tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377987672023-12-13T04:20:40.598-08:00Middle-Class Death TripsThoughts on Saving the Economic MajorityChris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.comBlogger376125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-21197273018224524312022-11-07T03:06:00.002-08:002022-11-13T03:09:29.454-08:00The Problem of the R-Whites<p> </p><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="4c3ua-0-0"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg--SarOe1NDIwsQRSUUzI65g8zqA23S8fHEXsI_mYB-HrpOFxVhM0aGmPu8wgbfoiyz_GFnhg5uZVxOndW5tbGHDkI_KVMNrxtYIq19pD0g1ONzql5lhcdDuZEKlOeX6KHP0rLmPszRe1v8ZsYOfp9FSZEr-59uV9McNA5LXzCnJg3_W116Yg/s604/ObamaClubGrenoble.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="604" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg--SarOe1NDIwsQRSUUzI65g8zqA23S8fHEXsI_mYB-HrpOFxVhM0aGmPu8wgbfoiyz_GFnhg5uZVxOndW5tbGHDkI_KVMNrxtYIq19pD0g1ONzql5lhcdDuZEKlOeX6KHP0rLmPszRe1v8ZsYOfp9FSZEr-59uV9McNA5LXzCnJg3_W116Yg/s320/ObamaClubGrenoble.jpg" width="320" /></a><span><span data-offset-key="4c3ua-0-0"><span data-text="true">The</span></span></span><span data-offset-key="4c3ua-1-0"><span data-text="true"> photo shows the Grenoble UCalifornia study abroad students celebrating a U.S. November election 14 years ago--the one that elected Barack Obama in 2008. We all assumed an exit door had opened on the Bush-Cheney nightmare of the global war on terror and that we would all be gradually waking up. Operation Cast Lead hadn't started in Gaza, designed to instruct Obama that the age of war was just getting started. None of the other stuff had happened yet either--Obama failing to bail out Main Street and indemnifying Wall Street, and renewed forms of white supremacism and white nationalism triggered by having a Black family living in the White House rather than working outside to refresh the paint. I still honor the hope that Obama wanted to inject into the political system and also the hope of these amazing students, staff, and unpictured educators, not to mention all the French people on public transport and in the streets chanting, “Obama, Obama,” ecstatically because of the glimpse of that door open to the better world.</span></span></div><p></p><div data-contents="true"><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="er8vj-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="er8vj-0-0"><span data-offset-key="er8vj-0-0"><span data-text="true">There are all sorts of policy deadlocks to discuss, but I'm struck by what used to be called the character issues, by which I mean the disintegration of the personality structures of a majority of white Americans since that day we were all hoping for Obama. I don't just mean the blanket refusal of information and data, though that's very bad, but the widespread toleration, even admiration, for sadistic, degrading activity and the desire for more. The Repubs have canonized a short list of major traits that everybody's parents always tries to keep their kids from taking on:</span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="er8vj-0-0"><span data-offset-key="er8vj-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="91er4-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="91er4-0-0"><span data-offset-key="91er4-0-0"><span data-text="true">Being a bad loser, to the point of refusing to admit you lost, also crying and yelling</span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="91er4-0-0"><span data-offset-key="91er4-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="f7trs-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="f7trs-0-0"><span data-offset-key="f7trs-0-0"><span data-text="true">Blaming everyone except yourself</span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="7tr0p-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7tr0p-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7tr0p-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7tr0p-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7tr0p-0-0"><span data-text="true">Cheating</span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="3roi6-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3roi6-0-0"><span data-offset-key="3roi6-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3roi6-0-0"><span data-offset-key="3roi6-0-0"><span data-text="true">Lying</span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="dp6uk-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dp6uk-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dp6uk-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dp6uk-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dp6uk-0-0"><span data-text="true">Bullying</span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="dfkpt-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dfkpt-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dfkpt-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dfkpt-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dfkpt-0-0"><span data-text="true">These are all behaviors that R-Whites, for lack of a better term, now celebrate. It's NOT obvious or to be taken for granted that a dominant political party is cool with the degrading, contemptible dishing out of humiliation and scorn to people they don't like. They are cool with making things worse for the obviously unfortunate, the broke, the desperate, the walked-a-thousand-miles to get out of an unliveable situation—what kind of people look on these terrifying flights from horror and work themselves into a state of contempt? They regularly do and also glorify things that would get you suspended from Catholic grade school: mocking the poor kids with bad shoes, beating up the brown kids when the teacher turns her back, accusing the innocent to explain why Jimmy's nose is bleeding, attacking the kids who studied for the test and did well on it, never ever accepting blame for anything, never trying to fix anything, never learning anything, never doing anything better. And instead lying to some refugees to get them on a bus to drop them off on some Dem politician’s corner in a blue city as a funny joke. It’s really the same spirit of throw the firebomb through the Black family's living room window. Except it's the governor of the modern state of Florida doing it, not some backwater klansmen, and with the support of his party, its members, and the state police.</span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2rkvr" data-offset-key="fh0ks-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fh0ks-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fh0ks-0-0"><span data-text="true">I don't see how we can get anywhere without naming this accelerating shift towards mass pathology--calling it fascism doesn't quite get at the sexual fear, the racial derangement, the hostility to autonomous women, the sadistic delight in seeing people suffer to prove they are lesser than you. I don't know what the name is, but it has to be studied and confronted with both brains and anger until it collapses.</span></span></div></div></div>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-20577810170624062342022-06-20T02:44:00.002-07:002022-06-20T14:29:08.807-07:00War is the Drift of the State<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi42sJh40DlqHv5_xvk0cfRTW3a8WxSi9UjgnFGLmgLD2rl2HyYdfTSw4IQu9nf7bQHy3xFwCMlKcjy2hYvSYjPc14r3JF-p1C9ihS3CUJNyjU1Z2zYJi9YXexS_NzDARPsqpy0hD6QjsT7XpMUjj4cem8ACyEmV9i_wQh46yb7VVAojrztJLQ/s830/Protests%20Cost%20of%20Living%20London%20Feb%202022.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="830" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi42sJh40DlqHv5_xvk0cfRTW3a8WxSi9UjgnFGLmgLD2rl2HyYdfTSw4IQu9nf7bQHy3xFwCMlKcjy2hYvSYjPc14r3JF-p1C9ihS3CUJNyjU1Z2zYJi9YXexS_NzDARPsqpy0hD6QjsT7XpMUjj4cem8ACyEmV9i_wQh46yb7VVAojrztJLQ/s320/Protests%20Cost%20of%20Living%20London%20Feb%202022.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">By now,
everyone realizes that the war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition. As <a href="https://toodumbtolive.blogspot.com/2022/05/war-diary-7.html">BobBaer put it weeks ago</a>, Russia is running shells through artillery pieces and
moving a kilometre or less a day through brute destruction. Ukraine demands
arms in enough volume to allow them to retake their territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The West gives them a fraction of that, enough
to control the pace of defeat, and to drag that out. There’s tacit agreement
between Putin and the West that this war will go on for years, that war will rule
the global economy and climate policy, and that warmaking and war preparation
will stay “<a href="https://cdn.mises.org/The%20State_3.pdf">the health of the
state.</a>”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Yesterday, the
analyst of land warfare Jack Watling described the extent to which Ukraine has
been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/19/ukraine-russia-war-of-attrition-nato">trapped
into attritional warfare</a>. Towards the end he writes, “The final process of
attrition for Ukraine is economic, and in this realm there can be no doubt that
it is running out of money, while Russia can withstand western sanctions. Soon
it will be essential for economic relief to sustain the government in Kyiv.
Alongside the military considerations outlined above, therefore, ending the
attritional struggle in Ukraine is ultimately a question of how much Nato
members are prepared to invest in Russia’s defeat.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The answer about
NATO investment is “as little as possible.” “Fighting to the last Ukranian”
remains the strategy. Reversion to the mean is the default answer, meaning back
to the cold war, famine, and global poverty.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> The visits of EU leaders--and the invitations to Ukraine to apply for membership--make it impossible for Putin to back down. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewEcQvEKA5Aoxk2gKOnty7d_uEiQt2FL7eCSDYdfDb2qdD0OY8O99RwYxBpUM1WB-MtdgUkHCI3H4_xLZIPMf6Iyab2LnUnywOay6UFXHEm9sh2H5n_WndV1QxPgLDKPAFJpDyLbmWaqiv5e5JlaNFmNw5jjVkRoRUFThVvvfHdoHoNiQfr8/s1600/Ukraine%20Zelenskyy%20&%20EU%20leaders%20India%20times%20061622.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewEcQvEKA5Aoxk2gKOnty7d_uEiQt2FL7eCSDYdfDb2qdD0OY8O99RwYxBpUM1WB-MtdgUkHCI3H4_xLZIPMf6Iyab2LnUnywOay6UFXHEm9sh2H5n_WndV1QxPgLDKPAFJpDyLbmWaqiv5e5JlaNFmNw5jjVkRoRUFThVvvfHdoHoNiQfr8/w640-h360/Ukraine%20Zelenskyy%20&%20EU%20leaders%20India%20times%20061622.webp" width="640" /></a></span></div><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The UK's Boris Johnson didn't want to be left out. Same message.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiksnjyI9WC3vUaNIN-OmyfvlPhgVQH8OBgUHo0KPQBELEWOc4PrgD4J_YbAr4zEZJcbd8QEUupr80Z_WZl3wym2h3qpR-EfTeCQven7fxhbH9kYTD_JFRKJNcqFzmFOEO9F_jhS9MyzSM6f73p8gx5idmlIbB84RJpsaokcElNX-K3cdTmZh0/s1000/Ukraine%20Zelenskyy%20Johnson%20061622.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiksnjyI9WC3vUaNIN-OmyfvlPhgVQH8OBgUHo0KPQBELEWOc4PrgD4J_YbAr4zEZJcbd8QEUupr80Z_WZl3wym2h3qpR-EfTeCQven7fxhbH9kYTD_JFRKJNcqFzmFOEO9F_jhS9MyzSM6f73p8gx5idmlIbB84RJpsaokcElNX-K3cdTmZh0/w640-h360/Ukraine%20Zelenskyy%20Johnson%20061622.png" width="640" /></a></span></div><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><br /> <br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The Westerners insure a Cold War standoff slated to go on for years.<br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The war
comes as a forty-year free-money period comes unglued. Day after day, the <i>Financial
Times </i>headlines deepening business alarm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Will <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/19/strikes-inflation-slump-back-to-the-70s-more-like-the-unwinding-of-thatcherism">Hutton
summarized the dying paradigm</a> in the first paragraph of his <i>Observer </i>column,
which appeared on the same day as Watling’s. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">This is not the 1970s all over
again, notwithstanding the apparent similarities – oil shocks, recession,
seasons of discontent, inflation. What we are living through is something more
profound. It is the painful unwinding of the dysfunctional Thatcherite economic
model, driven by credit, consumption and property prices, so careless of
investment, productivity and good, high-performance workplaces. Its end started
with the financial crisis, accelerated with Brexit and is now sealed by the
economic fallout from Ukraine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He goes on to point out that this government has no economic
plan, and also, that such a plan is beyond the capabilities of this government.
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I said to Andrea yesterday in Crux Easton that the Tories
have spent 12 years making the majority of their people poorer. </p><p class="MsoNormal">“That’s always
been the Tory strategy.” </p><p class="MsoNormal">“Going back to the 19<sup>th</sup> century?” </p><p class="MsoNormal">“Before
that.” </p><p class="MsoNormal">“Since the Civil War in the 17<sup>th</sup>?” </p><p class="MsoNormal">“Yes, exactly since the Civil War. Since the Roundheads rose up,
the poverty of the people has been the Tory strategy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">More people now say this about the Tories--that their goal is the poverty of the British people. The other
consensus is that Labour has no alternative. Party leader Starmer couldn't see Zelenskyy, so had a photo op with British NATO troops talking about Labour's restored patriotism. Kier and Boris are in full agreement.<br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The policy in the “West” is drift, and drift is the foundation
of war.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Anything better will depend on mass mobilization, aiming at a
positive alternative system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hutton
again: </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">But just as Thatcherism emerged out
of the 1970s, a new philosophy right for our times must emerge now. Its
building blocks are still hazy but already apparent. The trillions of ESG (environmental,
social and governance) savings need to be mobilised in partnership with
government to pursue great national missions – levelling up, rebasing our
energy system and grid to achieve net zero, opening up space, transforming our
cities, building in new resiliencies, backing our science.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Yes. And
this will only happen if policy <i>agency</i> shifts from the current
leadership pretty much everywhere to regular people, who've set themselves up in organizations now largely invisible. This is kind of great.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTbpuJ0JAByCiwJwb220p7TP01QsbqOcjPbrWHAnT1dvTjpLAN5c_hS5YYUdhFFyYcvyEnHSLSGuyhc88ZXYE8LN03UuUJyY1ouk1Yz_B4UlqhC8l0cUXRKgK_R_Cyz-zve3QEXhMCtHCbefJVJDQ8PIU1a6pEWNoPNUt5XoO2Y6YSFytlZbA/s2048/Ukraine%20Enviro%20protests%20Dominika%20Lasota%20NYT%20062022.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTbpuJ0JAByCiwJwb220p7TP01QsbqOcjPbrWHAnT1dvTjpLAN5c_hS5YYUdhFFyYcvyEnHSLSGuyhc88ZXYE8LN03UuUJyY1ouk1Yz_B4UlqhC8l0cUXRKgK_R_Cyz-zve3QEXhMCtHCbefJVJDQ8PIU1a6pEWNoPNUt5XoO2Y6YSFytlZbA/w640-h426/Ukraine%20Enviro%20protests%20Dominika%20Lasota%20NYT%20062022.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">"</span>This is a different brand of activist — young, mostly female and mostly
from Eastern Europe — who believes that the Ukraine war is a brutal
manifestation of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/world/asia/ukraine-war-climate-crisis-activists-protests.html?searchResultPosition=1"> They have joined two causes — antiwar activism and climate change </a>— to take full
advantage of this moment when the world’s attention is focused on
Ukraine. And to make their case, they confront Europe’s leaders
face-to-face." <p></p><p class="MsoNormal">They are great, and this needs to spread. It seems small, but only direct action is going to derail what's happening now.<br /></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-49423793103386754102022-06-14T11:17:00.003-07:002022-06-14T11:17:17.462-07:00Denying Reality<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj19YmUa9nRHTuPlfDUt9GdR9qv-gazFvKbNh1CrevspGzP8Vg41g8uQJLdIYsrtd51JQZiATTBkm0hyhAhNY7wme_fEU7q1HSYvOOoCUzgvzNWTNtBzImabbRY_lyDnC4NOFmDGWNC_Hr99zS8yY-aaVfFO3KIIw4vhR7Lz2g_rEYFvww7vWk/s3264/IMG_0537.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj19YmUa9nRHTuPlfDUt9GdR9qv-gazFvKbNh1CrevspGzP8Vg41g8uQJLdIYsrtd51JQZiATTBkm0hyhAhNY7wme_fEU7q1HSYvOOoCUzgvzNWTNtBzImabbRY_lyDnC4NOFmDGWNC_Hr99zS8yY-aaVfFO3KIIw4vhR7Lz2g_rEYFvww7vWk/s320/IMG_0537.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>What is it like to have gone from Trump's America to Boris's Britain in the middle of a pandemic? It was surreal. Two years later, it's constantly getting more so. By that I mean the British state seems to have a poor grasp of reality, and is working hard to keep it that way.<br /><p></p><p>I'd just gotten back to London in June 2017 when Grenfell Tower caught fire and burned all night, killing 72 of its residents. On June 17th, four days later, we visited a friend who lives nearby and spent time at the already very large memorial (hence the photo). </p><p>In a few weeks, we knew the causes more or less: the council had bought flammable cladding because it was cheaper, and turned the building into a torch waiting for a match; they followed no fire protocols, another likely cost saving; responsibility had been deregulated and outsourced; repeated resident complaints and warnings had been deliberately ignored. The white council government of the richest borough in Britain continuously ignored a tower of people of color in its midst by cloaking it in magic incinerator metal. It was an obvious case of malpractice issuing from structural racism that the government was rendering an unspeakable fact years before it seized on the menace of critical race theory.<br /></p><p>Today is the 5th anniversary of the fire. There have been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/a-merry-go-round-of-buck-passing-inside-the-four-year-grenfell-inquiry">no official findings of cause,</a> no convictions, or even indictments. What has emerged, as the <i>Financial Times</i> <a href="https://on.ft.com/3tAA3eY">piece put it</a>, is "a disregard for safety within parts of the construction industry and a
compromised regulatory regime that allowed Britain to become a dumping
ground for dangerous goods."</p><p>I'd been following the decline of British higher ed since the fee tripling and central funding cuts implemented by the Cameron-Willetts regime in 2011. But Grenfell was the moment when I decided Britain's decline would be obvious to everyone, and that something would happen. I didn't think of it as a point of no return. Now I do. </p><p>The Johnson government isn't failing on a few issues where its defunct Thatcherism or right-wing backbenchers are holding it back. It is failing on every front. </p><p>Just on Saturday:<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><u>Farming</u>: the government is not replacing EU subsidies lost to Brexit, and has cut them 20% this year.</li><li><u>Food policy</u>: the government is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/10/worse-than-half-baked-johnsons-food-strategy-fails-to-tackle-cost-or-climate">diluting the Dimbleby Report</a>, authored by the Tory co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, rejecting "expanded sugar and salt taxes" to fund fruit and vegetable consumption by low-income families. The obesity crisis will continue and probably worsen.</li><li><u>Immigration</u>: a high court judge ruled the plan to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/10/uk-deportation-flight-rwanda-can-go-ahead-high-court-judge-rules">deport migrants to Rwanda to be legal.</a> This plan is an obvious self-inflicted humiliation to Britain's international reputation, such as it still is, combining casual cruelty, neocolonial dumping in Africa, bumptious illegality, and financial incoherence, all wrapped in Monty-Python absurdist packaging. Even the crown, in the person of Prince Charles, has been <a href="Even the crown, in the person of Prince Charles, has been unable to suppress its disgust.">unable to suppress its disgust.</a> And yet first flight is to leave today, with 8 migrants. </li><li><u>Northern Ireland</u>: the government is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/10/draft-bill-override-northern-ireland-protocol-to-be-published-monday">nullifying large parts of its own treaty with the EU</a> to extend its denial of the reality that it put a custom barrier between Great Britain and the island of Ireland. <br /></li><li><u>Education</u>: more strong applicants are being<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/11/first-post-covid-school-leavers-face-fight-for-fewer-university-places"> excluded from their first choices of university</a>, even as marketization has degraded the distinctive alternative universities like Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and SOAS.</li><li><u>Research funding</u>: UK universities have all but given up on managing to stay in the 95 billion euro EU framework program that they wanted to keep in spite of Brexit.<br /></li><li><u>Economics</u>; the government has no actual plan either to "level up" the North or to expand the economy or to create high-wage, high-skill jobs. It is responding to warnings of widespread food and fuel poverty by promising tax cuts.<br /></li></ul><p>Intelligence requires foresight, which means seeing the bad effects of what you are about to do before you do it, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/10/rupert-murdoch-press-brexit-eu">not years later, when it's way too late</a>. But the failure of Brexit, the lethal Covid response, the attacks on cultural institutions, migrants seeking refugee status, universities, Black dissent--all the old unforgotten enemies going back to empire--has only hardened the government persisting in the obviously stupid on the basis of dim political calculations that their own people don't credit. And the hard-core TOry reprobates drive the discourse, which is familar from the U.S., which also has oriented its entire political system around the coddling of its most backward elements.<br /></p><p>The actual British people aren't like this. The gap between governments and people is rightly described as wide. And yet these people as voters did put this government in and show no sign of mass repentance and change. </p><p>Meanwhile they may turn the burned tower into a 24 story garden. We do remember the dead and the creativity of the local responses to the living. I dearly hope the latter can spread. <br /></p>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-47521968487181253792022-05-01T02:59:00.011-07:002022-05-01T04:30:31.029-07:00War Diary 7: Checkmate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-8QN3eQ3arLx2TsUOU39b-6tu-IUWykc6v4b4GpBjf6yZ0xcma9c0ruDrHT7uosSSkhSfM-4EjFnoB7QnfRLdBGo33SBQ8_GYTGyWg_7zM8Ry0qfUl1VK4XDyxSsuW5PrQP2Kxw1FpATicP-WfKfcHFcChvfKD3AmGk5JXYSTzKd9G1k3n5w/s2000/War%20Boys%20Mad%20Max%20Wiki.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1331" data-original-width="2000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-8QN3eQ3arLx2TsUOU39b-6tu-IUWykc6v4b4GpBjf6yZ0xcma9c0ruDrHT7uosSSkhSfM-4EjFnoB7QnfRLdBGo33SBQ8_GYTGyWg_7zM8Ry0qfUl1VK4XDyxSsuW5PrQP2Kxw1FpATicP-WfKfcHFcChvfKD3AmGk5JXYSTzKd9G1k3n5w/s320/War%20Boys%20Mad%20Max%20Wiki.webp" width="320" /></a></div><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">A month
into the war in Ukraine, former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry
Medvedev <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/26/russia-reasserts-right-to-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine-putin">said
that Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine</a> “clearly indicates the grounds on
which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons." He named four
of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first two involve nuclear
attack on Russia or its allies. The third is any endangerment of Russia’s
nuclear capability. “And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is
committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the
country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use
of conventional weapons.”</span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">That same
day, March 26<sup>th</sup>, Biden ended his <a href="“https:/abcnews.go.com/Politics/full-transcript-president-bidens-speech-warsaw-russias-invasion/story?id=83690301">speech
in Warsaw</a> with the famous ad lib, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain
in power.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">One month
after that, during an originally-secret visit to Ukraine by the US Secretaries
of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/24/world/ukraine-russia-war-news?smid=url-copy#blinken-austin-kyiv-ukraine">Austin
said</a>, ““We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the
kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.</span><span lang="EN-AU"> </span><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">It had already lost a lot of
military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see
them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The top
officials in the U.S. government have directly jeopardized the existence of the
Putin government of Russia, which is the same as the existence of their Russia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t tell if they’re keeping Russia’s nuclear
option alive through intent--which can't be ruled out--or blundering stupidity. But the result is the
same: Putin and his government thinking the West’s response to the Ukraine
invasion is an existential threat to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The U.S. response to that has been further displays of contempt.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">It’s contempt
without a plan for de-escalation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On his <a href="https://www.backgroundbriefing.org/2022/04/28/background-briefing-april-28-2022/">April 28<sup>th</sup> episode of <i>Background Briefing</i></a>, Ian
Masters spoke with a frequent guest, Robert Baer, the former CIA agent and
author who’s best known for the material that led to the film <i>Syriana</i>,
