"With the stroke of a pen, President Obama on Friday enacted the largest tax cut in nearly a decade and, in the process, took a big step toward reinventing himself as a champion of compromise in a politically fractured capital." Thus began a news analysis by one of the leading sources of elite opinion, The New York Times. Nevermind that the "tax cut" is really an extension of a rate reduction that failed to either propel growth or job creation after 10 years in place, and must be borrowed from our friends, the Red Chinese. The point, you see, is that Mr. Hoover has learned his lesson from the famous mid-term "shellacking." The Times reports, "the president who has emerged appears increasingly more confident than chastened, eager to revive his campaign image as a postpartisan leader who can work across party lines even at the cost of alienating his own supporters."
Many problems confront this scenario. One is that the Republicans are too smart, and the plutocracy behind them too powerful, to allow another Clinton triangulation. No amount of groveling before CEOs or the U.S. Chamber will cause them to like President Hoover. The plutocracy owns the Congress, and now, clearly, the Supreme Court. This is not the 1990s. It is a new Gilded Age with cheap trinkets from Asia to keep the proles distracted. And what did we get for Bill Clinton's vaunted triangulation anyway? Deregulation that killed millions of good jobs and set us up for the financial crash. Impeachment. A wasted presidency.
The deeper dilemma facing the president's strategy comes down to this: What is the center in America today? Does it even matter?
Let's take some examples. Climate change is real, human caused, happening now and will have far-reaching economic costs and national security consequences. A much higher-cost energy future is baked in the cake, whether you want to call it peak oil or not. It will disrupt all the assumptions about the global supply chain and pit nation against nation in a rush to lock up resources (and not only oil), with dangerous geopolitical results. The United States is falling behind in areas critical to maintaining global leadership, however much we borrow from Beijing for armaments. Among these: Infrastructure, education, research and a productive economy. Meanwhile, income inequality is at highs not seen since the late 1920s and the only sectors doing really well are big finance and those propped up by generous federal subsidies (defense, fossil fuels and big agriculture). This is not sustainable. The United States and the Russian Federation still have thousands of thermonuclear-armed missiles on hair-trigger alert, with Russia's safeguards against false alarms potentially decaying. Such a large force serves no deterrent value and carries huge risks. (One being, even if we nuke them to oblivion, the fallout will get us).
Now, these are just a few facts. Any educated, well-informed person knows they're true or can find out with minimal research. A centrist position on climate change might include a combination of market-based programs, such as cap-and-trade or adjusting tax incentives toward renewable energy, along with effective government investment in clean transportation, including high-speed rail. A decent reading of history shows that governance, particularly of a complex society facing historic challenges, doesn't succeed if done from dogma. The command economy of the Soviet era didn't succeed. Neither did the laissez faire of the 1920s. The mixed economy that evolved in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s did better than most, and it was based on real compromise and empiricism.
The only trouble: The GOP denies any of these things are facts. The party of hard-truths Abe Lincoln, the naturalist Theodore Roosevelt and even the often pragmatic Ronald Reagan denies climate change is happening, or if it is that's because the weather always changes. A significant number of its members believe in creationism — and this is not a fringe to be patted on the head, as Reagan did with them, but a major power bloc.
An increasingly nutty Sen. Jon Kyl refuses even to consider the arms reduction treaty with Russia. Apparently Kyl would rather play politics than recall Able Archer 83, the event that decisively turned Reagan against nuclear weapons (a CIA report on the World War III near-miss is here). Or the false launch alarm picked up by Soviet radar, also in 1983. Had not a mid-level Soviet officer used good sense and humanity that day, we probably wouldn't be here. The Kyl mindset is partly political strategy and cynicism, using the arms deal to play rope-a-dope with a weak president. But it also shows how the Republicans have become the party most captured by what a previous Republican president called "the military-industrial complex." In any event, Jon Kyl is not after a "postpartisan center."
I've been spending time with the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. One harsh fact is that America is a poorer country. Vast swaths of the nation have seen their median family incomes fall from 2000 to 2009. Even the banking center of Charlotte has seen income drop 15 percent. Silicon Valley, off 11 percent. And of course great damage has been done in the areas least able to absorb it, the already lower-income Red States (the exception being counties with fossil fuels or big, subsidized ag). Now, this is a fact. How does one proceed from it? How does one proceed when it is put in the context of stagnant wages for most Americans going back 30 years? Does one change the policies that caused this? Or just keep doing them? Where is the centrist position on union busting? On monopolistic corporations such as Wal-Mart? On the big banks that privatize profits and socialize losses while continuing to have a gun to the world economy? On the loss of so many well-paid American jobs connected to actually making something of value, rather than peddling financial frauds and "the American Dream"?
