The problem with the "austerity" con can be stated simply: Governments in the richest nation in the world may be "broke," as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker puts it, but the pain and sacrifice for righting this situation will not be shared, much less shared equally. This is the first recession in modern record keeping where the rich actually increased their share of wealth; average Americans continue to see their wages stagnate or erode — if they're lucky enough to have a job. Corporations have achieved their highest profits ever, but they're not hiring as unemployment remains at its worst levels since the Depression. The world capital markets are awash in dollars, largely being used to make more dollars via gambling ("trading") rather than to invest in productive, job-making enterprises, especially in the United States. So rich are the rich, and so detached are they from reality, that two American couples aboard a yacht have been murdered by Somali pirates, into whose clutches they heedlessly sailed as part of their blissful "lifestyle." When the pirates killed them, the U.S. Navy — that would be part of the commons of which the rich have such contempt — was negotiating to save them.
As Paul Krugman has masterfully pointed out, the Wisconsin battle is less about economics — for the state's finances are hardly as dire as Walker makes them out — as about power. The collective bargaining rights and pensions held by public workers there, which Walker, the Republicans and their puppet-masters such as the Koch brothers want to gut, were once foundational elements of the American middle class. Only 30 years of union busting and big lies about labor have caused most Americans to believe these teachers, firefighters, police officers and other civil servants are the enemy: Money-grubbing, overpaid parasites on the tax dollars of real hard working folks.
In fact, decades of tax cuts, especially for the rich, have a great deal to do with our present deficit troubles, whether at the state or federal level. But even the millions of low-wage workers who pay no federal taxes are part of the problem: They should be required to pay at least some, even symbolic, income taxes as the price of citizenship. Another big problem: The vast resources corporations put into tax-haven schemes, which means many of them pay no taxes at all, even as they benefit from the commons. Another big reason behind the deficits: The Great Recession and lack of real growth, partly because the economy has become more about making money from money and sending jobs offshore than producing dynamic growth in this country. Then there are two wars that have lasted longer than World War II — and does anyone wonder why we have a federal deficit that's a larger share of the economy than at any time since 1945 (e.g., the end of World War II, and tax rates on the rich were above 90 percent in the '40s and '50s to help pay that off). Meanwhile, what about hundreds of billions in corporate welfare? All this has helped government spending grow, along with average Fox-viewing Americans' insatiable appetite for government sevices. And yet none of this is part of our national conversation.
Instead, we must "tighten our belts." We must have "austerity." But who is this "we" we're talking about? The unions, the middle class, the future embodied in building 21st century infrastructure. Never the rich. Never the corporations. One almost wishes for a major Social Security takeback to give all these white-right oldsters what they say they want. There'd be some real austerity. Baby Boomers in their peak earning years are paying for the Social Security for the so-called Greatest Generation and those slightly younger, but we may never see a dime. Austerity, don't you know. Meanwhile, cheated out of the pensions and retirements benefits our parents enjoyed, even though we as workers are the reason American capitalism has thrived, are left with 401(k)s that are only beginning to be shown for the sham most are.
When I was considered a conservative columnist in Cincinnati, I met John Boehner, who represented the white northern suburbs, a few times. Nice guy. The golf course bonhomie and the easy emotion are genuine. Back then he was a conservative but not a nut. But he was also ambitious, compromised like so many by big corporate money, and has been effective in capitalizing on the ever-more-extreme rightward movement of the Republican Party. Now the Tea Party elements have forced him to come up with the equivalent of $61 billion in cuts — now. They fall, of course, on the poor, infrastructure, education and areas that the plutocracy wants hobbled, such as the EPA and SEC. Next comes a showdown in the Senate and perhaps another government shutdown.
That one of our two great mass parties has been totally taken over by an extremist agenda is a tragedy, and will be highly destabilizing for the future. We need a serious conversation about the size and responsibilities of government. And the trade-offs. For example, are we really going to allow government funding for R&D and education to continue to falter, putting us further back in competitiveness? Are we really not going to build high-speed rail and transit to prepare for a high-cost energy future? Let our libraries close, our National Parks further deteriorate? I know the super-rich and the Koch brothers don't give a damn. The Tea Party zombies scream. The Republicans do their puppet dance. And the delicate web of institutions and practices, private and public, that built the America many of us remember is collapsing.