about brutal US policy in the Middle East.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Around 15’45”, an alarmed Masters starts to push Baer to produce a concrete answer
about how Putin can stop from escalating in Ukraine and beyond it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: But his army’s a paper tiger. You were saying that earlier. So
how the hell is he going beyond where he is right now?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: He simply has to produce artillery shells. And run them through
his artillery pieces. Until Ukraine simply no longer exists. And as of today that’s
where he’s going. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: And what can Biden do? Biden today announced a 33-billion-dollar
package. They’ve been very slow getting stuff to the Ukrainian military, but
what’s the 33 billion dollars going to do if this is the ultimate plan? Is
there any way to stop Putin? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: The 33 billion dollars is a down payment on World War III. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: meaning what? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: Meaning an attack on a NATO country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Baltics. Go in, take them. He’s got to continue
this war on the West and War on NATO. He cannot let it go at this- a piece of
the Donbas. There’s so much he’s lost, he’s got to keep going. …. He can’t turn
to the Russians and say hey, it was a mistake, we got a bigger piece of the
Donbas, let’s declare victory and leave. People have been watching him for years—that’s
not what he’s going to do. …We don’t really know what he’s going to do. He’s
been listening to these mystics, you know, Russian superiority and the Russian
soul and it’s the clash of civilisations. He believes this. We don’t know what
he’s going to do. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: Let’s just go back to the idea that he fires a nuke at Odessa. That’s
a huge game-changer. What’s the West going to do then?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone in Washington does. They
don’t know what’s going on. They never took him seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he went into Crimea in 2014 and all this
blabbering on about how he’s going to take on NATO and take on the West—nobody believed
it. And now all of the sudden you have to figure out what this guy’s going to
do next. You can’t tell from pictures, but I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s
completely lost his mind. And that means you can’t predict what he’s going to
do. You can’t predict whether the Russian command and control will follow
orders to launch nukes. That’s unknowable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We don’t know.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: Assuming he does fire a tactical nuclear weapon as a way to
break the will of the Ukrainians and destroy Odessa—as much as there are
international sanctions now, he’d become an international pariah, nobody would
want to deal with him, not even the Chinese, would they? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: Ian, right now it’s the Sampson option for him. He has to die and
take down the temple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: right but is there any way that you can let him have some kind
of victory that he can dress up as a victory?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: there’s nobody to give him that victory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I Zelensky turns to the Ukrainian military
and says, “hey, we’re going to give up the Donbas to stop this,” Zelensky will
be gone the same day. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: so both sides are fighting to the death.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Bear: Yep. …they’re determined. They’re going for broke.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: well they have every reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They’re being invaded, right?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: yep, they’re being murdered. It’s genocide. What do you do when
you’re up against genocide? You fight back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And surrender does nothing for you, because they’ll keep going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All these things, it doesn’t really matter
what the plans are. It’s what people believe. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: well you’ve given us a lot to think about, Bob Baer, and I
thank you very much for joining us here today.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Baer: yeah, well none of it is optimistic.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Masters: that’s an understatement. 20’15”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Two big things are happening here. The first is that a tactical nuclear strike is being discussed as a realistic possibility. </p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Second, Baer dismisses the two current standard "solutions." Arms flows to Ukraine won't stop the destruction of Ukraine. And the other, a diplomatic solution, is no longer possibly psychologically. </p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">We can state the diplomatic solution's starting points: Russia keeps
Crimea, Ukraine keeps the Donbas with formal rights for ethnic Russians there, Ukraine pledges neutrality and permanent
withdrawal of any bid to join NATO. Something like this was <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/28/anatol_lieven_ukraine_proxy_war">proposed yet again </a>on
the same day as the Masters-Baer exchange by the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But, as Baer would expect, this framework didn't survive even to the end of the show: </span>Lieven later said that Russia needs all of the
Donbas to justify its losses, but left out the next sentence as provided by Baer—that the
Ukranian military, their country invaded and half destroyed, their existence denied by Putin, will fight to the death to prevent this. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Lievan also said, </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Lloyd Austin’s comments, and those
of the British government, as well, imply a war that will go on essentially
forever, you know, an endless war against Russia. You know, we have to ask what
that will do to Ukraine, what it will do to the world economy, and what it will
do to Europe.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We actually don't need to ask because we already know: if the war isn't forever, it's
nuclear.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Checkmate. See this war for what it is, in order to think past it. <br /></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-90919781999840265132022-01-20T02:53:00.005-08:002022-01-20T07:54:19.784-08:00The Sum of All Toryism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiXVz6GIPHLvw6PkFtOTp7AOYY-Ct6XydPEnc16EdUgh4_u3Eq4OAZeFsc9-xI3aNe-xBf8KcMkSht1v7UCecJrA3TE7M7anznSIW3WTB2Ha9ms_IUJlcUPFgJ8j2HPNxRp-3DNpP2rpRuPQVYn6DFf8LLWUo_r3PrWQ2-hbF1x7gfxtWjo2uQ=s645" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="645" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiXVz6GIPHLvw6PkFtOTp7AOYY-Ct6XydPEnc16EdUgh4_u3Eq4OAZeFsc9-xI3aNe-xBf8KcMkSht1v7UCecJrA3TE7M7anznSIW3WTB2Ha9ms_IUJlcUPFgJ8j2HPNxRp-3DNpP2rpRuPQVYn6DFf8LLWUo_r3PrWQ2-hbF1x7gfxtWjo2uQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div>It's interesting to be an American watching Anglo-American decline in the much smaller setting of England, starring Boris Johnson and the Entitled Tories. The background story is that in recent decades the national governments of both countries have focused on giving their populations less rather than more, and making ordinary town life worse rather than better. <p></p><p>An obvious example is the National Health Service, which has repeatedly been on the verge of meltdown since I started paying careful attention in 2013. Covid made that worse, but even before the Tory strategy was to keep core institutions at the level of "barely good enough to get by." The NHS is uber-popular here because it represents equal access, that is service <u>not</u> (for once) graded by wealth and privilege. Naturally the Tories have been bleeding that example.<br /></p><p>The Tories have made mediocrity the <i>de facto</i> standard of public systems, with actual collapse a perpetual shadow. UK infrastructures are not competitive in the 21st century. The Tory UK is weaker in 2022 than it was in 2010 when they took over. Neither the media nor much of the voting public ever focus on these core issues. They are less important than another issue, which we'll get to. </p><p>Another example of "making worse" is the government itself. Starting in 2015-16, Johnson and his Tories have turned public discussion in the country upside down. Everything has been about Brexit, everything has been about the people leading it--Johnson, May, Gove, Davies, Frost, et al. generating now seven years of nonsense about everything. Real British issues like climate disaster, entrenched poverty, deindustrialization, poor national health, faltering education, the worst productivity gains in the rich world, political corruption--all these were drowned by the nonstop Brexit roadshow. </p><p>Brexit got fired up five years into the Coalition and then Conservative austerity reign, which was clearly going nowhere. Over the decade, the BBC, the country's only internationally-respected institution (hate to break the news) was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/16/bbc-culture-secretary-funding-licence-fee">cut 30 percent</a>, and councils, which sustain local quality of life, were generally cut around 50 percent. This forced cuts that hurt essential services (after school youth programs, sidewalk de-icing, rubbish collection, everything), making most of this stuff, even in my well-off borough of Islington, pretty crappy. Simple repairs (a hole in a sideboard allowing squirrels into the building walls) would take months and months, and then not be done well enough to last more than a few weeks. Councils also ramped up side businesses like moneylending and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2daa1420-6f6c-447b-aaf2-094abf22aaaa">accompanying risks.</a> The fatal decision to put <i>flammable</i> cladding on Grenfell Tower was stupid and insane on its face, but very much a part of this austerity-mediocrity ethos that has degraded Britain.</p><p>Actually there is another internationally-respected British institution, universities, and the Tory-led Coalition government entered <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-collini/from-robbins-to-mckinsey/print">by whacking them too</a>, cutting central teaching funding to near zero for most fields, then later cutting maintenance grants for students, then still later eliminating the London cost allowance, all after tripling the fee level and creating a student debt (and also public debt, don't ask) crisis and then freezing fees for years which has pushed many universities into fiscal crisis--you get the picture. The entitled, casual fucking around with really complex institutions that took decades and the life-work of millions, well, it is very very hard to understand.</p><p>Behind the "great trading nation" rhetoric, the implicit Tory plan is to make everyday life for most people a little bit worse, year after year. The Tory offer to builders, bankers, and property owners is clear. But they offer <i>nothing</i> <i>material</i> to the general population: they certainly have no plan for economic grandeur of the kind associated with the lost empire, because--short of re-colonial conquest-- that would require massive investments in public and behaviorially-evolved stuff--research, advanced education, sustained managerial effort that goes beyond coercion and bullying, and also long-range, sustained thinking. </p><p>When they get into trouble, as they have now, Tories first think to wreck some more. Hence their <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/i-m-a-celebrity-nadine-dorries-munches-her-way-through-camel-toe-and-ostrich-anus-8315677.html">absurd</a> culture minister's <a href="https://twitter.com/NadineDorries/status/1482622722228240387?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1482622722228240387%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fentertainment-arts-60014514">plan to freeze and then defund the BBC</a>, the home office minister's plan to sic the Navy on refugee rafts, the likely pushing of more patients into the NHS by lifting all Covid restrictions before Omicron has been contained, and so on. There's just nothing constructive coming out of the party post-Brexit, which was the pointless, damaging culmination of their first 10 years of post-Thatcherite rule.</p><p>So the question is why do these Tories rule? One answer is that the Labour party today offers nothing much either. It presided over many Tory cuts on local councils in the famous red wall regions, and its post-Corbyn alternative is basically nonexistent. What rebuilding would Labour actually do? Their shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, used a Financial Times interview to <a href="https://twitter.com/cnewf/status/1484151711400931332">promise fiscal discipline, Tory style</a>.<br /></p><p>A better answer comes from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/17/tory-party-boris-johnson-polls-britain">Nesrine Malik</a> this week in the <i>Guardian</i>--it's kind of the only thing you need to read on the subject (though see also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/20/boris-johnson-culture-mourning-mother-downing-street-partied-prime-minister">Aditya Chakraborty</a>). Malik rightly claims that Tory supporters aren't going to dump Johnson so easily (though they will happily beat him up enough to make him more compliant with Thatcherite conservatism). </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Johnson is a contracted private service provider – as long as he
delivers, then as clients, his supporters don’t really care what he gets
up to outside of the tasks he has been hired for. Those tasks are
broadly Brexit and a shiny, prosperous country where jobs and funds have
been cut or confiscated from those less deserving.</p><p style="text-align: left;">She then helpfully translates: </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Those two tasks, at heart, are about contempt for communal rule of law,
and limiting sharing resources with others. They are about making our
own minds up regarding which laws we would like thank you very much, and
creating two classes of people. ... It is no wonder Tory
supporters are not storming the gates of Downing Street.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So the Tory offer to the nation is English exceptionalism. This has two components, one financial and one cultural, read racial.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">The sub-clauses in the contract that flow from these two headline items
all, one way or another, are about preserving the financial and cultural
assets of Conservative voters. Maintaining an economy built on
protecting private capital and property values, shifting the blame for
low wages and unemployment on to immigrants rather than poor regulation
of employers, and forging a synthetic supremacist national identity
through relentless culture war posturing on colonial history, statues,
flags and national anthems.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Basically Malik has captured the <i>whole story of English Conservatism toda</i><u>y</u>. There is nothing else to say. "As long as the Tories hurt only who they 'need to be hurting,' no frivolity or recklessness will be terminal." They have no other goals, or other ideas.</p><p style="text-align: left;">There. UK politics is explained. And, if Tory superdominance stays intact, so is the inevitability of English decline. </p>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-73855004194274303782020-11-09T03:18:00.006-08:002020-11-09T04:24:06.050-08:00Sobriety Week on Biden-Harris<div data-contents="true"><div data-block="true" data-editor="30eb4" data-offset-key="dktvb-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dktvb-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dktvb-0-0"><span data-text="true"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgTcr3pVMtTWwgjZtmK1QD3cipaiGFQvTWu5i85-V6aeE6ycAGZEiaXKbZ-cKdMDiUDM3HBwheuiT-XgkFOTnUHnJP_vN4RHh_vUkANeQ0_bQkUEf-gP7JB88K2xC7P9OtYkOsHg/s2048/Win+Champagne+BLM+Plaza+Amanda++Madden+110720.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1178" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgTcr3pVMtTWwgjZtmK1QD3cipaiGFQvTWu5i85-V6aeE6ycAGZEiaXKbZ-cKdMDiUDM3HBwheuiT-XgkFOTnUHnJP_vN4RHh_vUkANeQ0_bQkUEf-gP7JB88K2xC7P9OtYkOsHg/s320/Win+Champagne+BLM+Plaza+Amanda++Madden+110720.png" width="320" /></a></div>That felt good. Now it's post-Biden-Harris Sobriety Week. Over at the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/my-hectoring-lament-chelady-in-blue-requests-we-not-become-complacent">Elizabeth Nelson writes</a>, "let’s not interpret a Biden administration as an opportunity to indulge in cultural and political comfort food. Let’s not feel reassured or validated. There is nothing validating about 70 million votes cast for Donald Trump....This is not the time for upbeat “I knew we’d prevail!” indie rock. ...The anger should feel more acute now than ever. Per the GOP’s proven system, Trump will hand Biden a terrible economy and quite possibly an exaggerated winter of I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-How-Many-Die response to the pandemic. Biden will be pilloried, vilified and obstructed from the moment he takes power. Let’s push back harder than ever." Yes, exactly.</span></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="30eb4" data-offset-key="62pu-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="62pu-0-0"><span data-offset-key="62pu-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="30eb4" data-offset-key="bs96f-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bs96f-0-0"><span data-offset-key="bs96f-0-0"><span data-text="true">Writing in the New York <i>Times</i>, <a href=" https://nyti.ms/36jauTb">Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the pushing back</a> as "radical responsiveness" to real US conditions. This means above all extracting full accountability for the Trump Administration: legal forensics into the damage Trump and his people did to public systems from the Dept of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency to the misuse of executive branch paramilitaries in policing demonstrations in a way that created the illusion of leftist violence that Republicans took with them to the voting booth. There must be a calling to account. The attack on systemic racism that Biden invoked in his victory speech, the rebuilding of public health infractructure (including the disgraced CDC), energy conversion to renewables . . .everything depends on a militant reassertion of expertise, reality-testing, interpretative skills, the whole quantitative and qualitative set of knowledge practices that Trumpism voids. Liz Chatterjee and I have pieces in a forthcoming book (coedited by Anna Alexandrova, to be published by Alan Thomas) arguing that experts truly did earn popular mistrust by supporting policies that did systemic damage to majorities in both the US and UK. That said, the Biden-Harris admin will need to assert, with full militancy, the value of knowledge practices for solving social problems. This will require *investigations* and *prosecutions* of Trumpian corruption, including their deliberate epistemic sabotage. There should be the theater of congressional hearings and legal proceedings, tied to specific lessons to expand the "reality-based community in post-truth America," in Ian Masters' tag-line for his excellent show. Nothing could be worse than forgive-and-forget.</span></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="30eb4" data-offset-key="75cia-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="75cia-0-0"><span data-offset-key="75cia-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="30eb4" data-offset-key="fd55c-0-0"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fd55c-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fd55c-0-0"><span data-text="true">Cottom can be read in conjunction with Larry Elliott's <i>Guardian</i> <a href="https://bit.ly/32tHUNV">column about economic troubles</a>. Biden doesn't have an analysis of finance capitalism that can dig the US or anyone else out of the current hole--to the contrary, as Elliott and others point out, Biden is part of the Clintonian Dem establishment that got us here. What kind of worked in the 1990s is failing now, and real budget policy ("fiscal") requires a Congress that Biden-Harris don't control. As Elliott writes, "Monetary policy [via the Federal Reserve] is no answer to America’s need to renew its infrastructure or to make its welfare system more generous. To the extent that it does make a difference, [Quantitative Easing] works by pushing up asset prices and creating a feel good factor so it tends to be better for Wall Street than for the struggling communities in the less well-off states." This has been the play since Alan Greenspan took over the Federal Reserve in 1987, with unaffordable housing and low productivity growth (via low investment) being just two of many negative symptoms. (See French economist Cédric Durand's "Fictitious Capital" for an important analysis of asset-price opium and its damage to the real economy.) So we're going to need a radical rethink of US/UK capitalism, and that work is going to have to be done on a huge scale outside the Biden Admin, which won't touch it unless it grows into a movement.</span></span></div></div></div>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-66010075402979472482020-11-08T04:32:00.006-08:002020-11-08T04:32:56.458-08:00I'm Going to Enjoy This As Long as I Possibly Can<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Q8le4SLM2Et-BgHC1QSrvVA3Up5IgjLpT84JSMDdCXZ3o3WYucUZT8ItyrTStaywTkTVJ8yAxOTzsW8AftaC02OqwTZb4Lw5Z83uaRJXOntdrjAfPtjhXPOeYtaUtbZ_eeX4FQ/s1450/Trump+Exit+WaPo+Milibank+110720.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="967" data-original-width="1450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Q8le4SLM2Et-BgHC1QSrvVA3Up5IgjLpT84JSMDdCXZ3o3WYucUZT8ItyrTStaywTkTVJ8yAxOTzsW8AftaC02OqwTZb4Lw5Z83uaRJXOntdrjAfPtjhXPOeYtaUtbZ_eeX4FQ/s320/Trump+Exit+WaPo+Milibank+110720.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I didn’t support Biden or Harris in the primaries, mostly trying to decide between two candidates I really did like- Sanders and Warren. Neither Biden nor Harris had policies strong enough to address the scale of the problems that we have. Nor, I thought, did they have the ideas that could mobilize the base. My friend <br /><p></p><p>Ricki told me I was wrong about the latter, that Harris’s status as first woman and first woman of color in either position would rally people—which did rally me along with tens of millions of other Dems—and also that people would respond overwhelmingly to Biden’s decency and non-reactionary policies. She was right! We all can continue to debate whether more progressive policies would have helped make the Dem margin bigger, including in House and Senate races. But there’s a massive, immediate victory for four issues: </p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">1. racial justice, where overt racism won’t be sanctioned at the top. It’s only a start, but the Democratic win will end the demonization in Biden’s corrupt terminology of mainstream civil rights campaigns, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, queer people at that level of the federal government. The king of the Neo-confederacy has been beaten.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">2. judicial corruption. The Republicans did pack the Supreme Court and the federal bench, but the removal of Barr from the Attorney General position will allow the Dept of Justice to function more professionally. This will help with civil rights enforcement, investigation of racist police departments, reduction of violence against indigenous peoples protecting water and land, and other basics. We can also again start to imagine enforcement of anti-trust and other regulations in relation to a Wall Street that has had a free hand to reinflate asset bubbles, invest against their own customers, etc. The same goes for the Department of Education on student debt and for-profit abusers, among many others. Rampant sexism no longer has a safe space in the White House, so gender equality can return to its status as a normal goal in the 21st century.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">3. environmental regulation. Neither Harris nor Biden support the Green New Deal, but they can undo a ton of Trump’s gratuitous damage. They can be pressured into stronger, more adequate positions. and they’ll rejoin the Paris Accords.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">4. Covid-19. Biden and Harris understand the concept of public health and the essential role of the public sector in operating a pandemic response. The country will get well much faster next year because the Democrats are back in the White House.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Other issues are up for grabs—education and higher education policy, labor rights, reproductive rights, fiscal policy, transportation, infrastructure, the Middle East, China and foreign policy more generally. But i’m going to take a few days off from worrying about that.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">And I’m very happy to have a community college professor as First Lady. It’s about time!</div></div>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-20087294702446986072020-11-04T04:05:00.005-08:002020-11-04T04:05:54.827-08:00The Election Standoff: First Exit Poll Review<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQtvB6uiDBQfubRVeopfDyn2799GL1ox-jVR4kSN8LhyKKVotaDYpn7qkCD4qLftEcQaDSWk2ThBaf_wb1HNcEMuzNN3_GfUTFJBlnNA1D0rs_ni2cGoqtRHd-YE38pdi19IeCw/s245/are_you_kidding_me.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQtvB6uiDBQfubRVeopfDyn2799GL1ox-jVR4kSN8LhyKKVotaDYpn7qkCD4qLftEcQaDSWk2ThBaf_wb1HNcEMuzNN3_GfUTFJBlnNA1D0rs_ni2cGoqtRHd-YE38pdi19IeCw/s0/are_you_kidding_me.gif" /></a></div>The blue wave never arrived, and as expected, Donald Trump declared victory--"frankly, we did win this election." He then demanded that ballot counting stop in the swing states where at 2:30 am ET he was ahead. Here's the<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsI3jcgiIhA"> full clip.