No center remains in such an environment. As far as I can tell, we have a relatively large and militant right wing; not an electoral majority, but significant. They are backed by (run by?) corporate interests and powerful media outlets. We have a much smaller left wing, with much less "capacity" to win elections or influence policies. It would be comforting to believe there's a commanding center that makes its decisions based on pragmatic grounds, based on the facts. I don't buy it. The likes of Rupert Murdoch own their "facts" and have the loudest megaphones. One enduring meme: the president is a "liberal," we have suffered through two years of "liberal policies" and "liberalism" is evil. And as the consequences of right-wing policies continue to roil the American people, enough will be taken in by big liars.
Why do I keep calling our centrist leader, who's center seems suspiciously like whatever the GOP wants, President Hoover? The 31st president wasn't too-cool-for-school and had a lousy jump shot. But he had much in common with the 44th president. Both were highly intelligent, even intellectual men, both self-made, both forged in humanitarian efforts (although Obama's community organizing pales besides Hoover's monumental aid achievements), well-meaning, proud, stubborn. Each was dropped into a tectonic shift of historic discontinuty for which his gifts were particularly poorly suited. Each thought he could engineer solutions through compromise and good will. Obama's meeting with powerful businessmen last week was right out of Hoover's playbook. Instead, they were the tragic playthings of events.
The difference is that no Franklin Roosevelt is waiting in the wings to find a reality based center. Hillary Clinton would have been more of a street fighter, but she had the liability of Bill. And the failed old order was saved by big government in our time, rather than collapsing totally as in 1929-32, allowing an aroused, and more educated citizenry, to sweep the bastards out. Now we only have Huey Longs and Father Coughlins. And Daddy Warbucks galore.
The Clintons are controlled by the same puppet-masters that control Obama (or McCain), so what really would be different? NOTHING.
Thin gsfa llap art
“The mixed economy that evolved in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s did better than most, and it was based on real compromise and empiricism.” – Rogue
It may have expressed some compromise and empiricism, especially in comparison to today’s kabuki theatre, but it was based on combustion.
Fatal Plans Right
https://wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html
Relax and enjoy the music of Andrew Bird!
https://www.andrewbird.net/
Jon writes:
“The only trouble: The GOP denies any of these things are facts.”
Our country is indeed suffering a debilitating dementia. To wit: We aren’t even close to agreeing on what are our most serious problems. The two most overarching problems facing the country are:
1) Global warming
2) The middle class and the poor getting poorer.
Nearly every other problem you care to talk about, is subsumed by these two. And here is the thing: The GOP denies that these problems even exist.
If you are paying attention to their current agitprop then you know they are making the argument that our poor are richer than all other poor in history. If it wasn’t for our Billionaire Galts our poor would be really poor. (As in: More gruel.) In fact, our lucky duckies don’t know how lucky they are. This is their position. They are beginning to flesh it out. And of course, as Jon noted, global warming is a hoax hatched by liberal scientists to hobble America. That’s taken nearly straight from Limbaugh’s playbook…
You see? The problems don’t even exist. Yet there is one thing I think everyone (left, center, and right) can agree on:
A country that does not acknowledge its problems cannot possible imagine their solutions. And we should all also be able to agree that under Obama’s first two years we’ve moved the ball forward a mere few yards on these overarching problems. Even as the goal posts have receded out of sight…
One more point:
The heart of power for this modern GOP party that denies my two enumerated problems is the American South. Out of the immoral fever swamp that sought to extend slavery to California, the Caribbean, and South America (Confederados), a rough new beast is seeing its hour come round again.
And as in 1860 so today. The South will insist on its immoral positions until the bitter end. And if that means dragging the empire down the drain they’ll do it with a grin and a rebel yell…
I see no saving grace…
No exit.
No way out.
Agreed, koreyel. But could we stop using so many football metaphors? Using them so ‘liberally’ is like hooking a third down punt.
“Hillary Clinton would have been more of a street fighter, but she had the liability of Bill.” – Rogue
As WikiLeaks has shown us, she would have had the liability of a ‘feckless, vain, and ineffective’ government defined by ignoble, uncharitable, prattling, tactless and unaccountable sluggards.