But an even greater problem is the Democratic Party. While it maintains on the surface the composition of an American mass party (liberals, centrists and conservatives), it has been largely captured by corporate interests, too. It is no longer the party that speaks for, and fights for, the American middle class. Once upon a time, this was not the province of one party — Theodore Roosevelt understood the need for a powerful central government (and unions) as a counterweight to big business. Even Herbert Hoover started out as a Progressive. On the Democratic side, major candidates in the 1920s were generally solidly for big business, and it was long saddled with the segregationists from the South (and their fellow travelers, the Arizona "pintos"). But in the main after 1932, the Democrats stood for average Americans, for fair play and upward economic mobility. No longer. President Obama is thoroughly on board with the need for emergency measures to address the dreaded deficit (but not tax hikes or imperial pullback).
I read the New York Times Magazine profile of the apparently anointed next Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Written by Scott Turow, it talks about him being "aloof" and "surly," but "Emanuel was quick to win the support of most of Chicago’s business leaders, many of them former Daley loyalists, as well as a large number of influential local politicians. They are drawn to Emanuel’s intelligence and his experience in the use of political power." I ask: To what end? Emanuel was Mr. Obama's chief of staff when the administration embarked on its ill-advised health-care overhaul, allowing it to be used as a pinata for a year while issues such as jobs and infrastructure, which could have shown immediate results for Americans, were barely addressed. Wall Street got away with engineering the greatest financial crisis since 1929. Foreign policy remains in the Cheney mold. To what end are Emanuel's gifts worth?
The protesters in Madison are doomed to fail, I fear. Things will have to get much, much worse before most Americans wake up, if they ever do. There are decades of wealth and the commons built over a century left to loot. Even if Mr. Obama wins a second term, drifting Bill Clinton-like, he will be followed by a Republican who will make George W. Bush look like Pericles. But at least some are making a stand in Madison. "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere," Nehru said. And we, who toss around this word like a consumer product, will learn.
“The businesses will flee if we tax them!” To where? Arizona? Hah!
The anti-union Republicans have been very successful in pitting rank and file private sector employees against public sector employees. At the same time, Republicans claim class warfare any time inequities in wealth are brought up.
The indoctrination that Americans receive to blindly follow such rhetoric is amazingly effective.
Question: will the Christians and evangelicals sit idly by and allow the burgeoning social and economic juggernaut to roll over the less fortunate? Could this be what the PhDs call a “strategic inflection point? Or will the “I’ve got mine” crowd continue to cocoon themselves from the pain that is to come to the have-nots?
Public sector unions stood by and watched as government targeted private sector unions again and again; the various police agency unions took an active role in union busting, picket line crossing and strike breaking. Now that private sector unions are less than 10% of all U.S. workers, who will stand in solidarity with public service workers?
You reap what you sow.
Jon, as usual I cant disagree with your vision. And
I believe religious administrators will lay in bed with corporations to protect their con games. And the religious followers, victims that they are will drink the koolaid.
I suspect one explanation for the right’s Blitzkrieg triumph over American thought and ideals is the sheer ease of its accomplishment. That is, the right found themselves staring across the Rhine at a weak opposition and its ramshackle defenses. Once it became a question of merely how, the die was cast. Ideology and certitude replaced pragmatism. Triumphalism replaced compromise.
The rough parity between parties, economic classes, ideologies, and institutional power made creative compromise both possible and necessary. But once the parity began giving way during the Reagan years, the center broke down. Unions kept the working class aligned with Democrats. Once America’s deindustrialization began in earnest, that vital connecton was severed. In lieu of clear economic reasons, the white working class started voting their values (Gods, guns, gays, abortion) and America drifted inexorably to the right.
The Democrats then shifted their focus from economic populism to lifestyle and boutique issues. The DLC took control of the party just as unions began their final descent into irrelevance. Instead of speaking up for working-class Americans, the party’s wonks and thinkers talked about new classes of workers (knowledge-based, symbolic analysts, creatives). Only problem: the Democratic constituencies were now less organized than the Republican ones. Which meant even further rightward drift.
Right-wingers succeed by playing on the anxieties they themselves were instrumental in creating. Whether it’s the cultural anomie resulting from rootlessness and radical individuation, or whether it’s the economic devastation deriving from globalization, the right was cheering the manifest destiny of the free market while blaming its cultural effects on liberals. Liberals take pride in dealing with the world as it is. But conservatives deployed something much more powerful: nostalgia for a world definitively gone.
The right is overreaching because of its enormous advantages. They may well do to themselves what the ineffective left never could. A magic carpet woven from zealotry and wishful thinking will crash the political party riding it. Simpleminded bromides and demonology work very well on talk radio and cable TV. They will fail when it comes to competent governance, however. Politics based on certitude is a recipe for catastrophe.
Yes, we really are going to let libraries close, education fail, and fail to build a modern infrastructure. Our dismal fate was sealed when Obama simultaneously chose to govern from the right while letting himself be defined as a radical lefty. The right has succeeded at last in discrediting the idea of government, civil society, or common interest. We’re not coming back from this.