</a><br /><p></p><p>Both Fox and CNN denounced Trump's claim that continuing to count votes would be illegal. On Fox, Chris Wallace said, <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">"This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states ... the president doesn't get to say he won states ... there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." On CNN, Jake Tapper declared,</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> “what the president just said is undemocratic and false and premature." </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Now the battle begins, first just to complete voting counts, which will shift blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And the Senate is still up in the air, with only the more predictable flips being called--a Dem loss in Alabama (I'm sad about Doug Jones, actually), and two Dem gains, in Arizona and Colorado. It's all especially terrible for those of us from states like California, where we are hostage, election after election, to the whims of a few perennial swing states, many of which are also bad at counting.<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I have some early thoughts on the Edison Research exit poll <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html">posted at the New York <i>Times</i>. </a>It confirms <a href="https://www.dailyposter.com/p/six-takeaways-from-election-night">David Sirota's take</a>, especially the first and last items, "Democrats' weak economic message hugely helped Trump," and "A large percentage of Americans have lost their minds." </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">1. Let's start with the <b>economy</b> (Trump in red, Biden in blue)<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKvpHK55LKurEVa79Xz_YGKraaGzjkJlBnu1jY8ST7pYgLQB1M0-NqnzDeSz73KbJmLOVInbMH2rgNoDHQoqeuTvEIyPZYnY5gFy1TQW5HDzYWzwSriYxCx5ODC8MDIVzyzYG1Xw/s1252/Exit+Poll+Econ+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="1252" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKvpHK55LKurEVa79Xz_YGKraaGzjkJlBnu1jY8ST7pYgLQB1M0-NqnzDeSz73KbJmLOVInbMH2rgNoDHQoqeuTvEIyPZYnY5gFy1TQW5HDzYWzwSriYxCx5ODC8MDIVzyzYG1Xw/w400-h279/Exit+Poll+Econ+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div>Trump does <i>not</i> win the working class vote. I could complain about 40+ percent of the bottom income quartiles voting for an unvarnished plutocrat, but Trump doesn't get a majority until family income hits six figures, or the most affluent 25 percent. Trump is the candidate of the white middle- and upper-middle class. (re the title of this, my ancient blog). <p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">This one is extremely annoying. <br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCnkEGrR14ydRlbRhivzGNTtd2W4sxRp2GWDIUuFzNDYrUXZy2gqkx1N6nltWGRT1j2Xw8lcBZ0vIjhhmuFgOQfWM9jm17-GaKbN2jhv7vUfK0eRVKLOlbTWjggkJtgLznb_x9g/s1288/Exit+Poll+Issues+110420.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1288" data-original-width="1270" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCnkEGrR14ydRlbRhivzGNTtd2W4sxRp2GWDIUuFzNDYrUXZy2gqkx1N6nltWGRT1j2Xw8lcBZ0vIjhhmuFgOQfWM9jm17-GaKbN2jhv7vUfK0eRVKLOlbTWjggkJtgLznb_x9g/w395-h400/Exit+Poll+Issues+110420.png" width="395" /></a></div><p>People whose main issue is the economy went with Trump by 4:1! These aren't necessarily the people who know the most about economics (obviously). "The economy" seems to have become a proxy for pro-business ideology--tax cuts, deregulation, etc., rather than being a chance to evaluate policy performance. This is a massive failure for the Democrats, and confirms both of Sirota's points above.<br /></p><p>No less absurd is the Republican vote for the guy who addresses public safety by endangering it. <br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">A bit more on the economy: incumbents always do very well with people who think the economy is good (for them). Covid-19 and economic inequality notwithstanding, over 40 percent of respondents say they're better off than 4 years ago. The surprise to me is that only a fifth of respondents say they are worse off now. A third of even those people voted for Trump, again confirming the point that Biden didn't have a strong enough message to beat Trump with the 50 percent who think the economy is not so good or poor (below).<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqXmX37oyZR7tIxPryK6A8jQLZBgBv0PRt-kJ9oBSFGnYzLWXeSKC6nR-Bezgm7yaEGi86aWe8VDWnEwvPD0di5kcAOs_UOxkcNe-_djHyJQR2eVxFDfsWb3P2PFerLczWDd4Qgw/s1266/Exit+Poll+Econ2+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="1266" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqXmX37oyZR7tIxPryK6A8jQLZBgBv0PRt-kJ9oBSFGnYzLWXeSKC6nR-Bezgm7yaEGi86aWe8VDWnEwvPD0di5kcAOs_UOxkcNe-_djHyJQR2eVxFDfsWb3P2PFerLczWDd4Qgw/w400-h164/Exit+Poll+Econ2+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Finally, union households. They are only a fifth of respondents, and Trump gets a percentage of them that should embarrass Democrats, or unions, or both. Forty percent of union families voted for guy whose appointees have done serious damage to the status of unions, quite deliberately.<br /></span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcAtTZ0kHvnduZjbTsIWTJ7egSmuuLnN0ranMnAEpJ2kErfGjTFCx0-2vehkfdK-YWAQfYlNd11l3Uj_0UqmD4ZNVs2LPOlmmPUAbAbjSXZB1V26Y28Orv-EBps8b-u0X6XdTtxA/s1250/Exit+Poll+Union+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="1250" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcAtTZ0kHvnduZjbTsIWTJ7egSmuuLnN0ranMnAEpJ2kErfGjTFCx0-2vehkfdK-YWAQfYlNd11l3Uj_0UqmD4ZNVs2LPOlmmPUAbAbjSXZB1V26Y28Orv-EBps8b-u0X6XdTtxA/w400-h198/Exit+Poll+Union+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /></span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">2. <b>Race and Gender<br /></b></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">One story was that whites were still largely Trumpers but that white women had had enough. This was wrong. 55 percent of white women stuck with Trump. For me, this is big surprise number 2.<b> <br /></b></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><b></b></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglgU1G_z3d3lTC7esPHdmGoVVM7n6mvQMSxX8QwGZMd7vfDXtuO-pnI9djpAhDuhtX9FeBvDfOy9DcxCVEOZCNnmCeEv9Bmgn1zim_mw9tD3OMF1EaXs3ww7yXmeBG5fchGdfT3w/s1252/Exit+Poll+Race+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1120" data-original-width="1252" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglgU1G_z3d3lTC7esPHdmGoVVM7n6mvQMSxX8QwGZMd7vfDXtuO-pnI9djpAhDuhtX9FeBvDfOy9DcxCVEOZCNnmCeEv9Bmgn1zim_mw9tD3OMF1EaXs3ww7yXmeBG5fchGdfT3w/w400-h358/Exit+Poll+Race+110420.png" width="400" /></a></b></div>At first glance, 1 + 2 = a confirmation of 2016 analyses that stressed Trumpers voted to keep their racial position rather than to overcome economic anxiety. This is a depressing continuity.<p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">3. <b>College</b>. </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Another story was the educational divide: non-college people were said to resent the rule of experts and B.A. know-it-alls. Trump was to lose the college crowd, especially women, but score big with the non-college crowd.<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5-TfkVGlq3ze6edo-yFsrQNhgCD8NMjSXIdAPR-riCNas_OHwzrts076nfPc8TTylcmYcbVB1yr4Qo5sUJb31rOAX2c8LAIZS0EUltcum8FWCO30AIDftJuAx007qlqe1TKUcQ/s1290/Exit+Poll+Education+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="662" data-original-width="1290" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5-TfkVGlq3ze6edo-yFsrQNhgCD8NMjSXIdAPR-riCNas_OHwzrts076nfPc8TTylcmYcbVB1yr4Qo5sUJb31rOAX2c8LAIZS0EUltcum8FWCO30AIDftJuAx007qlqe1TKUcQ/w400-h205/Exit+Poll+Education+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Trump hung on to white women and won a narrow victory with white women college grads. College curbs but doesn't eliminate white enthusiasm for a president who so clearly elevates money and power over knowledge that he makes George W. Bush look like William Faulkner. The most anti-intellectual president in modern history still gets half of white college grads -- and slightly more women than men. </span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The main surprise here is among white men, where college cuts their Trump support two-thirds to under half. <br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">4.<b> Party Identity. </b></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The red state / blue state dichotomy is a tedious cliché. That doesn't make it wrong. What seems to be happening is that D v. R isn't about parties anymore, but breeds of American.</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9q3rYG61brPFsjVV1kzqp4jqgJLxnXFLh_KowBGnap2IViQFjXBWVEoXtydp1CqE_NareAVfck7ZXThvMShk5HzaeVPPCDH9jkrVpTQ61ris0PxwixccvXoDQvGqjaDgmTwsCA/s1258/Exit+Poll+Paarty+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="766" data-original-width="1258" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9q3rYG61brPFsjVV1kzqp4jqgJLxnXFLh_KowBGnap2IViQFjXBWVEoXtydp1CqE_NareAVfck7ZXThvMShk5HzaeVPPCDH9jkrVpTQ61ris0PxwixccvXoDQvGqjaDgmTwsCA/w400-h244/Exit+Poll+Paarty+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><b> </b>Note two things. First, the major parties each only have a third of the electorate. Second, they each had nearly 95 percent candidate loyalty. There are not so much two parties as two Americas. I dislike writing that stupid sentence but it seems to be true. <br /><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrc-mOV76FS1eaJlMTjub7v45lYpShM5_ed6Ep7vxDZ1yhkSgoHeCFmV3qxRKzvb82Uzbg2KR31sb1yqhlpE468vt8sFq560NfmG2Lk0gkkMRZU1J6A7sSNTchCm4KCGVMnNYNgQ/s1248/Exit+Poll+Scared+if+Biden+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="1248" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrc-mOV76FS1eaJlMTjub7v45lYpShM5_ed6Ep7vxDZ1yhkSgoHeCFmV3qxRKzvb82Uzbg2KR31sb1yqhlpE468vt8sFq560NfmG2Lk0gkkMRZU1J6A7sSNTchCm4KCGVMnNYNgQ/w400-h198/Exit+Poll+Scared+if+Biden+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The question for Trump gets the same numbers: the other party's candidate inspires concern or fear in 90 + percent of either party. And that's true even for an "Uncle Joe" moderate like Biden. </span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">A silver lining is tentative vindication of people like Sanders and Warren who tried to talk the Democrat establishment out of their faith in moderation and the centrist voter. There's going to be hell to pay for the strategists who spent millions on white "persuadables" instead of on first-time Latinx voters, for example.</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Party also beats region. West and East are more Democratic as we already knew, but not by a landslide. Biden got nearly half of the South, the same as his score in the Midwest. We now have country vs. city parties--confirmation of a trend people have analyzed for years.<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOXJYR76gqjrnos9sjMmFbVEA9ZObTKvzFoze3w-EI9vMjkY4poK3PsdA7GYw-5_iQmL7GeK1n6vRx1zQko8r-dM_2ndlApavgca11wCcr5SHkKD95V7YULGYAhC4ppa2x5DHeEQ/s1318/Exit+Poll+Region+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1276" data-original-width="1318" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOXJYR76gqjrnos9sjMmFbVEA9ZObTKvzFoze3w-EI9vMjkY4poK3PsdA7GYw-5_iQmL7GeK1n6vRx1zQko8r-dM_2ndlApavgca11wCcr5SHkKD95V7YULGYAhC4ppa2x5DHeEQ/w400-h388/Exit+Poll+Region+110420.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><b>5. Pandemic politics</b></span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">This exit poll confirms that in America, there is no independent reality--only a party line.<b> <br /></b></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><b></b></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCQ9XGN9kU2J9Pnsm9RXmKt9M5ZBS8O_UQ0Sg6MEbUMCzKYboAW_IE1F1iGhG516NWfrOTsBLyGJ6aRqrp7Uz-G_3xBJAU2fllvK7aVEKUSakZe_9S2j1ns_70qf-HGGd44QR7IA/s1380/Exit+Poll+Corona+v+Economy+110420.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1380" data-original-width="1284" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCQ9XGN9kU2J9Pnsm9RXmKt9M5ZBS8O_UQ0Sg6MEbUMCzKYboAW_IE1F1iGhG516NWfrOTsBLyGJ6aRqrp7Uz-G_3xBJAU2fllvK7aVEKUSakZe_9S2j1ns_70qf-HGGd44QR7IA/w373-h400/Exit+Poll+Corona+v+Economy+110420.png" width="373" /></a></b></div>We see the same 90+ percent correlations between perception of Covid-competence and party membership. This is a huge embarrassment for a country that prides itself on can-do realism.<p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Equally embarrassing is the failure of rocketing Covid infection rates to make many people rethink Trump's performance. The same goes for the split on reopening vs. containment. Democrats did not break through the wall on the basic point that if Covid isn't contained the economy won't rebuild. There's lots of bad news here about the country's epistemic competence.</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">This polls has huge gaps on issues and better data will be flooding out. And as of noon in London the count is far from over.<br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /><b> </b><br /></span><br /></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /><b> </b><br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /></span></span></p>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-59581319204967846202020-04-05T16:05:00.000-07:002020-04-05T21:30:50.488-07:00The Longer Arc of Covid History<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2DWXvMmAKKBzWq5zSHe0gKALYVOuhXmMuGRe8vref0Lmz5PiXUuOx1R3zY07LPzkEQrdmZNt6G17IuFp72noJHJcc26_98LJIdmTgid9NnZndNqpk-8y5COGgLoFYA6H0BYKIIg/s1600/George+Bush+Doesn%2527t+Care+About+Black+People.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="480" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2DWXvMmAKKBzWq5zSHe0gKALYVOuhXmMuGRe8vref0Lmz5PiXUuOx1R3zY07LPzkEQrdmZNt6G17IuFp72noJHJcc26_98LJIdmTgid9NnZndNqpk-8y5COGgLoFYA6H0BYKIIg/s320/George+Bush+Doesn%2527t+Care+About+Black+People.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The short story of the U.S. 21th century is the tale of four disasters. The first was the response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001--the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing era of permanent war and suffering in the greater Middle East. The second was the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: that's Kanye West at left intoning his immortal line, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." The third was the 2008 financial crisis. The fourth is unfolding now--the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic depression likely to ensue.<br />
<br />
The failed response to these disasters has a common element. It is the Republican party and its world view. <br />
<br />
George W. Bush ignored intelligence warnings about the activities that led to the attacks, which caught the enormous US military completely off guard. Military solutions made the situation worse, and were overcompensations for the initial failure.<br />
<br />
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 became a human catastrophe, particularly for Black residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana, through the Bush administration's then-astonishing failure to manage basic disaster relief. FEMA was run by a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1230-01.htm">political crony</a>. Much talk of reform ensued, but the structural problems persisted and then got worse under Trump, leading to the failures of 2020 that we are living through.<br />
<br />
The 2008 financial crisis was created by Republican economic policies, which always center on tax cuts, government starvation, deregulation of business and banking, the continuous priming of equity markets with <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993326">low interest rates and other tools</a>, and asset securitization and other financialization processes that attracted capital out of production and non-financial services.<br />
<br />
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic will be greatly worsened by another Republican administration's refusal to prepare for it. A comparison to a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.html?searchResultPosition=3">competent public system like Germany's</a> is profoundly painful. Why can't we do that here? The U.S. is now a formerly-1st world country, not a leader in any domain that requires cooperative skill in the use of large-scale structures. <br />
<br />
Why have Republicans presided over all of these disasters - 4 out of 4? Bad luck? My selective reading? (true, I forgot Benghazi!) Neither. It's because their core belief is that <a href="https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/inaugural-address-2/">"government isn't the solution to our problem, government is the problem."</a> Government isn't something that creates and orchestrates common goods. Government is a piñata to hit with the political bat until the candy falls out for you. <br />
<br />
To rehearse: Step 1 is to appoint political allies rather than competent professionals--allies you control.<br />
<br />
Step 2 is to neutralize regulatory power or independent oversight. The knowledge-creating function of government agencies is silenced if not destroyed. The same goes for unvarnished communication with the public. (Attacks on a still-independent academia are part of this.)<br />
<br />
Step 3 is to turn the government agency into an extraction pipeline that siphons public money into private pockets. Mineral leases on federal and/or Native lands are one example; subsidies for fossil fuel but not renewable development are another. The result of this structure in the pandemic is a <a href="https://lat.ms/3aLMrNH">war of all against all </a>for masks, ventilators, and other basic equipment, like what you'd expect in a run-of-the-mill dictatorship.<br />
<br />
Step 4 is Orwellian denial that the leadership has failed or manipuled reality-- as when the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote their webpage in the hours after "the president's ignorant son-in-law" <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/03/trumps-halfwit-son-in-law-is-running-coronavirus-response-thats-unacceptable/">falsely stated</a> that the purpose of federal emergency stockpiles is not to help the states, to confirm his falsehood.<br />
<br />
How did we get to this place--this place where the U.S. isn't operationally competent anymore? It's barely second rate in various measures of public health, disaster relief, housing, general education, and is worse than second-rate in other things like infrastructure. I can't imagine the U.S. increasing the number of intensive care beds by 50% in 2 months, as Germany did. My hope a couple of weeks ago that UC medical centers would come to the rescue of California's infected people, offering lots of tests, tracing, beds in MASH-style hospitals, is sad to remember.<br />
<br />
So there's the Republicans' phony non-state state in Ruthie Gilmore's term that hollows out government capacity to provide core human services--health, housing, and education--and to do this equitably, meaning without regard for ability to pay, as democracy theoretically demands. But Republicans didn't take over the federal and most state governments at gunpoint--they were fairly elected (mostly). How'd they get there and stay there?<br />
<br />
Some of it is dirty tricks and highly organized, intelligent strategy, plus excellent propaganda skills. The roles of voter suppression and Fox News are well known. But this doesn't change the fact that Republicans are there because white middle class voters keep them there. Whites majorities still vote Republican <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/11/08/2018-exit-polls-show-greater-white-support-for-democrats/">even under Trump</a>; he has lost many college whites but has <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/248525/non-college-whites-affinity-gop-trump.aspx">kept</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329219861215">non-college white middle class voters</a>. For decades, whites have voted overwhelmingly for conservative Republican policies on housing, health, education, taxes, voting, and civil rights. Running through white flight, property tax revolts and opposition to busing, the paleomammalian cortex of the white middle-class decided to dismantle the common goods that created it rather than share them with people of color. <br />
<br />
This statement is pretty obvious to Black people: see, for example, this good explanation that historically-informed <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-black-vote/">Black distrust of educated whites</a> led them to support for Biden over Sanders in the South Carolina primary. There's also more awareness of this issue in the white middle-class than was the case ten or thirty years ago, but it hasn't changed anything--voting patterns haven't shifted enough to insure Trump's defeat in November. It's this white expert discourse, even when officially anti-racist and enlightened. Experts are as likely to tell people they have to go without things they want and need--like free college or public housing--than to form plans for social reconstruction. Trump and Boris Johnson belong to parties that have openly sabotaged expert advice and expert institutions, so their failures to deliver affordable health care and higher ed are not mainly the experts' fault. And yet experts as a group, and their universities, neither offer big plans for nor systematically expose the anti-professional right as ruining the country.<br />
<br />
In part because of professional class passivity, neither non-college whites nor people of color look to universities, professionals, or college degrees as reliable sources for progressive politics. They aren't seen as institutions hellbent to build shared resources and infrastructure for all. This is one reason why even Dem support for college is more obligatory than passionate. For example, one poll showed majorities of all groups, especially Latinx parents, saying that college is important for their children (<a href="https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/survey/S_1216MBS.pdf">p 15)</a>. And yet they are far more likely, in California, to say public colleges are doing a "good" than an "excellent" job <a href="https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/survey/S_1216MBS.pdf">(p 10</a>). "Good" and "not so good" together have close to 3/4ths of respondents. I interpret this to mean that college isn't building a better world for people. It's mostly holding out the promise of a half-decent job. <br />
<br />
The only solution is for experts and their white middle class base to map out the complete reversal of anti-government neoliberalism. I say this although it is so entrenched, and the national opposition (Democrats) so compromised, that it is unlikely to happen without a political revolution.<br />
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Given its failure to reform its self-dealing neoliberalism, the white middle class will be one of this revolution's targets. The war on college-educated experts started long ago, and is now being waged enthusiastically by the Trumpian right. The white middle class, since it turned on the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and fought busing and property taxes in the 1970s, has sided with the inflation of asset prices over equitable development, including living wages for the multi-racial working class on which it depends. It has voted for people whose explicit program has been to cut taxes on business and the wealthy, give public lands to extraction companies, suppress unions, wages, and worker influence in their workplace, purge reproductive rights, and massively increase economic inequality, but but what the hell--these Republicans won't raise property or income taxes, pass rent control, or integrate the schools, so we'll just ride asset inflation up the steep slope of inequality. <br />
<br />
And with Covid, the Republicans will allow tens of millions to lose their jobs <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus-economy-saez-zucman.html">instead of paying companies to keep them employed</a>, because that policy, adopted even by Boris Johnson's Tories in Britain, wouldn't treat workers as disposable. Facing the Great Depression 2.0, borne of the right's hollow state and hatred of mass security, the middle class can either side with the multiracial workers of the country it fake-helped through Clinton-Obamanomics while keeping its assets growing, and redeem expertise in the bargain. Or it can chose its overpriced property economy, and be crushed by the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Winters-ebook/dp/B0056XNK80/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1BRCLQKWWE8AJ&dchild=1&keywords=oligarchy&qid=1586147421&s=books&sprefix=oligarchy%2Caps%2C237&sr=1-4">sultanistic oligarchy</a> the Trump Party yearns to deliver. Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-515184972312943622019-12-15T11:21:00.000-08:002019-12-18T12:40:05.855-08:00English Nationalism in an Absurd Election<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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First off, this was a very English occasion. Not British. The map at left shows an overwhelmingly Tory England at odds with at least two of the other three nations of the United Kingdom. Scotland may be gone by the end of Boris Johnson's five-year term. Northern Ireland, I think, will slowly realign with the Republic of Ireland in an island federation with capitals in both Dublin and Belfast. Johnson may be the "one nation" UK's last prime minister.<br />
<br />
Second, Labour's demolition in the UK election under social democrat Jeremy Corbyn does <u>not</u> mean that US Democrats should run to the pro-business center. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/opinion/uk-election-trump-2020.html?algo=top_conversion&fellback=false&imp_id=0&imp_id=690719783&action=click&module=Most%20Popular&pgtype=Homepage">Roger Cohen</a> et al. are wrong about this--and it will be really great of American liberals not to channel Steve Bannon's spin about a Brexit wave sweeping the globe. In the main exit poll, voters who didn't vote Labour blamed Labour "leadership" rather than its "economic policies"--by a <a href="https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1205510937995812864">margin of nearly 4 to 1. </a>Among Labour voters who defected to the Tories, that margin was 9 to 1. The share casting conscious votes against nationalization or infrastructure development or renewable energy or pension increases stayed in the single digits. Labour's defeat was not a defeat of green democratic socialism as an increasingly popular project.<br />