I think this is a good take on Kyl’s apparently reflexive opposition to New Start. The votes are there so McConnell must have given his caucus freedom to vote their conscience. Still, given the black eye that Kyl is getting for this, his ludicrously hurt feelings about Christmas, and stalling the Zadroga Bill, there’s a question whether he’s simply flaming out of politics altogether. His 2012 fundraising is anemic and his political action committee is still dormant. It could be that Kyl’s achievements, modest as they are, still haven’t resulted in his own crowning glory: a lucrative payday as a post-senatorial lobbyist. In that case, it’s Senator Jeff Flake.
Elsewhere, McCain’s disturbing antics about DADT repeal reek of a Queeg-like breakdown. His leader, Mitch McConnell, looks like an undertaker at the gunfight, someone who provides an archetypal image of cultural Republicanism that is close to disturbing. Obama may be objectively Herbert Hoover but McConnell could be his actual grandson.
By scuttling the Omnibus spending bill, Republicans rolled Obama once again and may yet succeed in gutting ACA. If that happens, Obama’s presidency is finished. There’s no recovery for someone who is this easily played. But there probably is an endpoint to rightwing nihilism: eventually Republicans will have to govern effectively. Raping and pillaging are not adequate substitutes if the GOP base doesn’t get its SS checks and health care. Defunding the zealots is not an option.
The latest Washington slobbering about centrism, the No Labels burlesque, seems to show that long memories and dementia may be related. 20 years of DLC corporatism and this is what we get: a country so starved for hard truths that an Evan Bayh becomes our man on the white horse, prancing to Bethlehem.
Soleri wrote:
“…a country so starved for hard truths that an Evan Bayh becomes our man on the white horse, prancing to Bethlehem.”
Hard truths it is then…
The word of the year?
Austerity.
(https://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101220/ap_on_re_us/us_word_of_the_year)
People “get” austerity…
And under the imprimatur of austerity all things become possible in McConnell’s DC:
We can’t afford Medicaid…
We can’t afford Social Security…
And we can’t afford to tax our billionaires (lest they stop spending)…
And we can’t afford to do a carbon tax…
And we can’t afford to stop a Canadian Copper mine in Az from dumping its tailings on thousands of publicly owned acres because we third-worlders need the jobs…
Austerity…
So what can we afford? Will how about a war in Afghanistan protecting the Chinese mining rights to what may be the biggest copper lode on the planet? That’s why we are in Afghanistan right? Never mind that the copper lies under an archaeological site. We can’t afford to do the archaeology properly anyways, and besides, the Chinese are growing impatient.
If that’s not this year’s biggest WTF story of a failing empire I don’t know what is. Perhaps Jon, or someone else can do better? Here is the link:
https://azstarnet.com/news/article_dc4c9646-beab-55a7-b089-62532f76437f.html
koreyel, maybe it’s a paradox that our political class extols the spinach of austerity before passing out the high-fructose corn syrup of tax cuts. It helped that the Serious People bought the Teabaggers’ argument about deficits before the election, and afterwards decided we needed the rich to keep their booty in order to give us jobs. And their evidence that they would? Oh, ye of little faith to ask such an impertinent question!
I think it’s safe to say that what passes for “hard truths” has nothing to do with long-term deficits, fiscal policy, or even entitlements. A hard truth is anything that has empirical rather than ideological merit. Centrism itself is now the ideology of Reaganism: supply-side theory, imperial overreach, anti-environmentalism, and corporatist blather. Because it isn’t couched in culture-war rhetoric, it’s palatable to pundits like David Broder, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, and Peggy Noonan. They are Serious People.
Senator Lindsey “Butters” Graham, is very disappointed with his Republican colleagues. It looks like enough of them are going to approve New Start despite Jon Kyl’s specious objections. No lie:
“I stand here very disappointed in the fact that our lead negotiator on the Republican side … basically is going to have his work product ignored and the treaty jammed through in the lame duck. How as Republicans we justify that I do not know,” Graham said. “To Senator Kyl, I want to apologize to you for the way you’ve been treated by your colleagues.”
https://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/12/lindsey_graham_senators_should.html
It’s important to remember that to the extent that the payroll-tax cut is stimulative, it’s not because tax cuts per se are stimulative; it’s because it’s actually a form of income redistribution from the wealthy (specifically from the portion of their income unused for consumption) to the working and middle classes, via deficit-funded borrowing.
That is, once the wealthy have consumed all they want in goods and services they still have excess discretionary income, which they invest both to bid up the price of their paper assets (e.g. stock) and to put their unused wealth in safe instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury securities).
So, the stimulus from the payroll-tax cut occurs by increasing consumer demand by borrowing money from the wealthy that they aren’t using themselves for consumption, and giving it to working and middle class families with unfulfilled consumer needs. (Though in the case of the payroll tax cut some of that money is going right back to the wealthy: I’ve yet to see a breakdown of the figures by income decile.)