I don’t know CDT. I am not a fan or advocate of fatalism and find it rather disadvantageous. To think one has such foresight and can draw conclusions today is (IMO) naive.
Who’d of guessed that the turmoil and revolution taking place in the Middle East and North Africa would look as it presently does? That scrambled fighter jet pilots would instead defect to Malta rather than bomb their own people (as just one example).
The Wisconsin public employee protests and Capitol Building takeover can very well be the nation’s trumpet call. Just as Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, and Libya followed Tunisia perhaps a revolution will occur state to state in similar fashion.
This outcome is not unthinkable and as more Americans learn of corrupt corporate puppet masters creating the mess, this scenario seems more and more likely. And yes, many Americans failed to correlate corporate greed and money to party doctrine despite the blaring obviousness of the situation.
But life remains unscripted and we Americans fickle, making things that much more interesting so stay tuned.
And just to be clear, when I speak of a revolution in America, I speak of one with less hostility compared to North Africa/Middle East. I speak of revolution in terms of sweeping political changes and policy making. I do not believe that Americans are callous as some of our disengaged and disconnected, gluttonous, affluent citizenry and politicians have become today. What’s that cliché…absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the U.S. money is that power and it has become too concentrated in certain portfolios.
Arizona the next Wisconsin?
“Can we expect opposition in Arizona to do what we’ve seen them doing in Wisconsin?
Adams said he’s prepared for protests and for people to try to kick him out of office.” https://www.kpho.com/news/26946615/detail.html#vote
I got caught up with Reaganism in high school and the Newt Gingrich folks as a youngish adult. After Reagan’s NAFTA and the ineffectual “Contract on America” I feel pretty silly.
Certainly I will thank myself in the future for not jumping on the austerity & tax cut bandwagon.
The current cult control of Arizona understands believe they must cleanse Arizona of the Mexican plague before the sheer numbers of Hispanics dominate politics. Their intent is to privatize all of Arizona and reduce the rules that inhibit the cult’s life style. They want not to pay any taxes for governmental services other than a military to protect the US from foreign invasions. The cult has a head that can govern over his people and a body of enforcers to insure compliance.
Oil is currently spiking due to Middle East turmoil. We’ve seen this movie before except there’s no guarantee the ending will be as pleasant. Assume for a moment that the price of gas doubles in the next year. Given everything else going on in this country, an oil price shock would be devastating.
We live, more or less, in a permanent state of denial about energy. I suspect the average American is somewhat like Sarah Palin in thinking there’s this infinite bounty of oily goodness off our coasts. All we have to do is neuter the “environmental wackos”, and everything will be fine. .
The result here is that we won’t do what is minimally responsible in preparing for the stark possibility of energy inflation. It’s one thing to invest in alternative energy (which has a much longer timeline in terms of payoff). It’s something much easier, however, to fund mass transit instead of starving it. If nothing else, it gives citizens a valuable option in the worst-case scenario. As it is, the sunk costs of our infrastructure are huge and bleeding us daily. If we don’t concentrate on making it less expensive to maintain, it won’t matter once oil hits $200/bbl. We’ll be facing a crisis of epic proportions. The austerity our Galtian overlords are planning for us will pale by comparison.
The preferred method of American energy policy, unfortunately, is keeping supply lines open militarily. We spend a lot of money doing this but the testosterone rush is incredible. It also creates a lot of enemies and means we’re locked into a dead-end strategy. Yes, it’s what we’ve always and it makes some players very rich. It is, in other words, a well-known definition of insanity. Or as Dick Cheney put it, “the American way of life is not negotiable”.
Cal, cults usually end in a blaze of “glory” or in mass suicide; the current political cult in Arizona is headed for both. Cults are also generally compromised of a small band of outsiders. The AZ political cult is a small band of interlopers, to be more definitive.
Thing is, how long will it take Arizonans to realize this fact?
Hopefully, only until mañana!
Soleri, one can only hope that military power will be used sparingly in the future and not openly for oil. I think it would be more brazenly clear to Americans why our forces are overseas if that is the main objective, more so than any other time in the past.
My scenario entails the suburbs making a run at starting commuter rail lines and a change in philosophy. One in which buses and light rail are not for “those people,” but for all of “us.” To all the 30-thousandaires living an unsustainable lifestyle in the East Valley and NW Valley, commuter rail will become a necessity and more comforting than the driver seat of their 9 passenger Suburban.
And that 9-passenger Suburban typically only has room for 1 wide-assed suburbanite. I see them trying to squeeze into subcompact spaces in downtown garages all the time; a fitting analogy I think.