<br />
So if the working-classes weren't voting against socialism, what the hell happened? Union leader Len McCluskey <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-labour-election-defeat-len-mccluskey_uk_5df3b918e4b0ca713e5ee0fa">blamed Brexit,</a> meaning Labour would have won if it had competed with Boris Johnson to be more pro-Brexit? I really don't think so. This theory doesn't explain the tragic fact noted by a Labour MP from Birmingham, Jess Phillips, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/working-class-voters-didnt-trust-labour-jess-phillips">who wrote</a>, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The more working-class a constituency was, the worse the result was for
Labour. The problem isn’t just that working-class people will be hurt by
the Tories – it’s that too many don’t believe we’re better than the
Tories. </blockquote>
The hard question is <i>why</i> do working-class people who've been hurt for nine years by Tory austerity think that Labour is as bad as the Tories? It's not like the US in 2016, where a representative of the New Democrats, Hillary Clinton, could be blamed by Obama-to-Trump voters for neoliberal policies that offshored jobs, deregulated banking, and watched millions lose their homes. Corbyn was staunchly opposed to New Labour and to Tory austerity, and could hardly be accused of being a Tory enabler.<br />
<br />
So it was something about Jeremy? Phillips almost gets there, but wanders off into complaints about intolerance in the party leadership towards dissent, which was a problem for MPs but not obviously for voters. <br />
<br />
Similarly, Lisa Nandy, an MP from outside Manchester, accused her party of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/victory-boris-johnson-election-jeremy-corbyn">not listening to people enough.</a> But again, even if Labour MPs like her were not listening a whole lot more than Tory MPs don't listen, which I strongly doubt, she doesn't say what better-listening MPs would have heard. It's not clear what policies would have mattered, since Labour has been out of power for nearly a decade, and it's the Tories that have run the government and squeezed every council budget and every public service in the country. Perhaps local Labour officials did crap jobs in working-class constituencies that Labour lost--I wouldn't know. But it makes no sense that people hurt by explicit Tory policies don't hold the Tories responsible for the damage they are famously resentful about.<br />
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This is a map from the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/working-class-voters-didnt-trust-labour-jess-phillips">BCC coverage</a> showing constituencies that changed hands. In England, nearly all went to the Conservatives (in blue; yellow is the Scottish National Party, and orange the Liberal Democrats).<br />
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I'm struck by that middle belt from west to east, which corresponds to the "Northern Powerhouse" whose overstuffed, clunky trains, tattered NHS clinics, and generally neglected services have been famously <u>not </u>improved by the Tories over their decade in power. So where was "vote the rascals out"? In fact, a bad ten years was rewarded with another five--in part by austerity's leading victims.<br />
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This was not a close election. An <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/15/the-guardian-view-on-labours-defeat-an-existential-crisis-with-no-easy-solution"><i>Observer</i> editorial</a> summarized the scale of the Tory win.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is the largest Conservative majority the country has seen since
1987, delivered on the biggest share of the vote won by any party since
Margaret Thatcher’s first victory in 1979. For Labour, this defeat is
its fourth in a row, producing the smallest cohort of MPs the party has
seen since 1935. Britain’s electoral map has been upended as the <a class="u-underline" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="auto-linked-tag" href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/conservatives">Conservatives</a>
have swept to victory with a raft of seats in the north and the
Midlands that were not so long ago seen as impregnable Labour
strongholds.</blockquote>
England went whole-hog Tory, with the exception of the London city-state.<br />
<br />
Were voters duped by the Tory press? I'm not a fan of dupe theory: if a Labour voter was going to vote for Corbyn but switches after following a Facebook link to an <i>Evening Standard</i> headline about his <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jeremy-corbyns-red-plan-for-britain-as-he-says-his-wife-is-very-interested-in-life-inside-number-10-a4292881.html">"red plan for Britain,"</a> she wasn't a Labour voter. Dupe theory begs the question of why people are "duped." People also don't enjoy being tricked. They didn't vote for the victory of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/victory-boris-johnson-election-jeremy-corbyn">"bullshit-industrial complex."</a> Nor did they hope for Boris Johnson to "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/15/the-guardian-view-on-labours-defeat-an-existential-crisis-with-no-easy-solution">extract a dangerous lesson</a> from his win: that
putting out untrue claims about your opponents, blaming them for events
that happen on your watch, and avoiding scrutiny at all costs is an
effective political strategy."<br />
<br />
So back to leadership: I would like to know <i>why</i> Corbyn wasn't a "leader" even to traditional Labour voters.<br />
<br />
His handling of the anti-Semitism charges did real damage. A couple of my (working-class) neighbors in Islington have dwelt upon it. The charge is very serious-- and yet it feels to me more like a screen for a deeper misgiving about Corbyn overall. The party went through a constantly scrutinized investigation, but it produced no findings and served mostly to keep the charges alive. Corbyn and some other Labourites are certainly opposed to Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza toward Palestinians, but voters need to have reasons not to see or care about the difference between that and anti-Semitic policies or beliefs.<br />
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Corbyn also made a massive leadership mistake in not coming out for or against Brexit. He was swept into party leadership by his reputation for principled integrity, clarity, and consistent political values. When he equivocated on the main issue of his time as party leader, he threw away his reputation for integrity. When he spoke, he became evasive and hard to understand. He could have campaigned for Socialist Remain and tried to persuade his Brexit base, or on the other hand promoted an exciting and coherent Lexit. He did neither, for whatever reasons, and threw away his main credential as a political figure. <br />
<br />
But the real problem is the English electorate. The vote seems to me driven by English nationalism, damn the social consequences. This involves seeing the country as still-exceptional and innately great, in spite of its current condition. It also demands <i>never</i> criticizing the evil outcomes that have gone with its imperial history. Corbyn's career revolved around criticizing those outcomes, as he was a confirmed anti-imperalist who opposed state policies in Palestine and Ireland, among others, that were endorsed by the English establishment. His leadership failure was a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/15/blair-old-seat-sedgefield-rejected-corbyn-perceived-unpatriotic">"failure of patriotism."</a> In contrast, Johnson advanced himself as the new Churchill. This evoked the England of World War II and of imperial glory, <i>not</i> of Montbatten the Last Viceroy in India or the Suez defeat or Britain declining slowly as it passive-aggressively decolonized. Corbyn was not the person who would tout English good intentions or English successes in those nationalist missions. Thus he was distrusted or even despised by all sorts of English people, working-classes much included.<br />
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English nationalism is also a white nationalism. I'm surprised at the lack of mainstream discussion this weekend of the anti-immigrant motive behind Brexit, and of Islamophobia. The election took place on the 13th day after the London Bridge knife attacks, in which <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/usman-khan?CMP=ILC-refresh">Usman Khan</a> killed two people before being chased by the public and then shot dead by police. The victims were <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/01/europe/london-bridge-stabbing/index.html">two University of Cambridge graduates</a> who worked with a prison education program called Learning Together, which was having a meeting in a facility near the bridge. Formerly incarcerated people were in attendance, including at least <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50744983">one who tried to hold Khan off</a>. Khan was himself formerly incarcerated, convicted of terrorist offenses in 2012: how he wound up at Learning Together, killing two people working with the currently and formerly incarcerated, beggars belief. The victims were both white; the father of one, Dave Merritt, tried to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/02/jack-merritt-london-bridge-attack-dave-merritt">keep his son's death from being used to stoke anti-Islamic sentiment for political gain</a>, and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-jack-merritt-father-death-opportunity-london-bridge-a9240671.html">publicly accused Boris Johnson</a> of doing exactly that. But the sides were quietly drawn: it was easy, for example, to find coverage of Khan's story that tied <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/london-bridge-attacker-usman-khan-body-flown-buried-pakistan-a4306746.html">"the terrorist's UK-based family" </a>to Pakistan. It was also easy to vote silently for a <i>de facto</i> anti-Islam and anti-immigrant ticket that needn't actually speak its name.<br />
<br />
A further dimension is England's economic nationalism, which may have once been dragged into supporting public transportation, housing, health, education, telecom, and the other publicly-funded foundations of the modern private sector, but which now looks for living incarnations of Keynes's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)">"animal spirits." </a>Johnson routed Corbyn in the contest for "a spontaneous urge to action" which sweeps all obstacles from its path. In Keynes' words,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
a large
proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism
rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or
economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the
full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come,
can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to
action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted
average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative
probabilities. </blockquote>
Johnson presented himself as the improbable transformation of Brexit horror into future triumph, to be won through his indomitable vitality. English people are like Americans in frequently skipping the details of capitalist operations in favor of capitalist vigor. The hero of this story is the willful entrepreneur, the small business person, the "job creator"; the villain is government regulation and society itself. Descended from Schumpeter, Hayek, and many others, what we now call neoliberalism is a thinly-veiled social Darwinism. The losers--the homeless, children in poverty, the poorly educated, the shivering elderly whom Labour would befriend--are required by the nature of things. It's what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism in action.<br />
<br />
For Corbyn and other Labour candidates to try to make England more equal and just was seen as irrelevant or even opposed to prosperity, which is now generally assumed to come from private investors, financial engineering, from everywhere except from the "poorest communities" and their labor. Given the nationalist mixture of manhood, race, country, and money, it's common sense even for many members of those communities themselves. In reality, the private sector depends fundamentally on state investment--and on privatizing public resources. The fountainhead of "market forces" as channeled by vigorous male champions was outdated even as is was being (again) conceived in the 1930s. But it persists in countries like England and the United States, where it dovetails with nationalism. <br />
<br />
Thatcher was one of the origin points of economic nationalism for working people. She offered them income through property ownership rather than industrial labor, which she helped to destroy. After decades in which investment returns have increased much faster than wages, the main way to stay afloat in England is to join Thomas Piketty's <i>rentiers</i>, who prosper in an England where labor does not. Big returns are implicitly adversarial--your wealth is the other's hardship (your London house, their unaffordable rent). They require a kind of hardness that Johnson relishes and that Corbyn rejects. <i>Rentier</i> relations are threatened by Labour's ideals of shared social investment in collective development, and they threaten the parts of the working- and middle-classes that depend on property income or ever-growing spreads between their cost and your price.<br />
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Overcoming this conjunction of property interests, racial-religious identity, and masculinity is going to take much more time. Sadly, as Johnson <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/15/boris-johnson-threatens-bbc-with-two-pronged-attack">becomes the Orban of England</a>, it's a very multi-racial English working-class that will pay the biggest price.<br />
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A very Tory England:<br />
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<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-39212787950078771842016-12-11T12:16:00.003-08:002016-12-13T06:24:42.472-08:00Trump's Triumph Over the Professional Middle Class<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm going to tote up a few things that are sometimes too obvious to say, but that should be in circulation. The end point is that Donald J. Trump's post-fact ethos is the visible piece of a submerged crusade to make the United States a post-middle class society.<br />
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The first visible thing is the national knowledge crisis. People now talk about a post-fact era, and even the summit of the Washington establishment is feeling distress about Trump's power to dismiss any analysis that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/us/politics/trump-mocking-claim-that-russia-hacked-election-at-odds-with-gop.html?_r=0">"conflicts with his a priori assumptions."</a> A more banal but pervasive problem is that it is impossible to understand any public issue through television, our dominant news medium. This is also true of most print outlets, where coverage is superficial and fragmented. That is slightly better than superficial and chaotic, or simply propagandistic, which is the range on TV. (Social media varies from deep, authoritative expertise to fake news propaganda to <a href="https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/12/08/dark-marketing-function-trumps-mobs/">dark marketing</a> psy-ops, but I leave that aside here.) The U.S. has no public framework of political understanding today. <i>Crisis</i> is too weak a word for the state of national knowledge.<br />
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The second clear thing is that Trump's success rested on a classic <i>plutocratic</i> appeal to white racial resentment. There are two parts to this. Part one, the resentment, takes the form, "my white stuff has been given to minorities by the government." We often talk as though this just another way of saying "white racism," but that begs the question, what is white racism today? My own sense is that it is tied to a white feeling of superiority <i>and</i> to a white feeling of failure--to the economic and cultural failure to be successful, central to the society, recognized as such. The complicated result is racial resentment, which is <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/2/racism-undermines-support-for-government-spending.html">fused with resentment of government.</a> Our knowledge crisis then helps many whites trace their sense of failure to the great government giveaway to racial minorities.* <br />
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Part two: Plutocracy is Trump running as the American businessman-king, who has a sovereign power to make everything work. This figure is embodied in the corporate CEO, who has two core features. He [sic] maximizes private/corporate self-interest. He [sic] has a proven capacity to dominate others in pursuing this private self-interest. A plutocracy admits no public interest that is separate from the private interests of the dominant figures. It has no need for democratic processes that are separate from the executive's power to dominate ("to get things done"). Hence Trump's failure to admit the need to separate his business interests from the state or to grant the importance of the emoluments clause that opposes this use of the state to advance private interests. He of course understands that there are frequent conflicts of interests (Carrier management and Carrier employees, perhaps Putin the oil baron vs. Putin the Middle East strategist). He does <i>not</i> grant that conflicts must be adjudicated by a non-dominating public-interest <i>procedure</i> that differs from the behavior of the strong private executive, and is ruined by the executive.<br />
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So far we have a knowledge crisis sustaining a plutocracy crisis that hinges on racial scapegoating. This gets us to a third thing: Trump's voters supported plutocratic racial capitalism because they <i>hate</i> the supposed alternative, the professional-managerial class's knowledge economy, championed by the Democratic party. The professional-managerial class** seems to oppress them more directly--as managers and know-it-alls--than moguls do. Moguls like Trump act like Machiavelli's Prince, existing above all laws and rules, possessed of a magical ability to get things done. A quarter-century of Clintonian know it alls--including Robert "symbolic analyst" Reich and Richard "creative class" Florida--have abandoned the American working class and let their towns and cities go to hell.<br />
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On top of that, Clintonist professional-managerial types demanded that workers convert themselves into <i>people like them</i> if they wanted jobs. This meant not just demanding university degrees of 45 year olds but a change in their culture and values and relationships. On the other hand, Republicans offered the preservation of some manufacuturing and extractive industry jobs for which blue-collar folk were already trained--as well as the continuity of conservative cultural values. <i>Republicans</i> have been the political champions of blue-collar work, even as their tax giveaways to the wealthy undermine it. Blue-collar workers can <i>legitimately</i> wonder how much worse Trump could be for them than Clinton and Obama.<br />
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Fourth, the professional-managerial class displays a <i>conceptual</i> failure that rests on this <i>practical</i> failure to keep the working class (only 1/3rd white male in the mid-1990s, and less so today) fully inside the U.S. economy The conceptual failure is to have abandoned a sharp distinction between the public and the private good. As Clintonist centrist Democrats practically abandoned the industrial working class <i>and</i> racial <i>equality</i> of outcome, they also gutted public good conceptions of social cohesion and majority prosperity. <br />
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Fifth, in abandoning the blue-collar economy and a strong public-good ethos, Clinonist professional managerial folk mooted the difference between <i>expert</i> authority and <i>executive</i> authority. The PMC is supposed to earn its (limited) authority on the basis of knowledge, which is then to generate equity and effectiveness. Expert authority is supposed to be an <i>alternative</i> to domination, while executive authority <i>is</i> domination. A good large chunk of the population, including the <i>nonprofessional</i> middle-class, now seems to think we may as well have domination via Trump, and <i>this</i> Trump strength exists because the supposed non-domination of expert authority has done nothing<i> </i>economically for Trump voters in the past 35 years.<br />
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The two great government programs even Tea Partiers like, Social Security and Medicare, were New Deal and Great Society programs that were in place a generation before the Clinton-Obama quarter century of Democracy Lite. The yuppie army of knowledge economy advocates added nothing to them. They never <i>built an employment base</i> to match that of dirty industry--steel, auto, coal, et al. To top it off, the Clintons personally squandered the PMC claim to equity and effectiveness--to the absence of partiality and corruption--with their steady stream of minor but revealing scandals over these 25 years. They also got rich through government service--a common right-wing talking point--further eroding the public vs. private good distinction on which professionals' superior virtue depends.<br />
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Disliking professional authority helps explain why Trump's vote <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/?ex_cid=story-facebook">correlates with medium and low levels of education</a> more than with higher or lower levels of income: the population that respects the moral and political claims of expertise has shrunk to other experts or near experts like holders of B.A. degrees. Trump's people never penalized him for his contempt for the governing claims of professional people--quite the opposite. He needs functional skill, but this is a commodity that he can buy, and the Trumps of the world can buy <i>any</i> expertise at some price. As a commodity, knowledge expertise lacks political rights or moral authority. The Clinton period has witnessed the commodification of increasingly complex skill, with the irony that professional skill is going the way of blue-collar skill--a point I discuss at length in <i>The Great Mistake</i>.<br />
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At this point, a card-carrying professional like myself can rush into discourse critique: In contrast to people like doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, accountants, nurses, college professors, city planners, and so on, Trump has spent his life in a world where a sales pitch plus money and influence creates its own reality, which is good at fleecing people but not at building a society. More fundamentally, his personality structure disables the sort of verbal analysis, debate, and synthesis that is second nature to knowledge workers. His move is to throw the disputant out of the language game, which, in Jean-François Lyotard's classic definition, is terrorism. Lyotard's definition of "postmodernism" in his famous book on the topic was not the end of "master narratives," but the rise of economic determinism, embodied in the U.S. by the businessman-king, who has the power to expel any irritating opponent from the language game before it starts. Right-wing media plays its major partnering role. The point is not to debate democratic socialists, for example, but to define them as bad people who want to destroy America, which means you don't need to debate them at all. In this discursive sense, Trump is the Terror King. <br />
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All true enough. But the structural point is that Trump is also the triumphant enemy of the professions and professionals that make up the PMC. Professionals, living in their traditional world of self-regulated standards and widespread social respect, do not understand this fact: the American right in general, and Trump in particular, have built a <i>post-knowledge economy</i> in which expertise is a commodity they buy for pennies on the global market.<br />
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The convenient effect of this hatred for the professions is that Trump can create the kind of cabinet he has: foxes will guard every henhouse. He picked an enemy of the minimum wage and the 40 hour week to head the Department of Labor, an enemy of public education to run the Department of Education, an unhinged opponent of everything public to run Housing, an extractor of treasury funds to run the Department of Treasury, a fan of war to run Defense, an enemy of environmental protection to run the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the World Wrestling Federation to run the Small Business Administration, and now, reportedly, the leading advocate of private petro-interests to run the Department of State. From from Trump's point of view, why not? Professional expertise and democratic deliberation either don't really exist or are obviously inferior to executive command. And the public interest isn't different from private self-interest (an American neo-Smithian truism not limited to Trump). This frame lends logic to Trump's kleptocapitalist cabinet, running energy policy for the petro sector, banking for hedge funds, labor for fast food chains, and education for charter school chains.<br />