If the government had funded the payroll-tax cut instead by reducing its own spending by a like amount, then there would have been no increase in the deficit and national debt, because the increase in private sector demand would be exactly offset by a decrease in public sector demand, with the net result of no increase in demand in the economy as a whole; but as a result there would, ipso facto, also have been no stimulative effect, since demand would have remained unchanged.
A comparable stimulus (comparable in size over the same period) could have been accomplished, without the need to service new debt, by allowing the Bush tax-cut on households making more than $250,000 a year to expire; the taxes collected could then have been directly redistributed. (This would also maintain the integrity of Social Security instead of creating shortfalls which may allow the camel’s nose of privatization into the retirement pension tent.)
For example, if the cost over two years of extending the Bush tax cuts for households making $250,000 or more is $100 billion (I’ve seen varying estimates but this is in the ballpark) then by collecting those taxes and redistributing them directly to 10 million working class families, each family would receive $10,000.
How stimulative would that be, as these households, hungry to get their part of the consumer society, spend these funds on goods and services sold by local businesses?
This would also eliminate that dreaded “uncertainty” we keep reading about, because it would be permanent rather than temporary and short-lived (two years). This would result in increased hiring as businesses used a portion of their increased profits to hire new workers to keep up with the increased demand; and the predictable income stream would certainly reduce “uncertainty” both for these businesses and for the banks whose loans to small business depend in part on income-stream projections.
Republicans argue that such a tax increase would hurt small business owners, whom it must be admitted provide most new jobs, since 75 percent of small firms report their business profits as personal income. But as USA Today reported (citing the Tax Policy Center) only 10 percent of the income that exceeds $250,000 is reported by sole proprietorships; and many of the others are hedge-funds and private-equity firms that don’t do much hiring.
The biggest problem is that such a stimulus is too small, both with respect to the size of the economy and to the conditions (e.g., high unemployment, low demand) which persist.
Climate change cannot be addressed unilaterally or even primarily by developed countries (and specifically the U.S.); China has already eclipsed the United States as the world’s leading greenhouse gas producer and the problem will get worse the longer China’s manufacturing economy expands; and meanwhile India is waiting in the wings.
The problem isn’t just manufacturing by developing nations, though that’s part of it — those “dark, satanic mills” associated with pollution since the time of the Industrial Revolution haven’t changed a whole lot: they’re still powered by dirty coal-fired power plants because that’s cheap and China has an abundance of coal; and since emissions control is expensive that too falls by the wayside in a race to build manufacturing market share and create economic growth.
The problem gets worse because as China and India get manufacturing economies, those workers also become the new consumers, and one of the biggest consumer items (here or in the developing world) is the automobile. China is predicted to see an explosion of private automobile growth to put developing countries in the shadow of eclipse. Will those cars pass EPA standards? Likely not, but even if they did the addition in emissions would add enormously to the problem.
Furthermore, as China develops a consumer society, that will further expand the need for increased manufacturing and energy output in China, since its factories must meet not only export markets but increasing domestic markets as well.
Coincidentally, the development of China and India as manufacturing centers also drives energy demand and therefore may be a major factor behind an increase in energy prices.
So, the development of large population centers like China as both manufacturing centers and as consumer societies, is behind both the lion’s share (a share soon to increase) of both climate change and any energy crunch that might occur.
What allows China to develop this way? Did China pull itself up by its own bootstraps?
No, China was able to do this because the trade laws and capital investment laws in developed nations (especially in the U.S.) allow it to, encourage it, actually, by penalizing (for example) U.S. manufacturers, who must pay a minimum wage (higher in fact since the U.S., unlike China, has independent unions). U.S. manufacturers must also comply with laws regulating pollution, emissions, dumping, workplace safety and compensation: China need not.
The answer, of course, isn’t to allow U.S. manufacturers to create their own giant cloud of smog choking the nation, but to insist that the cost of Chinese goods to American consumers (for example) take into account these basic inconsistencies, so as to provide a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD for world capitalists.
There is also the matter of currency manipulation, which some analysts have estimated cause Chinese goods to be 40 percent cheaper than they would be if they allowed their currency to float like those of “free-market” economies. China doesn’t even have a “real” (i.e., currency yet developed nations allow it to play at the big boys’ table, apparently on behalf of international corporations based in their own nations, which have considerable political power.
P.S. Sorry for the typos in the last message but I’m trying to get this done on library computers with 15 minute Internet sessions and (with a possible line of waiting users) this doesn’t encourage careful proofreading.