The word “com-pre-hen-sive” has too many syllables and moving parts for most politicians and governments. If we have a comprehensive energy policy, it must be locked up somewhere . . whimpering in a dark vault. Who knows . . it may even contain a plan to use nuclear energy to bridge us over until the other alternative forms can be optimized?!
I must tell you that you all have me very upset today. You talk of gas, war, taxes, debt, corruption, unions, etc.
Justin Bieber got his hair cut today and not one of you has commented on it.
What is wrong with you people?
Please let go of your hate and join the rest of us sheeple as we deal with the REAL issues in our lives.
Don’t you know that Kim Kardashian needs to find a husband and have a baby and SHE CAN’T FIND SOMEONE TO LOVE HER BACK??
First we have the Armenian genocide of 1915 and now an American Armenian has to suffer like this? Don’t you people have hearts.
I’m going to go on FaceBook and unlike you all.
So there!
Although a militant agnostic I have prayed for drought and $10 a gallon gas prices for years. And as a Malthus population advocate I have hoped the Gates and Buffets would turn their $$ loose on something like salt peter in the water supply or at least a sound program of birth control. I find it hard to believe that current under 35 folks have what it takes to do what is happening in Egypt. Although we do have Google, Wikileaks and a real Ed Abbey group, Southwest Bio-Diversity headed up by Kieran Suckling an original Monkey Wrench Gang anarchist, for a start. But is that enough to overcome the Watts and Cheney’s of the US? And AZ Rebel turn off that Social Networking stuff, I’ll loan U my recumbent to ease your stress. And who R Jason and Kim? Something from TV land? Please excuse my lack of editing.
I am out of here for a walk on the MT.
The under 35 crowd is much more keen on protesting and window breaking (a la WTO Seattle, 1999) than anyone over 35. Especially after social networking detox. The kind that leads too many to stalk via twitter. I think we should start calling in twatting. Maybe less will want to do it…
First time poster here. This is a good blog you have here Jon, and posts like this show me beyond a shadow of a doubt that you see the big picture through all the political distractions. I was fortunate to stumble upon it a few weeks ago.
I might be a shade more “conservative” than you/your posters but in reality we would probably agree on most things, differing only on a few issues. Kind of like how you described the good ole days 40-50 years ago.
Looking forward to adding my occasional thought.
BTW azrebel, that was hilarious. Don’t if anybody else appreciated the cynical humor – in moderation, I find it to be quite cathartic, especially in times like these. Best to all…
Here’s a handy guide to what’s wrong with America (in eight charts):
https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
Jon: The protesters in Madison are doomed to fail, I fear.
That was my initial feelings too…
But a poll (see TPM) is showing 61% of Americans think the attack on these unions is misguided. And the fact that Daniels in Indiana has come out against it is also adding some counterpunch.
The news is all Walker/Wisconsin and Gadhafi/Libya these days. Which leads me these questions: Which one of the two said: “I’ll die a martyr”? And who do you think is going to fold first?
Me?
I think the Colonel is smarter and saner than the teabagger. He’ll fold first. And head for Saudi Arabia. And besides, where can a teabagger run to? Arizona?
Go fish.
Ok folks while on the mountain top I encountered Singularity and a mental galactic spread sheet totality void of urban planning?
Thanks Soleri for MJ somehow I missed that issue.
How many of us have seen the documentary, “Inside Job”?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
soleri, thanks for the link. One small problem I see with the link:
Most Americans no longer understand graphs and an even greater number don’t understand percentages.
Just yesterday in a store I heard a Mom tell her daughter, “15% of $30 is $6”
New math I guess.
Rate Crimes, I carted my aged ass out to the Camelview a few months back to see Inside Job. Here’s hoping it wins the Oscar for Best Doucmentary (if only to get a few more of us outraged).
Here’s another great Matt Taibbi piece from the Rolling Stone that tills the same field:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
I’m worried about Emil…
@phxSUNSfan:
It’s not fatalism. It’s despair.
RC, I’m worried about Emil too. His last post that I remember was not reassuring…
Privacy is something we grant reflexively, so I was hesitant to offer Emil a laptop with which to access the internet (if he can get to someplace with wifi). However, should he make contact again, please let him know, Jon, about this offer. My e-mail address is whall22@cox.net, so there’s no privacy violation on this end.
Very gracious of you Soleri. I hope to see Emil posting again.
CDT, word play. The kind of despair many give off is the very definition of fatalism. Although I just watched “Waiting for Superman” and couldn’t sit through the entire “lottery” process of admission to some of the schools. Because of situations such as those represented in the documentary, fatalism is understandable but too easy an answer.
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