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The wider political spectacle will be executive power crushing self-proclaimed independent professional expertise. Every member of the cabinet of predators represents the use of autocratic authority against collective forces--cultural change, social movements, labor unions--whose political claims have been embodied in the disinterested languages of ethics, the law, and bureaucratic rationality. Most professionals still think they are sheltered from direct executive power, and the high end perhaps believes their high salaries will protect them. Protect them from poverty perhaps, but not from humiliation or political marginalization--or from being made historically obsolete as they had made the nonprofessional working and middle classes.<br />
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In short, the key achievement of Trump's business wing of the Republican party is have contained the knowledge economy. It has done this by overcoming the class opposition between the working class and the bourgoisie that Eric Olin Wright could still identify twenty years ago. He has forged a working-class/bourgoisie alliance by rendering the professional middle classes their common enemy. <br />
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One big effect is to turn high-end professionals into servants, as I already mentioned. Another is to have flattened the democratic potential of the tech economy that advocates like John Seely Brown had long predicted. Brown's co-authored <i>Shift Happens</i> is a good window into the promise of 2009 (and 1999). The shifts this book describes are:<br />
<ol>
<li>Value is moving from stocks to flows</li>
<li>Power is shifting from organizations to individuals</li>
<li>Performance is falling for organizations.</li>
</ol>
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(3) is entirely true: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-American-Corporation-Navigating-Hazards/dp/1626562792/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481570957&sr=8-1&keywords=the+vanishing+american+corporation">corporations <i>are</i> failing,</a> measured as Return on Assets and other ways. Large, top-down organizations in general are a mess, and are burdening society in many ways I can't go into here. In addition, (1) and (2) are true in principle. But the point of resurgent, extractive, financialized Trumpian organizations ruled by businessman-kings is to <i>make</i> (1) and (2) false. Trump's capitalism locks up value in stocks that companies control and meter, and traps individual insight and energy within organizations, where they commodify that insight. In our era <i>after</i> the knowledge economy, management is more powerful than ever, audit culture rules professional organizations more than during the Bush years, and executives are more entitled autocrats than in any other period.<br />
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This is the work of Trump's circle of allies, waging war on dissent, focusing Prince-like entirely on their own rule, and making knowledge creators into subordinates. It is also the work of Silicon Valley culture, which has been stupid about and contemptuous of human processes and so can't protect them. It is also the work of Clintonism, which has blamed people and their (non)skills rather than management/moguls for every economic thing. The Valley and Clintonism broke whatever alternative to Trumpism was in the minds of the Google bus dissidents as they were shipped in their rolling crates to work.<br />
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The current default is that Trump autocracy will rule American capitalism, keeping it extractive and oppressive to white- and blue-collar labor alike, opposing even minimal reforms, accelerating the aging of the U.S. economic apparatus and its productive decline. The result is to be a U.S. that is no longer middle class in economic entitlement, political rights, or multi-racial equality.</div>
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Such is what the executive-plutocracy-working class alliance foretells. When the musician Beck, in the top photo, released "Loser" a few weeks after Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, he called it "forces of evil in a bozo nightmare." We were warned, and now we have to do something about it.<br />
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<b>Addendum</b>: I started this blog as a kind of diary ten years ago this month. In <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.com/2006/11/example-of-problem.html">the first post </a>I pointed out that "when the gloves come off, the Creative Class goes down like a bag of cement." Still so true! Happy anniversary to "Middle Class Death Trips."<br />
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*I realize someone like George Lakoff would say facts won't change the framing, and that analysts going back to Du Bois would say facts won't change the social structure. I agree: a national knowledge system rests on frames or paradigms and not just facts, and the frames are rebuilt every day, week after week. Thus a functional national knowledge system would fail to support, and therefore erode, this white sense that, to paraphrase Zizek, "the government has stolen my enjoyment. And given it to racial minorities." We don't have one.<br />
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**I generally use Erik Olin Wright's 12-class model from <i>Class Counts</i> (1997), in which the middle-class is a set of "contradictory positions within class relations" that reflect variations of authority and expertise. This class ranges from expert to skilled to unskilled, and has a range of authority positions as well. I'll use professional managerial class for the expert/skilled white-collar people, and gloss over a bunch of details, particularly the current civil war between professional and managers in medicine, academia, and elsewhere.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-61093338153422941742016-11-02T08:34:00.002-07:002016-12-09T13:30:52.265-08:00Depressing Hillary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The reality is that I don't know a Democrat who is actually <i>enthusiastic</i> about Hillary Clinton becoming the next president. Many Democrats think she's earned her shot and is very qualified. Everyone sees the value of having a woman president. And yet my twenty-something feminist friends and students have said, "yes I want a woman president. Just not that woman." Reports this morning are that in spite of the Trump terror factor, African American early voting is down.<br />
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Clinton has not broken with her dynasty's 1990s New Democrat vision of business as the great progressive force, and made no case in the debates that the public mission would be back in charge. She already ran for president in 2008, when she was defeated by the then more populist candidate Barack Obama. She didn't have a good record in her last big job as Secretary of State--her acceptance of the removal of the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras helped disintegrate that society, which in turn led to some of the immigration that Donald J. Trump has successfully stigmatized. And she isn't clearly willing the integrity race with the demagogic salesman, scapegoater, tax avoider, and OPM artist Trump. On policy, she will be Obama Minus: about the same centrist ineffectuality on banking reform and economic redevelopment, and worse on the Middle East on other areas of foreign policy. On personal integrity, she isn't in Obama's league--she's more like Trump Plus.<br />
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The root problem is her neoliberal self. This has been nicely defined by the political theorist Wendy Brown as devoting one's working life to increasing the value of oneself as human capital. The Clintons are profoundly unoriginal thinkers who have stayed inside of the influential orthodoxies of the particular time, for example, favoring stereotype-driven"super predator" mass incarceration in the 1990s rather than confronting the deindustrialization that drove the crime spikes; then opposing mass incarceration thanks to Black Lives Matter et al. in 2016. This reflects the fact that they always take positions that will maximize their own position and influence. People who have watched them over the years understand this, and it is at the root of the feeling that they are unreliable allies. The single worst example early on was Bill Clinton's abandoning of Lani Guinier, his nominees for the civil rights head of the Department of Justice, when a Wall Street <i>Journal</i> labeled her a quota queen. But everyone can imagine the Clinton's abandoning a position at any time, which gives them a queasy feeling.<br />
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Another aspect of the neoliberal self is not being able to tell the difference between public goods and self-advancement. This seems like something anyone could and should be able to do, but this has become less true in practice. One of the FBI investigations of the Clintons involved "pay to play" use of their foundation in which foreign leaders that Hillary Clinton treated as the Secretary of State could get enhanced access through donations to the Clinton foundation. Reporters have found a statistical correlation between donations and meetings with Hillary Clinton. The causal connection would never be direct, but what matters is the general ability to <i>imagine </i>that Bill would certainly do this and that Hillary would go along. They spent the 2000s using their political prominence to get rich. Though they pay full taxes on their multi-million dollars of annual income, they are the kind of people that can't imagine their wealth impairing their public vision. That's neoliberalism.<br />
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This week CNN announced the firing of former DNC head Donna Brazile because they found that she was feeding questions to the Clinton campaign ahead of interviews. This is cheating. The same goes for former head of the party Debbie Wasserman, who was forced to resign in the wake of WikiLeakes information of her skewing party resources away from Bernie Sanders. Hillary's response to that was not to apologize for taking advantage of unfair advantage, but to give Wasserman a job.<br />
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I have a bad feeling about what is to come.<br />
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<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-31397280843504009842016-10-02T16:06:00.001-07:002016-10-02T17:13:20.907-07:00Trump's Noir Power<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This piece blames the Democrats for the persistence of Trump. My reason is that Trump wields what I'll call the power of noir, and the mainstream Democrats are unable to fight it. Noir is a vision of terrible trouble and of violent recovery that in this election mixes authoritarianism, economic pessimism and racial fear (of white weakness, rather than certainty of white supremacism). In the U.S., <i>noir always beats nothing</i>. And that, at the moment, is what the Dems are offering--the status quo, no change, nothing, nothing that we don't already have with Obama, and that is clearly not enough.<br />
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This was Clinton's weakness in the debate she won. The first question noted that half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck and asked how the candidates would create good jobs. Clinton answered that this is an opportunity to think about the country we want, mentioned her two-year-old granddaughter, said "I want us to invest in you," called for more profit-sharing, and said she supported better work-life balance. All very nice. None of them offer a direct means of restoring middle-class jobs.<br />
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Here's Trump.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2225623" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10505539" data-genius-featured-referent="true" data-genius-hover="" data-genius-referent-id="10505539" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10505539/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506337" data-genius-referent-id="10506337" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506337/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506552" data-genius-referent-id="10506552" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506552/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Our jobs are fleeing the country.</genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506552" data-genius-referent-id="10506552" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506552/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"></genius-referent> <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506575" data-genius-referent-id="10506575" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506575/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">They're going to Mexico.</genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776939" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507496" data-genius-referent-id="10507496" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507496/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506575" data-genius-referent-id="10506575" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506575/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> They're going to many other countries.</genius-referent> <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506588" data-genius-referent-id="10506588" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506588/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">You look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our product. </genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3779301" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10512421" data-genius-referent-id="10512421" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10512421/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3740089" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506955" data-genius-referent-id="10506955" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506955/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506588" data-genius-referent-id="10506588" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506588/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"></genius-referent>They're devaluing their currency</genius-referent>, and there's nobody in our government to fight them.</genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506621" data-genius-referent-id="10506621" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506621/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776939" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507496" data-genius-referent-id="10507496" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507496/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776939" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507496" data-genius-referent-id="10507496" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507496/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> And we have a very good fight. And we have a winning fight. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506631" data-genius-referent-id="10506631" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506631/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Because they're <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506342" data-genius-referent-id="10506342" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506342/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China</genius-referent>, and many other countries are doing the same thing.</genius-referent></genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So we're losing our good jobs, so many of them. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506649" data-genius-referent-id="10506649" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506649/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">When you look at what's happening in Mexico</genius-referent>, <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="273646" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507490" data-genius-referent-id="10507490" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507490/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">a <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3777159" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507894" data-genius-referent-id="10507894" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507894/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">friend of mine</genius-referent> who builds plants</genius-referent>
said it's the eighth wonder of the world. They're building some of the
biggest plants anywhere in the world, some of the most sophisticated,
some of the best plants. With the United States, as he said, not so
much.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3695773" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10520799" data-genius-referent-id="10520799" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10520799/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1553" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506091" data-genius-referent-id="10506091" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506091/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3777455" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10508439" data-genius-referent-id="10508439" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10508439/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">So Ford is leaving.</genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3777455" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10508439" data-genius-referent-id="10508439" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10508439/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> You see that, their small car division leaving. </genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3778387" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510200" data-genius-referent-id="10510200" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510200/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3777455" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10508439" data-genius-referent-id="10508439" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10508439/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2112137" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506732" data-genius-referent-id="10506732" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506732/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Thousands of jobs leaving Michigan</genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">, leaving Ohio.</genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3777455" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10508439" data-genius-referent-id="10508439" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10508439/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> </genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">They're all leaving.</genius-referent></genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="7758" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506680" data-genius-referent-id="10506680" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506680/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> </genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1704764" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506352" data-genius-referent-id="10506352" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506352/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"></genius-referent>And we can't allow it to happen anymore. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506355" data-genius-referent-id="10506355" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506355/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">As far as child care is concerned and so many other things, I think </genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3779562" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10512324" data-genius-referent-id="10512324" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10512324/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Hillary</genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506355" data-genius-referent-id="10506355" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506355/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> and I agree on that. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1553" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506133" data-genius-referent-id="10506133" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506133/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">We probably disagree a little bit</genius-referent> as to numbers and amounts and what we're going to do, but perhaps we'll be talking about that later.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But we have to <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506369" data-genius-referent-id="10506369" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506369/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">stop our jobs from being stolen from us</genius-referent>. </blockquote>
Trump said, of course we need child care. But we're talking about other countries stealing our jobs. He offered a direct cause for job loss: other countries are getting our jobs. He then turned to two direct solutions:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3781590" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10514161" data-genius-referent-id="10514161" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10514161/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air conditioning in Indianapolis. They left -- fired 1,400 people. </genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2112137" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510733" data-genius-referent-id="10510733" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510733/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">They're going to Mexico.</genius-referent> <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506379" data-genius-referent-id="10506379" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506379/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">So many hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing this.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We cannot let it happen. Under my plan, <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2225623" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10505571" data-genius-featured-referent="true" data-genius-hover="" data-genius-referent-id="10505571" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10505571/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">I'll be reducing taxes tremendously, from 35 percent to 15 percent for companies, small and big businesses</genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3779301" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10523628" data-genius-referent-id="10523628" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10523628/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">.</genius-referent> That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506392" data-genius-referent-id="10506392" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506392/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Ronald Reagan</genius-referent>. It's going to be a beautiful thing to watch.</blockquote>
<br />
Trump's first direct solution helped caused the problem he laments: Reaganite deregulation allowed companies to offshore production with no financial penalties. It's a terrible solution, and will in fact make the problem worse. But he did offer a <i>direct </i>response to the problem, and scores points for that. He then offered a better, second response:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510572" data-genius-referent-id="10510572" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510572/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"> first thing you do is don't let the jobs leave</genius-referent>. The companies are leaving. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510589" data-genius-referent-id="10510589" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510589/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">I could name, I mean, there are thousands of them. . . . </genius-referent>And
what you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other
country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck. But if you think you're
going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or
whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're
wrong. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3775923" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510605" data-genius-referent-id="10510605" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510605/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">And
once you say you're going to have to tax them coming in, and our
politicians never do this, because they have special interests and the
special interests want those companies to leave, because in many cases,
they own the companies</genius-referent>. So what I'm saying is, we can stop them from leaving. We have to stop them from leaving. And that's a big, big factor.</blockquote>
This is Trump's best line, and it's straight noir. "Big people are screwing you. They have to be made to stop. I will stop them. I will charge them to leave, and that will make them stop."<br />
<br />
How did Clinton respond? By recalling the financial crisis eight years ago, and saying this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2112137" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10534023" data-genius-referent-id="10534023" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10534023/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">That
was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the
wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of
Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2225623" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10505804" data-genius-featured-referent="true" data-genius-hover="" data-genius-referent-id="10505804" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10505804/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">In
fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis.
He said, back in 2006, "Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can
go in and buy some and make some money." Well, it did collapse.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2225623" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10505804" data-genius-featured-referent="true" data-genius-hover="" data-genius-referent-id="10505804" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10505804/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">TRUMP: That's called business, by the way.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CLINTON: Nine million people -- nine million people lost their jobs. Five million people lost their homes. <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776184" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506652" data-genius-referent-id="10506652" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506652/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">And $13 trillion in family wealth was wiped out.</genius-referent></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now,
we have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy. So we're
now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy, but
the last thing we need to do is to go back to the policies that failed
us in the first place.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3695773" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10520851" data-genius-referent-id="10520851" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10520851/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="8534" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10507245" data-genius-referent-id="10507245" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10507245/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Independent experts have looked at what I've proposed and looked at what Donald's proposed,</genius-referent> and basically they've said this, that if his tax plan, <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1545865" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506367" data-genius-referent-id="10506367" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506367/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">which would blow up the debt by over $5 trillion</genius-referent> and <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1545865" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506377" data-genius-referent-id="10506377" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506377/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">would in some instances disadvantage middle-class families compared to the wealthy</genius-referent>, were <genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="1545865" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506386" data-genius-referent-id="10506386" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506386/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">to go into effect, we would lose 3.5 million jobs and maybe have another recession</genius-referent>.</genius-referent></blockquote>
Clinton is basically right, but it doesn't matter. There is no noir <i>agent </i>in her crisis. "Tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy" isn't an agent: it is an effect of some unnamed parties. How do we know she knows who they are?<br />
<br />
Clinton needed to say this: "Donald has supported tax cuts his whole life, and is a champion tax avoider. I mean he's the king of the legal tax dodge--at least I assume they're legal, Donald. The congresspeople he gave money all through the 1970s and 1980s when jobs were leaving--they paid him back. They cut his taxes and deregulated real estate and Wall Street. When Wall Street blew up the economy with exactly the know-it-all arrogance we see Donald show, Donald and his friends make more money than ever, while his banker friends evicted you or your neighbor or your family member from your house. <br />
<br />
She should have continued: "Donald will say, 'that's called business.' Donald means, 'I win when you lose.' Now he wants to take another $5 trillion away from you by depriving the government of $5 trillion more after he and his friends lost $13 trillion in family wealth. He wants to take another $5 trillion from schools, clinics, roads, bridges, colleges, parks, police, firefighters, everything you need for a decent life, and give it to the same wealthy people who made all the money from the crash. Made money from the crash just like Donald did. I won't allow that. As president, we'll put the money Donald and his rich friends took from you back into your communities and the economy."<br />
<br />
Clinton can only fight Trump noir by writing her own noir plot and making Trump the predator. As many a Bernie voter knows, she is probably prevented from doing this by her own alliances with Wall Street and her own distance from the working class Democrat base that, starting with the Carter and ending with the Clinton presidencies,<br />
<br />
The Clinton-Trump exchanges I mentioned all occur in the first six pages of a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/">forty-page debate transcript.</a> Clinton goes on to invoke solar energy, inviting Trump to defend another of his terrible claims, which is more oil and coal because global warming is a hoax. Trump instead turns Clinton-Obama back into the noir villain:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="2225623" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10505867" data-genius-featured-referent="true" data-genius-hover="" data-genius-referent-id="10505867" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10505867/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">TRUMP: She
talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company, our country.
That was a disaster. They lost plenty of money on that one.</genius-referent> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3695773" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10520864" data-genius-referent-id="10520864" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10520864/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">Now, lo</genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3695773" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10520864" data-genius-referent-id="10520864" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10520864/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3616116" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506003" data-genius-referent-id="10506003" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506003/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">ok, I'm a great believer in all forms of energy</genius-referent>, but we're putting a lot of people out of work. Our energy policies are a disaster. Ou</genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3695773" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10520864" data-genius-referent-id="10520864" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10520864/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">r
country is losing so much in terms of energy, in terms of paying off
our debt. You can't do what you're looking to do with $20 trillion in
debt.</genius-referent> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776177" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506577" data-genius-referent-id="10506577" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506577/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3778698" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510944" data-genius-referent-id="10510944" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510944/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">The Obama administration, from the time they've come i</genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3776177" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10506577" data-genius-referent-id="10506577" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10506577/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated"><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3778698" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510944" data-genius-referent-id="10510944" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510944/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">n,
is over 230 years' worth of debt, and he's topped it. He's doubled it
in a course of almost eight years, seven-and-a-half years, to be semi-
exact</genius-referent></genius-referent><genius-referent data-genius-annotator-id="3778698" data-genius-api-path="/referents/10510944" data-genius-referent-id="10510944" data-genius-style-id="referent" data-genius-wrapped-path="/10510944/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated">.</genius-referent> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So
I will tell you this. We have to do a much better job at keeping our
jobs. And we have to do a much better job at giving companies incentives
to build new companies or to expand, because they're not doing it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And
all you have to do is look at Michigan and look at Ohio and look at all
of these places where so many of their jobs and their companies are
just leaving, they're gone. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And,
Hillary, I'd just ask you this. You've been doing this for 30 years.
Why are you just thinking about these solutions right now? For 30 years,
you've been doing it, and now you're just starting to think of
solutions. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CLINTON: Well, actually... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
TRUMP: I will bring -- excuse me. I will bring back jobs. You can't bring back jobs. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CLINTON: Well, actually, I have thought about this quite a bit. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
TRUMP: Yeah, for 30 years. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CLINTON:
And I have -- well, not quite that long. I think my husband did a
pretty good job in the 1990s. I think a lot about what worked and how we
can make it work again... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
TRUMP: Well, he approved NAFTA.. (CROSSTALK) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CLINTON: ... million new jobs, a balanced budget... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
TRUMP: He approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.</blockquote>
Trump gets Clinton to defend NAFTA, which destroys her image as tough on Wall Street. She doesn't ever say what the great new ideas are that have come from 30 years of thought. He goes on to point out that her own party's president is pushing a new trade deal that's like NAFTA, and she doesn't repudiate Obama. She says, "there are different views about what's good for our country," which proves Trump's point that she can't be trusted to know who the enemy is or to do anything to that person. <br />
<br />
When they get to the next segment on taxes, her big line is that she "would not add a penny to the debt." This puts her entirely in the camp of the conventional Republicans that Trump torpedoed in the primaries. So it doesn't matter that Trump says "the wealthy are going to create tremendous jobs" when the wealthy have been doing the opposite for thirty years, because he is talking directly about overcoming an enemy--people who send American jobs abroad. She is not. <br />
<br />
In the final two-thirds of the debate, Trump lost focus and became defensive, so most pundits have declared her the victor. She was not. She didn't become a noir hero battling an identified evil with a direct intervention. Trump remained one.<br />
<br />
The same problem dogs today's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html">New York <i>Times </i>revelation that Trump may not have paid income taxes for twenty years.</a> Previous NYT reports have showed that Trump built much of his empire on political connections that generated <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/donald-trump-tax-breaks-real-estate.html">$885 million in tax breaks in postindustrial New York</a>, made his money on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/donald-trump-debt.html?action=click&contentCollection=N.Y.%20%2F%20Region&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article">a labyrinth of debt</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article">on bankruptcy, and on shorting investors he'd attracted while stiffing working-class contractors</a>. As U.S. manufacturing and its blue-collar workers declined, real estate deals and Trump's extractions soared. So you'd think Clinton could make Trump the poster child of American decline, caused by its greedy extractive financiers.<br />
<br />
Not so far. In response, Trump said the <i>Times</i> is an arm of the Democratic party, that they broke laws to get the tax documents, that Hillary Clinton is even more criminal than Trump is, that Trump is a supremely skilled businessman who was obliged to minimize his tax burden which is what he did. The crucial statement appeared in a <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-nytimes-taxes-18-publish-legal-161316688.html">Trump tweet:</a> "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them."<br />
<br />
Translating the noir code: "I know the system, I used the system, I broke the system. If you want to fix the system, hire the person who was big enough to break it. And if you don't, I will keep breaking it."<br />
<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a guilt-driven nation like ours, he who shows no guilt will be
considered innocent, and receive a hero's welcome. This is how we have
gotten to Trump, the conquering hero. Some analysts feel that Trump is
such an obviously unqualified and corrupt candidate that it's a miracle that
Hillary Clinton isn't 20 points ahead. I feel that Hillary Clinton is such a
weak candidate on working-class and middle-class economics that Trump still can win. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">UPDATE: Trump<span style="font-family: inherit;">'s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/girl-talk-at-trump-tower.html?ref=opinion">"bitchy sewing circle of overw</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/girl-talk-at-trump-tower.html?ref=opinion">eight men" </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">performed <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/christie-trump-tax-story_us_57f108e7e4b082aad9bbbd3d?">exactly <span style="font-family: inherit;">this</span> spin control </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">about the NYT story today<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (h/t M<span style="font-family: inherit;">eranze</span>)<span style="font-family: inherit;">--<span style="font-family: inherit;">T<span style="font-family: inherit;">rump the</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">conquering t<span style="font-family: inherit;">ax hero.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-30306871960062123182012-12-30T23:12:00.002-08:002012-12-30T23:13:10.911-08:00Children of the Reagan Generation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Thanks to my friend Ricki I wound up at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. yesterday to see Jon Robin Baitz's play <i>Other Desert Cities</i>. It deals with the same issues that people like <i>Mad Men</i> for addressing, but without leaving the impression that anything cool is actually happening.<br />
<br />
Reviews (<a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-other-desert-cities-review-20121211,0,6887893.story">LA Times </a>and <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/2012-12-13/stage/other-desert-cities-mark-taper-forum/">LA Weekly</a>'s) have focused on the frame of a political couple, Polly and Lyman Wyeth (center and right in the photo), who were big in the national Republican party during the Reagan years, and who have, in 2004, been retired for a while in Palm Springs. Their children do not share their conservative politics, and their daughter, Brooke (at left), a liberal and a writer, has arrived to spend her first holiday with them for a while. The youngest son, an L.A. TV producer, is also there. The oldest son, who committed suicide in the 1970s, is there in the form of a book manuscript that Brooke, has recently completed. It is a tell-all book about her famous family and how they cruelly drove their oldest son to suicide out of hatred for and embarrassment about his anti-war politics and revolutionary drug-taking friends. Brooke wants her family to read the manuscript and bless her decision to use a published book to air the truth about their lives. We learn (SPOILERS scattered from this point on) that she has been helped by her aunt and Polly's sister, Silda, a recovering alcoholic who has her own scores to settle with her sister and with Republican politics, not necessarily in that order.<br />
<br />
The "liberal" position is upheld in the play by the two women--Brooke and Silda--who have been damaged by their lives under the reign of the self-righteous, authoritarian power in the family, the mother Polly (played wonderfully by JoBeth Williams). But they don't really espouse their own positions and instead continuously criticize Polly's. Polly is a dominating figure who was friends with Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, and at one critical juncture had forced their fictional versions to back Lyman when they want to dump him. The ongoing power of the parents is the real subject of the play, and runs deeper than Brooke's dislike for Polly's support for George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for Lyman's faith in Colin Powell, or for Polly's very frank hatred for the protest politics of the 1960s, which have clearly for her never ended. <br />
<br />
Polly's position is clear from beginning to end: she hates weakness and admires strength. "Families get terrorized by their weakest member," she says, referring to her sister Silda as someone she's had to take care of from start to finish--which financially at least is true. In one of the most quoted lines, she says, "I just think— The only way to get someone to not be an invalid is to refuse to treat them as such." (The audience loved Silda's response: "And there it is, folks: the entire GOP platform in a nutshell.") When it becomes clear that Brooke's book is about her dead brother, Polly says two kinds of things. One is "political" -- a standard conservative attack on the liberal / radical 60s:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The story of your brother. It’s drugs. Your whole generation, awash in drugs. The provocations, the absurd beard, the refusal to shower, to bathe, to adhere to the basic civilities of family life. He was stoned from the age of fifteen on, it made him dumb and it triggered his depression. Three generations, three generations of escapism. Lost. Drugs. Drugs actually destroyed the American century. Up the hill there, up the hill in Indio, the meth addicts, and you see them coming into town, wrecks.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
There isn't much analysis, just a visceral antipathy for what she reads as a generation's break with the authority and more deeply the civilization of its parents. The Reagan-era parents, embodied by Polly, once rejected by their children, were wounded, insulted, outrageous, furious, and unforgiving. Baitz's Polly is a luminous portrait of a Reagan generation that condensed every social movement or progressive political idea into this rupture with, implied repudiation of, the goodness of their way of life.<br />
<br />
The second kind of thing Polly says is parental. Referring to Brooke's view that publishing her version of the family's history is her right and of great benefit, Polly says,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why is it that children are allowed a sort of endless series of free passes in this life, you know, and we’re expected to be the parents of children forever? This is a new phenomenon; once I was an adult, all of my parents’ indulgence ceased. You all want to stay children forever, doing whatever mischief you can think of. All you entitled children of the “me” generation. </blockquote>
Polly is wrong about her children's politics and leftist motives, as in the first passage. She is right, as in the second passage, that her adult children remain childish. Brooke replies with submissive wit, "By free-passes you mean 'free-will' of course?" Her entire visit, in fact her book itself, is an effort to get not only attention but approval from her parents. The effort is delusional and self-destructive: her parents couldn't possibly approve a project that claws open old wounds and embarrasses them all over again for something that had happened thirty years before, and for her to imagine that it could is infantile, a form of aggression that presents itself as victimized, which is of course exactly what her Republican parents see in everyone not of their political circle -- Romney's 47% etc etc.<br />
<br />
Until we get to the major revelation, Polly and to some extent Lyman are much more impressive and even sympathetic than their twerpy children and the perceptive but completely unreliable Silda. Here's a core exchange between mother and daughter, regarding the publication of the book:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Polly</b> (cont.) Whatever it is, whatever you do, you’re our daughter, and I will love you. I can’t stop you from doing what you will, I can’t prevent it. But you must know that whatever you do, there are consequences to your actions. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Brooke</b> What does that mean? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Polly</b> How could I trust you? How could I ever be in your presence, my dear? If you betrayed the trust of the family? A family that has so valued discretion and our good name in the past three decades. You would still be my daughter, but the meaning of it would change. You needed us. We came to the East Coast. A year of our lives, I thought of nothing but your well-being, your recovery. I could never in quite the same way avail myself— I know who I am. That is who I am. You would lose us. So you understand.</blockquote>
Polly does know who she is, while Brooke does not. Polly's claim about the primacy of trust is entirely open and consistent with everything else she believes. She is a far more appealing character than is the passive-aggressive and dependent Brooke.<br />
<br />
But Brooke is Polly's creation. We don't know how she has produced Brooke exactly until the climax of the play--MAJOR SPOILER HERE. In order to derail Brooke's book once and for all, Polly and Lyman finally tell the rest of the family the truth about their dead son: he never killed himself, but was ferried in secret by Polly and Lyman across the border to Canada, where he presumably still lives under an assumed identity. Brooke has never gotten over her brother's death, and is shattered by this news. By the end of the play, we realize she really is victimized by her parents after all, whose genteel, sociopathic politics, Lyman says quite directly, flow from the capacity he discovers in himself, through this coverup, to lead a life of secrets and lies.<br />
<br />
The revelation scene ends too abruptly. There's an epilogue six years later in which Brooke seems to have changed her book into celebrity pablum to cash in on the death of her parents. The point is not to make Brooke an emblem of feeble-minded Democratic politics, though she is that, but an emblem of the capacity of the Reagan-era parents to destroy the independence of their children. This is of course ironically what their childrens' generation was supposed to be about.<br />
<br />
At one point Silda, pressing Brooke not to back down, says of Polly and Lyman and their Republican circle, "These people, driven by fear, have taken ownership of an entire country. And fear— fear led to punishment." This is true of the parents, but it is equally true of the Reagan era's children. What exactly are we still afraid of?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-9876131628000386912012-08-15T11:01:00.003-07:002012-08-15T11:01:57.728-07:00Building the Ryan Backlash<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Mitt Romney has just confirmed the main- streaming of a far-right ideologue, Rep. Paul Ryan, by anointing him the Republicans' vice- presidential candidate. What would constitute an effective response? It's clear from the early reviews that there's a confidence gap on the left in the vacuum created by Barack Obama's non-leadership on the relevant issues.<br />
<br />
It's worth pointing out at the start that while some early commentary saw Ryan's extremism as a problem for a party that needs to reach out to the center in November, the Republicans' winning strategy since 1980 has been not to move the ideologue to the center but to move the center to the ideologue. Romney's "<a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/a-risky-rationale-behind-romneys-choice-of-ryan/">bold" move is "Politics 101"</a> according to Reagan-Atwater-Rove: make fringe ideas common sense through saturation media exposure both pro and con from the pundit legion of America--even critique helps make the bad or silly claims weighty and important. Hugely unpopular ideas can in this way become hard truths whose acceptance proves the adherent's toughmindedness, rather than, as in their first appearance, his obvious lunacy.<br />
<br />
Exhibit A is Paul Ryan's obsessive desire to convert the country's existing public health insurance system--known as Medicare, limited to senior citizens--into a voucher system for purchasing private insurance. This is an obviously absurd idea, since it takes a popular, administratively efficient, and humane program and gives it to a hated, inefficient, and inhumane private insurance system that delivers the world's most expensive health care at a mediocre level of quality. But the whole country must take this bad idea seriously because the top of the Republican ticket advocates it. <br />
<br />
Progressives generally have two reactions to the way the two-party system and the monopolized MSM legitimate one awful, regressive right-wing talking point after another. They split between anger and depression, which leads, respectively, to denunciation of the right and denunciation of progressives themselves. For the first, here's Joan Walsh's blast at Salon right after the announcement- <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/08/12/paul_ryan_randian_poseur/">"Paul Ryan: Randian poseur"</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Paul Ryan was born into a well-to-do Janesville, Wisc. family, part
of the so-called “Irish mafia” that’s run the city’s construction
industry since the 19th century. When his lawyer father died young,
sadly, the high-school aged Ryan received Social Security survivor
benefits. But they didn’t go directly to supporting his family; by his
own account, he banked them for college. He went to Miami University of
Ohio, paying twice as much tuition as an Ohio resident would have; the
in-state University of Wisconsin system (which I attended) apparently
wasn’t good enough for Ryan. After his government-subsidized
out-of-state education, the pride of Janesville left college and went to
work for government, where he’s spent his entire career, first serving
Republican legislators and then in his own Congressional seat, with
occasional stints at his family-owned construction business when he
needed a job (reportedly he also drove an Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile for a
while). </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ironically, Ryan came to national attention trying to
dismantle the very program that helped him go to the college of his
choice, pushing an even more radical version of President Bush’s Social
Security privatization plan, which failed. He has since become the
scourge of the welfare state, a man wholly supported by government who
preaches against the evils of government support. He could be the poster
boy for President Obama’s supposedly controversial oration about how we
all owe our success to some combination of our own hard work, family
backing and government support. Let’s say it together: You didn’t build
that career by yourself, Congressman Ryan.</blockquote>
Glenn Greenwald offered a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/08/12/the_rights_brittle_heroes/">parallel exposé of Ryan's hypocrisy </a>and generalizes it to the Republican party: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the American Right seems to have a particular need to inflate their
leaders into beacons of courage, self-sufficiency and virtue, even when
their lives are completely devoid of those traits. Paul Ryan is a
perfect symbol of America’s political class. He is directly responsible
for the large deficits and debt which America has compiled, and now
seeks to exploit what he himself helped create in order to deny to
others the very benefits that were responsible for almost every
opportunity and success he has had in his life, with the burden falling
most harshly on those who need those benefits the most to have any
remnant of fair opportunity. That’s the crux of the American elite:
making massive mistakes and engaging in destructive behavior and then
demanding that everyone — except them — bear the brunt of the
consequences.</blockquote>
Greenwald and Walsh are excellent critics and writers, but their material inspires and deflates other progressives who can't imagine it having an impact on the American voter. This gets us to progressive option #2, which appears in the also excellent commentator James Kwak at <i>The Baseline Scenario</i>. The Right, Kwak wrote <a href="http://baselinescenario.com/2012/08/13/small-government-or-smallish-sort-of-mediumish-nicer-better-government/">in a recent post,</a> has a great rhetorical claim: "Government infringes on individual liberty. Cut down the government and
we will have (a) more liberty, (b) more economic growth, and (c) lower
taxes." To respond to that the Left has, he says, well, nothing. Democrats need to have "some kind of understanding of what the federal government actually is and does," which they apparently don't. Kwak ended the post in muffled despair: "President Obama needs to come up with a vision of what the government is
for—one that he hasn’t already compromised away. Isn’t he supposed to
be good at that sort of thing?" <br />
<br />
Politics 101 does say that the angry denunciation, whether it's Walsh and Greenwald's columns or Henry Rollins singing <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaysTVcounI">Liar</a>, shocks, alienates, and offends the fence-sitters one needs to win over. On the other hand, Politics 101 also says arguments don't change voters minds. Kwak's best line is a denunciation of the dimwit middle--"this election will be just like every other one: it will turn on a
handful of independent voters’ inchoate, irrational perceptions of which
candidate better fits their inchoate, irrational notion of what the
president should look like." Depression is anger turned against the self--the progressive self in Kwak's case--and within progressive psychological dynamics both responses are doomed: attacking is wrong, arguing is wrong, so the Right wins again.<br />
<br />
Kwak's low esteem for the American decider in fact supports the Greenwald-Walsh style of denunciation, and is confirmed by three generations of successful Republican anger politics. It's true, as Kwak says, that most people don't pick the candidate on the basis of "a considered reflection on the proper size of government." The obvious alternative is drama, story, passion, feeling, critique, and anger in a package that enlightens people while firing them up against a clearly-defined opposition. Greenwald and Walsh are already masters of the genre of linking a threat to a face and name attached to it, which is sadly one of the few things that galvanizes humans in general and Americans in particular. The goal with Ryan should be to show that he personally adds a new level of delusion about people's lives starting with the voters in his district, that he is a calloused ideologue, that he is a Simple Simon and therefore dishonest, and that his ideas about privatizing Medicare or whatever, because they are <i>his</i> ideas, cannot be trusted. This would include the kind of analysis at which Kwak excels, like showing that lower
taxes don't produce higher growth or that falling government employment
is hurting the recovery. Getting there doesn't mean a smear campaign. It requires impassioned and relentless critique, escalating throughout the campaign. In Ryan's case this started happening years ago (e.g Krugman's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/opinion/08krugman.html">"Ludicrous and Cruel"</a> in 2011)--there's plenty to work with here.<br />
<br />
On to Kwak's other point, which is that progressives don't have a message about government. This isn't true, and Greenwald and Walsh, to stick with our two examples, demonstrate two of them. First, for Greenwald, government needs to be honest. It needs to be honest in the specific sense of treating everyone via the same rules, equally and fairly. In health care, the obvious contrast is between private insurance companies that deny coverage to clients that are likely to be more expensive, and Medicare or Medicaid, which pays for everyone regardless of cost. Ryan fully intends to ration Medicare, and he worships the private sector model of cutting costs via denying coverage and this damages the welfare of millions of people in ways Ryan refuses to admit. Government rejects hypocrisy in the sense of double standards of the kind that, via private insurance, have divided Americans into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class citizens in the realm of health care.<br />
<br />
Walsh's progressive value is that individual success depends in part on the quality of the public sector. For some reason Kwak wrote, progressives could say, "people need government services to succeed. (Doesn’t that sound offensive as soon as you say it, even if it’s true?)" Why is that offensive to say? It is very true, and obvious in all wealthy countries other from the United States-- in fact the entire "rise" of the "West' out of the depths of quite violent, authoritarian cultures riven with religious fanaticism and planted on top of mediocre physical resources--like Britain, Germany, Sweden, etc.--hinged on their fairly early discovery that large-scale "improvements" in public infrastructure, coordinated by government but largely built from the bottom-up, made all the difference in a society's success or failure, and hence in the success or failure of all but a privileged few of its citizens. Americans have not been taught this, but need to be via politics among other ways if they are to cope with the challenges of the 21st century.<br />
<br />
Kwak is right that the Dem arguments for government are underdeveloped. But these arguments are correct, and the compelling drama is this: government-funded social development is <i>the</i> difference between plutocracy and democracy. Crap public services, small middle class. Most voters, judging from the popularity of say social security, know this. Progressives need to cement the convictions so we can go on to address our actual problems rather than the demons Romney and Ryan conjure up to get elected.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-34620571641403748622012-08-01T04:15:00.000-07:002012-08-01T04:15:00.582-07:00Under the Big EmptyI can't see any foreclosed houses from the hotel pool. I do see a 5 story apartment building going up across the street. It looks cheap enough to fall down befoe it gets its supporting siding and paint. It ill have the airport to the front and a hotel to the side. I look at it from poolside. Trees consist of a scattering of short palm trees whole leaves rustle like the pom-poms of tired cheerleaders, most of whose friends have already left. There a party on the other side of the pool - Hilton Honors. the tall greeter, who much be a supervisor, is white. Every other employee is a person of color - mostly Latino, who can be seen everywhere doing all of the work, literally 100%, and a few South Asians. Jets roll off the runway at John Wayne screened from view by the hotel. Their steep angle keeps things quieter over the hedge funds heads below at Newport Beach, and up here they make a military roar. Southern Cal has always been great for aviation - endless flat plains, steady onshore switching to offshore breeze. endless emptiness of the sky. It's not so good for the people of the empty sky. the unchanging breeze ripples the pool surface that no one swims.<br />
Earlier that morning, same hotel, other side: <br />
<br />
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<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-249251952055959352012-06-17T10:53:00.000-07:002012-06-18T16:09:24.248-07:00Unger is Right: the Left Must Defeat ObamaThere's good stuff in the Unger statement about the purpose of society and government pointing towards the development of human capabilities, and the need to pay for education that does this. Then he drops the bomb around 6:17 that got us the Huffpo headline,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/16/roberto-unger-obama_n_1602812.html"> "Roberto Unger, Obama's Former Harvard Law School Professor, Says The President 'Must Be Defeated'</a><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Gnf4k8EaL7M" width="560"></iframe><br />
Here's what he says, after 6'10"<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
President Obama must be defeated. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States. He has spent trilliions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests, and has left workers and homeowners to their own devices. He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care, in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight. He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice. He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money. He has reduced justice to charity. His policy, is financial confidence and food stamps. He has evoked the politics of handholding. But no one changes the world without a struggle. Unless he is defeated, there cannot be a contest for the reorientation of the Democratic party as a vehicle of a progressive alternative in the country. There will be a cost for his defeat, in judicial and administrative appointments. The risk of military adventurism, however, under the rule of his opponents, will be no greater than it would be under him. Only a political reversal can allow the voice of democratic prophecy to speak once again in American life. Its speech is always dangerous. Its silence is always fatal. </blockquote>
This is all quite right - except for the part about the Democrats becoming progressive if Obama is defeated. Bit if it makes the chronic, semi-permanent fear vote for the Dem candidate feel any better, Unger is calling for a strike on the Democratic party that is nothing less than what the Tea Party did to the Republicans. But it must go far beyond that. <br />
<br />
When I began this blog in 2006, most people assumed
that the fortunes of the working- and middle-classes went up and down with the business cycle,
but that the overall trend was up.
Now over five years later, studies of the inequality boom have made it
clear to anyone who reads that the gains of economic growth have gone largely
to the very top, and to an almost unimaginable degree.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last week, a Federal Reserve survey got wide attention for
quantifying the large decline in net worth and the boom in student debt, among
other things. "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/business/economy/family-net-worth-drops-to-level-of-early-90s-fed-says.html">Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early '90s, Fed Says,"</a> was the NYT headline. The reversal
of the democratizing trends of the post-World War II period is now
entrenched. <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-12/american-families-are-poorer-than-in-1989">Peter Coy’</a>s
extrapolation of the Fed study shows that by this measure at least, any
progress over the past 30 years has been wiped out.<br />
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Felix Salmon adds, </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
The fact is that household net
worth was pretty inadequate even at the top of the housing bubble in 2007.
Families need a place to live, and if you strip out the housing component of
the net-worth calculation, the median US family has barely any net worth at
all. Certainly nothing they can retire on. This of course is why Social
Security is so important: with the recent drop in net worth, there’s no
realistic chance that the median US family will ever save up enough to live on
when they’re no longer earning money. </div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It’s another sign of our death-wish culture that a
bipartisan coalition of business and political leaders is trying to cut social
security, <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/fareed-zakaria-is-really-mad-about-public-pensions">complains
endlessly</a> about the cost of remaining defined benefit pension plans, and
has helped Obama be the first president in postwar history to <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/american-austerity/">preside over adecline of public-worker employment </a> that
has undermined the recovery.
Although <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/chart/isqi31tjaZFo/">Democrat
presidents always preside over more private sector job creation than
Republicans</a>, Obama’s economic performance has put him barely ahead of the two-faced
predator Mitt Romney, and could cost him his job.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Should</i> Obama lose
his job? Yes.
Betrayal of core values cannot be rewarded with a second term. And there is no other way to end the shameful policies and the politics of betrayal.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thirty seconds of thought about my core values include the
rejection of targeted killings of Muslims in their own sovreiggn countries with flying robots, the rejection of
incarceration without trial and of warrentless surveillance, and the rejection of our new royalism--beyond the social Darwinism of the 1890s or 1990s--that sees the financial and technological 0.1% as the Great
Creators, to the exclusion of the labor and creativity of ordinary people. Obama is not only indecisive and
confused: he actively supports <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/06/16/freakonomics_author_steven_levitt_corporate_shill/singleton">freakonomics</a>,
nudging, and other neo-aristocratic quantoid bollocks while hoping, in the
same pathetic hope of the last two generations of Democrat party stars, that these slightly
appeased elites will get around at some point to endowing the rest of us with a
Great Society. History refutes
this view at every turn. This is what Unger meant by change requiring struggle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Obama effect has been to eliminate turnaround ideas from
the national scene. Acceptable progressive ideas are reduced to calls for a short-term debt-based government stimulus from leading figures like Paul Krugman and
Joseph Stiglitz so that we can at least stop
sinking. Rebuilding and moving ahead is beyond conception. David Brooks can absurdly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/opinion/brooks-what-republicans-think.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks">blame the welfare state for the sins of finance</a> with total impunity because there is no vision of the welfare state --as agent of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-newfield/jerry-browns-budget-a-dan_b_811848.html">the developmental society </a>-- that he needs to reckon with.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The June
elections, particularly the attacks on city pensions in California and the
retention of the anti-union radical Scott Walker as Wisconsin’s governor, confirm the following features of this
national situation. I plop then down with deliberate crudeness. I do this because only if we see
these features as our core reality, our new normal and not as a temporary
deviation from who we really are, will we be able to take the measure of what
to do.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Obviously I am not denying contest, contradiction, and
countervailing tendencies: I am trying to describe the current core of the
established system.<br />
<br />
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1. Socially speaking, the United States is the
worst of the world’s wealthy economies. It is the most unequal, has the
greatest concentration of wealth at the top, and has the rich world’s
rock-bottom level of class mobility.
The U.S. is the New Old Europe.<br />
2.The U.S. is a plutocracy or “<a href="http://politicalgates.blogspot.com.es/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two-bombshell.html">plutonomy</a>” in a Citigroup consulting neologism.
It is no longer a middle-class democracy in the post-war sense. A major symptom is that financial power
can defeat all familiar forms of political mobilization (<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/6/walker_survives_wisconsin_recall_after_gop">John Nichols</a> on the Wisconsin vote), with <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all">Citizens United</a> as its constitutional platform. The U.S. is Europe’s New Latin America.</div>
3. The two national political parties are a
Conservative Party and a Radical Party – on the radical right <a href="http://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk_120605_170004dbriefing.MP3">(Ian Masters)</a>. The U.S. lacks a moderate social
democratic party or even a reliable centrist party. Compare the recently departed
conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s modest increase of social security retirement age to Democrats’ leadership in eliminating defined-benefit pensions for public
employees in various local jurisdictions: US Democrats are conservatives on issues where
Sarkozy was a centrist. Our respectable Conservative Party , the Democrats, function
as the janitors of the Radical Party, the Republicans. Janitorial work consists
of honorable caring for common assets like schools on behalf of people who can
simply use the assets without maintaining them. When Democratic presidents
replace Republicans, they repair tax systems that have been shredded, restore
economic growth rates, pay down the debts run up by profligate Republican
giveaways. Like patient
homemakers for spouses who use irrationality as mode of rule, they soothe hurt
feelings and get people back to the dinner table and in good enough shape to return to work—albeit for lower wages and benefits. As the Republicans’ janitorial staff, the
Democrat party has no story about itself or about the society it wants (Etzioni at the Ian Masters link above: when Democrats where asked in a focus group
about their party's main message, they could not say what it was.) This has been true since George
McGovern’s presidential defeat in 1972, forty years ago. In the 1970s, a generation of New
Democrats appeared to manage the decline of the party into service status to
the Republican paradigm. Exhibit A
was Jerry Brown, once and current governor of California, whose entire
political philosophy now consists of reducing the state budget deficit to
zero. Bill Clinton became the most
powerful of this group that, now in their 70s, continue to set strategies that
insure that our Conservative Party is also our weaker party. Obama governs on these terms, exhibited
by his failure even to mount a fight against plutonomy front-man Gov. Scott
Walker in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall.<br />
4. The U.S lacks the culture and practice of
solidarity or mutual support that would its poor and middle classes to progress
in spite of predatory rule. After
decades of “bowling alone” most of us lack the basic skills of self-governance—exerting
serious systematic effort to understand accurately what others are saying,
refusing the polarizing, othering, demonization, and casting enemies into the flames in all the ways that prevent consensus or truce. Democracy now lacks American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cultural</i> soil. The state of the US middle classes is
historically distinctive and needs to be analyzed as such. It is a post-middle
class, and it is post-democratic. It is not authoritarian in the same way as
was parts of the German or Spanish population during the 1930s. But it appears to be as profoundly
confused, disoriented (Luce, Hedges-Sacco), perhaps dissociative as those countries' majorities at that time. It has exhausted itself by defending
itself against attacks from a elite that continuously extracts
further incremental sacrifices and denies the earned status of its entitlements
(pensions, affordable health care, non-eviction, wages that rise with
productivity). More accurately, it
has exhausted itself in defense while also denying that it has had to defend
itself against predators that are continuously casting themselves as not only
benefactors but as givers of economic life. The result is chronic social-psychologial depression that in its turn gets perverse satisfaction in ripping away any shred of protection (public pensions,
health care benefits, etc.) from other poor or middle class people who are
within reach. The flip side of
bitterness over the ability of those with wealth and power to insulate themselves is to participate in the degradation of other unworthy groups.<br />
5. Mutual aid solutions to destructive and
inefficient markets for core goods will not return in the United States.
Innovation is a form of mutual aid, but the
version controlled by the US business system will not recover soon. Having missed creating the “green
collar economy” that would have addressed environmental and employment problems
at the same time (and wrecked the Right-Radical / Conservative duopoly in US
politics), mainstream innovation theory now consists of pep talks about the
American Spirit, tributes to Anglo-Saxon law, and the blanketing of
every field of invention with patent filings and unending lawsuits. The innovation economy systematically
seeks and achieves monopoly or duopoly in every domain (Google-Yahoo, Apple-PC), suggesting low survival rates for invention that does not
support plutonomy.<br />
6. Democracy
depends on mass creativity in both economy and society, but the creativity of
the great majority does not fit with the current economic model. The business
relation to labor is mainly that of exploitation and cost reduction (Philip <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/640901-wednesday-rumors-of-qe-gather-steam">Davis</a>:
“Q1 Productivity dropped 0.9% while Unit Labor Costs rose 1.3% - indicating our
corporate masters have finally squeezed the last drop of free labor out of the
population and will now have to actually hire people or purchase more efficient
equipment . . . in order to produce more goods.” The theory of control before
creativity will not be changed by this shift.<br />
7. There
remains a creative contradiction between the democratic imagination, which has of course
often used the Internet and various decenetralization technologies as a
validation and means of its furtherance.
The above situation is not static, but Unger's interest in a "beyond Obama" can only be addressed by direct
confrontation with the sadomasochistic middle-class <i>psychology</i> that has been produced by decline.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-89826900310371635262012-05-07T04:39:00.001-07:002012-05-07T05:14:10.911-07:00France After Sarkozy: What Can Hollande Do?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Nicholas Sarkozy came to power five years ago heralded as France's New Man who would yoke France to global capitalism by separating it from its social model. He <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.de/2007/07/dumbness-explosion-in-fransce.html">jogged</a> and he <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.de/2007/08/sarko-in-canoe.html">paddled New Hampshire canoes </a>without his shirt. I <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.de/2007/04/afraid-for-france.html">thought then</a> that it would turn out badly, and it has. The new Socialist president François Hollande faces a mess when he steps out of his democratically little car.<br />
<br />
Sarkozy was a classic wedge politician, campaigning against France's supposedly grasping unruly immigrants and its allegedly violent racial minorities in 2007 as he had while minister of the interior under Chirac. Sarkozy brought one of America's most repulsive and ineffective ideas into French politics, which is that solidarity damages the economy and retards society's wealth creators, who should rule by natural right. The practical effects in France have been a minor-key echo of their destructive impact in the U.S.. Sarkozy presided over the piecemeal degradation of two of the cornerstones of
French society, its strict, high-quality public schools and its
affordable, high-quality health care system. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Sarkozy had two positive issues. The first was what in this recent campaign he called "la France forte" on the international scene, which he accomplished by abandoning France's Gaullist independence from American foreign policy and by leading the bombing campaign in Libya. The second was tax cuts for France's wealthy, embodied in his early campaign to hold total taxes to 50% of overall earnings - the famous "bouclier fiscal." These goals presumed that the world needed more military intervention and political bullying in conflict zones, and that France's main economic problem was that its rich weren't rich enough. Both problems were patently fake. Five years later, "Merkozy" austerity has maintained Sarkozy's goal of upward redistribution while the recovery falters, France's exports continue to slip, its deficit grows bigger than ever, it has the same low proportion of the small and medium-sized companies that support the healthier economy of Germany, and it remains ruled by a mediocre business aristocracy whose big multinational firms created a net negative number of jobs during Sarkozy's mandate. But these outcomes were programmed into Sarkozy's politics, whose goal was to consolidate the control of France's neocolonial elites over major economic sectors through both a weakening of socialist domestic authority and the strengthening of France's geopolitical influence not only in francophone Africa but in the emerging economies that increasingly overshadow medium-sized countries like France.<br />
<br />
François Hollande systematically rejected Sarkozy's wedge politics, which set up a dangerous, Islamic underclass against wealth-giving elites unjustly burdened with taxes. Hollande's acceptance speech, given in the provincial city of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulle">Tulle</a> where he was mayor and then president of the regional council, stressed reunification and the reorientation of policy around justice and the advancement of the younger generations that are facing the worst prospects for a normal entry into society in recent memory. He offered a good summary of the challenges he needs to start facing as of today:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Les défis qui nous attendent sont nombreux : le redressement de notre
production, la réduction du déficit, la préservation du modèle social,
l'égalité entre nos territoires, la priorité éducative, l'école de la
République qui sera mon engagement, la transition écologique, la
réorientation de l'<a class="surligner" href="http://www.lepoint.fr/tags/europe">Europe</a> pour l'emploi pour la croissance pour l'avenir.</blockquote>
The country needs to redevelop the economy, strengthen schools, and protect a social model that supports human development while reducing the deficit and transitioning to a new economy. This means squaring a circle whose shape appears to be the same to the neo-socialist or semi-socialist party that Hollande helped build as it is to the center-right opposition.<br />
<br />
Hollande rejects austerity on both the national and European level, and will undo some of Sarkozy's stupider economies, like the continuous reduction of France's already underpaid teaching force in a nation where educational attainment has slipped to<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading#data"> barely the OECD average</a>, and is well below average in science, a traditional strength in France. But Hollande's modest victory, not quite 52% of the vote, means that he will have equally modest support even for a limited neo-Keynesian politics that would combine much bigger short-run deficits for public investment with tax increases on the wealthy (see #15 and #17 of Hollande's <a href="http://groupealpha.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/projet_presidentiel_2012_francois_hollande.pdf">"60 Commitments"</a> and on big corporations that create no jobs. He also inherits from Sarkozy an economy that on the global scale is in decline.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.de/2007/05/m-sarkozy-govern-from-left-or-fail.html">my comments on Sarkozy's economy of 2007</a> are still relevant:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The false yet pervasive axiom is that business gives life and public
services drain it away. Sarkozy's victory in the [2007] presidential
elections will have the ironic effect of showing its limitations. The
reason is simple. France is not large or dominant enough economically
for it to muscle its way through the inefficiencies of conservative
economics as the US has done. American conservatives from Reagan on
could indulge in their completely one-sided notion of development - all
business, no society - only under special circumstances. The country
was already wealthy, had a huge internal market, dominates the global
economic system, and had military and financial power clout to win every
bargain into which it enters. American financial and political leaders
could conceal declining wages, benefits, and quality of life for the
economic majority with massive foreign borrowing to fund domestic
deficits, similar foreign subsidies to keep interest rates low, and
cheap money policies that allowed rising stock and housing prices to
create temporary wealth effects for the middle classes that, in the long
haul, have done poorly. The Right was also helped by its incessant
attacks on both people of color (as degenerate and lazy) and on
blue-collar workers (as inflexible and obsolete), for these destroyed
the political standing of much of the economic majority, leaving a clear
field for conservatives.<br />
<br />
None of these options are available to
France. It is a medium-sized country with a second-tier economy that has
no chance of competing with the US, China, or India through
deregulation. No politically imaginable amount of flexibilization will
make it like the US, to say nothing of countries where manufacturing
workers earn 50 euros a month or less and have no health and safety
protections. </blockquote>
Hollande can change none of this with a kinder, gentler version of austerity. He will be tempted toward gentler austerity by the powers that be in Europe and by the narrowness of his victory. But the narrowness resulted from the narrowness of the practical differences between his program and Sarkozy's: the absence of a vivid socialist program meant that twice as many people could vote for Sarkozy as actually <a href="http://toodumbtolive.blogspot.de/2010/10/why-is-economic-policy-so-dumb.html">approve of his job performance</a>, out of a sense of an insufficient alternative. To overcome the narrowness of his mandate, Hollande will need to do what Western countries can't do anymore - govern like a socialist.<br />
<br />
Socialist governance must start by explaining how strong economies depend on strong societies, where a strong society is built on mass benefit and equitable returns for labor, not the crazy skew we have now. He could break out "justice et jeunesse" like this:<br />
<ul>
<li><u>A massive reinvestment in education, research, and, universities.</u> Hollande would set a goal for his administration, like getting French students <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading#data">above 510 in all OCED categories</a>, analyzing what this will take, and then funding that, up to say 30% annual budget increases in the first couple of years. The relation between great educational levels and economic health is well-established, and Hollande needs to build on his proposal for 60,000 new teaching posts <a href="http://groupealpha.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/projet_presidentiel_2012_francois_hollande.pdf">(#36) </a>and do something effective and big.</li>
<li><u>Transformation of banking into a utility</u>. Hollande already called for putting banks at the service of the economy but his concrete measures are weak <a href="http://groupealpha.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/projet_presidentiel_2012_francois_hollande.pdf">(#7-8)</a> He needs to make France a leader in implementing a "Tobin tax" on financial transactions, defining speculative activities that public funds will not support and fully defunding these, insisting on proportional public representation on boards of subsidized banks, and converting bank direction to public partnerships in which stakeholders have direct input into bank decision-making. Technical changes would evolve from there. Bank-dominated and financialized economies are not competitive with those that spend more of their money on social development and investment in production (see for example <a href="http://ineteconomics.org/conference/berlin/michael-hudson-debt-politics-and-economics-restructuring-24">Michael Hudson's talk</a> at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Berlin in April 2012).</li>
<li><u>Explicit racial egalitarianism</u>. Like nearly all societies, France is actively underdeveloping its racial and religious minority populations via second-rate education, housing, health services, you name it. This policy is in more open contradiction with French republican values of equality and solidarity, but the passivity of the Left has allowed the Right to have a free hand with racial wedge politics. Stratified public services prevents the social integration that maintains mutual suspicion. The white majority is more inclined to defund public services that are perceived to be mostly for racial others (a mild version of Reagan's war on "welfare queens" always pictured as Black). The African, Asian, and North African minority withdraw from a state that seems more about harassment and stigmatization than about support and development. Hollande should set as a goal equality of <u>outcome</u> for all racial and religious groups, and give his administration five years to make major progress - say reducing educational outcomes by 50%. </li>
</ul>
There were lots of great pictures of election night, but my personal favorite is of my brother who, having voted as French for the first time, was invited to count ballots in his precinct in Paris's 18th arrondisement. Vive la république!<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAGrCToHQb1inWfhOdickemo34S39Gjgn8AuHF__y95e2BD-PGo7YX4M8Bju-A_8MlNTmWJ1arTstjjVcPuEgUqIDuaDYuREuvtEeQxnAgb29mKCajkklDbq8op0j-PsUqgRKfw/s1600/Brad+Counting+Votes+May6+2012.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAGrCToHQb1inWfhOdickemo34S39Gjgn8AuHF__y95e2BD-PGo7YX4M8Bju-A_8MlNTmWJ1arTstjjVcPuEgUqIDuaDYuREuvtEeQxnAgb29mKCajkklDbq8op0j-PsUqgRKfw/s320/Brad+Counting+Votes+May6+2012.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-55329609110541507982012-04-30T02:48:00.002-07:002012-04-30T04:36:19.810-07:00Apple's Attack on the Knowledge Economy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLlCh-7SNNvEHt283ERV6Vt6bTLcGpu6SAFYOPJAvRVs91_OGjEkblyfBmyQvI6w16-3J-10mJxRO20eNJZmi62OsX5Eykbkq01sn0J4oUSjit31vMrGwem5uKASAzbun3EoyL/s1600/bizarro-world.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLlCh-7SNNvEHt283ERV6Vt6bTLcGpu6SAFYOPJAvRVs91_OGjEkblyfBmyQvI6w16-3J-10mJxRO20eNJZmi62OsX5Eykbkq01sn0J4oUSjit31vMrGwem5uKASAzbun3EoyL/s320/bizarro-world.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The<i> New York Times</i> has just published the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?ref=charlesduhigg&pagewanted=all">latest</a> in Charles Duhigg''s important series of pieces on Apple and the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/ieconomy.html?scp=1-spot&sq=ieconomy&st=Search">iEconomy</a> (see also<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=all"> "middle class squeezed"</a> and <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E2D71438F935A15752C0A9649D8B63&ref=charlesduhigg&pagewanted=all">"human costs," </a>written with various coauthors).<br />
<br />
This
third article is about Apple's global effort at maximum tax avoidance.
The story is mainly about what is in effect one rich company's effort
to contribute as little as possible to public coffers, but it shows how
Apple's way of looking at society is creating a Bizarro world that
steadily undermines its own ability to innovate. <br />
<br />
The most important relationship in the story is between Apple and its neighboring community college, DeAnza College. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that <a class="meta-per" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/stephen_wozniak/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Stephen Wozniak.">Steve Wozniak</a>,
one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of
California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand
courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008. <br />
<br /></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a “death spiral,” the school’s president, Brian Murphy, <a href="http://www.deanza.edu/budgetinfo/announcements/News01_23_12.html" title="Mr. Murphy’s letter to faculty">wrote to the faculty</a>
in January. Apple, of course, is not responsible for the state’s
financial shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s tax
policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the
crisis exists. <br />
<br /></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I just don’t understand it,” he said in an interview. “I’ll bet every
person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our
pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for
Pete’s sake. <br />
<br /></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div itemprop="articleBody">
“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.” </div>
<a name='more'></a><br /></blockquote>
Community colleges are finally being recognized as so central to the knowledge economy that Barack Obama wants to send them an <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-13/obama-proposes-8-billion-for-job-training-at-community-colleges.html">additional $8 billion</a>
for strategic training, while some analysts call for 20 times that
amount. This is because the US higher ed system is great for the upper
5% and either nonexistent or crumbling for the bottom half to 2/3rds of
the population. Cuts to places like De Anza destroy mass access to a
knowledge economy that is led by Apple Computer. Corporate tax
avoidance has for decades been a major mechanism of crumbling the social
bridging performed by higher ed. Although corporations complain
endlessly about the bad business climate of states like California,
state corporate taxes as a share of Gross State Product are half of what
they were 25 years ago- a <a href="http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers50states/CorporateTaxDodgers50StatesReport.pdf">miserable 0.28% of nationwide GSP.</a><br />
<br />
Apple has become one of the most profitable companies in history,
and has the largest market capitalization in the world. Today it is
worth not much less than General Electric (another <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=all">champion tax avoide</a>r), Wal-Mart, and Google combined (<a href="http://ycharts.com/rankings/market_cap">ranked 9-11</a>).
While Wal-Mart paid about 24% of profits in taxes, Apple paid less than
10%, in large part by moving profits from where they were earned to low
or no-tax jurisdictions, whether that be from France to Luxembourg in
Europe or from California to Nevada in the United States.<br />
<br />
Apple pays a higher rate than some companies (see <a href="http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers50states/CorporateTaxDodgers50StatesReport.pdf">appendicies</a>). Yet Apple and other iEconomy leaders have trapped us on a <a href="http://madmikesamerica.com/2012/02/romney-should-turn-to-bizarro-world-for-support/">Bizarro world</a> where De Anza College fires around 60 instructors (guesstimating the equivalent of 8% from <a href="http://www.deanza.edu/about/facts.html">here</a>) while Apple's CEO Tim Cook <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-didnt-really-make-378-million-in-2011/">earns $376 million</a> in stock grants, or enough to pay around 7000 De Anza math instructors (who <a href="http://www.indeed.com/salary/Foothill-De-Anza-Community-College-District.html">average $54,000).</a>
Put another way, CEO Tim Cook's stock grants would take a De Anza
instructor 7000 years to earn, yet we can't afford 60/7000's of the
Apple CEO's stock grants to prepare people to work at companies like
Apple. This system underwrites a Bizarro capitalism whose leaders
decline to maintain the conditions required for the reproduction of
their own labor force.<br />
<br />
Why is this happening? Most literally it is happening because
state corporate taxes are caught in a race to the bottom in which
developed states are being carved up by underdeveloped states elsewhere
in the country. Thus federal policy forces a state like California,
where generations of citizens paid taxes to build a high-quality public
support structure for creating its "human capital," to compete with a
state like Nevada, which has no knowledge economy and no corporate
income tax.<br />
<br />
The federal government is in effect running
an anti-innovation policy: the least innovative states, those that have
historically
made the lowest investments in their people and physical plant, get
more in the way of new business than their long history of
non-investment deserves. The race to the bottom in tax policy has
favored low wage states with weaker or non-existent rights to collective
bargaining, low overall
incomes (poorest 10 <a href="http://247wallst.com/2011/09/14/americas-poorest-states/print/">here</a>), and more growth in manufacturing through relocation (see this Cato Institute <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/.../holmes.pdf">analysis</a> for the standard argument). " <br />
<br />
The race to the bottom of tax rates doesn't signal an innovation economy, but a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Predator-State-Conservatives-Abandoned/dp/B002BWQ4UA/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1335778759&sr=8-1">predator</a>
economy, where
low-rent states run by enemies of public sector development steal
jobs from places that have invested in their citizens taxes for decades
-- California, New York, and others being classic examples. Red states
that vote against government receive more in federal government dollars
than they send in taxes. No only do more i<a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/the_red_state_ripoff.html">ndustrialized blue states subsidize their underdeveloped red neighbors with taxes: </a>they
also send their jobs to red states with tax giveaways and other free
public stuff that blue states gave to them via the aforementioned tax
transfers.<br />
<br />
This means that here in America we have a tax
system in which innovation states subsidize anti-innovation states,
helping to deprive themselves of the tax base that made them innovation
states in the first place.<br />
<br />
So why do we put up with this? Part of the answer is that red
state conservatives control federal policy even when they are in the
minority in Congress. But the inability of modern American conservatism
to acknowledge <i>any</i> connection between public investment and wealth creation is enabled by the intellectual weakness of American liberalism.<br />
<br />
An example of the latter is Jared Bernstein's<a href="http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/today%E2%80%99s-must-reads/"> post on the Apple tax avoidance</a>
article. Bernstein was President Joseph Biden's chief economist, and
here makes the Democrats' standard argument in favor of tilling the
public infrastruture soil in which we will be growing our future Apple
trees. He makes sensible suggestions about passing a minimum tax on
foreign profits of U.S. companies and in general ending "the loopholes
that make it cheaper to invest" abroad than in the U.S.<br />
<br />
At
the same time, Bernstein goes out of his way to say Apple is doing
nothing wrong, "They need to compete and to avoid providing their
competitors with any advantages," so they minimize their tax burden just
like the other guy.<br />
<br />
Bernstein's error is to separate
Apple's exploitation of the tax system from Apple's creation of that tax
system. Apple in fact helped create this begger-thy-neighbor tax
system through lobbying and other interventions in the political process
at every level. Apple and its competitors created this low-tax system
for themselves, it works for them, and they have no economic reason to
give it up. They won't voluntarily support Bernstein's tax reforms,
meaning that these reforms will never happen without concerned
anti-Apple pressure to get Apple to do what Apple would not do on its
own.<br />
<br />
Bernstein admits as much by calling on Apple to "be a
better corporate citizen" and shower "schools in its backyard" with
what in effect would be some charity money. Unfortunately, this work
either: the knoweldge economy was created by <i>mass</i> access to high-quality education, not by rehiring a few fired professors with a little trickle-down largesse.<br />
<br />
The
larger problem is that Silicon Valley businesses have more ideological
and cultural influence than any sector on earth. Yet they won't
actively support even minor rebuilding of public higher ed, much less
the mass access that created the post-war middle-class. As De Anza
College's president put it, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When it comes time for all these companies — Google and Apple and
Facebook and the rest — to pay their fair share, there’s a knee-jerk
resistance,” Mr. Murphy said. “They’re philosophically antitax, and it’s
decimating the state.”<br />
<br /></blockquote>
The U.S. economy will go nowhere if we can't get past Silicon Valley
ideology. We are used to equating Apple with the knowledge economy. We
also need to see Apple as the knowledge economy's enemy. Until we do, we
won't be able to reverse the erosion of that economy or of its middle
class that, thanks to Silicon Valley's antisocial economic thinking, is
already well under way.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-82610303614229781242012-04-16T09:07:00.000-07:002012-04-16T09:07:20.009-07:00My Problem with Schumpeter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA1zw8GMBWgg5z2SQkeRn-yQtmo89ngikXhZAymxbDhjhzMNPX938tCrDY2yQFRLkgVkbl3h8-ou2G8GHsLZrrhuRtBmRuxz4nPRg94QcT-ZcH9DsJyHRZixPKuEspfRA3Ub0AsQ/s1600/SchumpeterJoseph.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA1zw8GMBWgg5z2SQkeRn-yQtmo89ngikXhZAymxbDhjhzMNPX938tCrDY2yQFRLkgVkbl3h8-ou2G8GHsLZrrhuRtBmRuxz4nPRg94QcT-ZcH9DsJyHRZixPKuEspfRA3Ub0AsQ/s320/SchumpeterJoseph.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>First, some throat-clearning, with Mr. Schumpeter at left very much in mind.<br />
<br />
The decline of the middle class has been this blog's theme since it began in 2006. I have been interested in the self-inflicted nature of this decline, and in its social and psychological dimensions. The title of the blog expreses this angle on the problem. The economic decline of the majority is now common knowledge. The self-inflicted sources of the decline - not so much.<br />
<br />
Most of my <a href="http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/">blogging since 2009</a> been about the decline of the foundational institution of the middle class -- college, including community college -- and about the big conceptual and storytelling errors that have gotten middle class voters to go along with the budget cuts and the loss of focus on core educational missions that have made universities increasingly less useful to the students (and faculty) who go through them.<br />
<br />
When I consciously try to avoid this theme of public university (self) destruction, I wind up in my other obsessive area, innovation theory. Which brings me to last week. On Thursday, in Berlin, I gave a talk at the JFK Institute called "Does Cultural Study Need Innovation Theory?" My real topic was the reverse - that innovation theory needs cultural study. This is a slightly obtuse way of saying that there are huge problems with the unchallengeable model of innovation in the US, which is founded in Joseph Schumpeter. Here's my one slide summary of what is wrong with him. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxjJUpluwY97cEnzju9hvkWX-bRG5rfOOAN_Y9abrK1hzwlI5Zc2ef4thTCIj2JXsn2ytjHOH-z4SUOoAhownFEAYiIOnDg0GpYAWN9o3i1TuR2U-sORxlkWo-cF-2X7ESk4BJNA/s1600/Schumpeter+Slide.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxjJUpluwY97cEnzju9hvkWX-bRG5rfOOAN_Y9abrK1hzwlI5Zc2ef4thTCIj2JXsn2ytjHOH-z4SUOoAhownFEAYiIOnDg0GpYAWN9o3i1TuR2U-sORxlkWo-cF-2X7ESk4BJNA/s400/Schumpeter+Slide.png" width="400" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">i just don't see anything in Schumpeter's model, with its hostility to self-governance and regular people, that is compatible with egalitarian economic development. Why would a Schumpeterian entrepreneur care about full employment, as opposed to minimizing their own employment of people? In this system it is inevitable for us to have an Apple Economy now where the wealthiest most admired companies practice the offshoring of jobs as a doctrinal necessity. The now-famously <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html">"squeezed middle class" </a>is no longer the beneficiary of innovation and new levels of productivity, but its victim. We have innovation, but <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-newfield/innovation-economy-debt-debate_b_917151.html#postComment">we don't have innovation jobs.</a></div><br />
Under Schumpeter, genesis is technology. Its fountainhead is the entrepreneur, not the toiling multitude. To a surprising extent, technology is always in opposition to labor, which it seeks to liquidate. Schumpeter allows economists and anyone else to assume the valuelessness of people -- the valuelessness <i>of how people like to do things</i>. Schumpeter enables <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/03/obama-accuses-republicans-social-darwinism-budget">the social darwinism that even Barack Obama has complained about. </a> He also enables the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/business/28wages.html?_r=1&sq=real%20wages%20fail%20to%20match%20a%20rise%20in%20productivity&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all">decoupling of labor productivity from pay</a>, since productivity doesn't really come from labor at all. The logical consequence is the <a href="http://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/graph-of-the-week-usa-productivity-and-real-hourly-wages-1964-2008/">broken relationship between productivity (up) and wages (flat)</a> that has caused the economic decline of the middle class.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb_kTpG8WciE0Sn_RxFb-rPruT5SlmZvQUUFJirKeU7FZCFnBNoGV4H1F9eqRkOFV6cG7X3eHYAZoYbT6BrjjRTEmz18QAH0VROofDKz0LFMMRlTkluoNm7wb7h0yoKaGC3RRx5Q/s1600/Productivity+v.+Income+1964-2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb_kTpG8WciE0Sn_RxFb-rPruT5SlmZvQUUFJirKeU7FZCFnBNoGV4H1F9eqRkOFV6cG7X3eHYAZoYbT6BrjjRTEmz18QAH0VROofDKz0LFMMRlTkluoNm7wb7h0yoKaGC3RRx5Q/s400/Productivity+v.+Income+1964-2008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Am I blaming Schumpeter's dominant model of innovation for this decline? Yes I am. <br />
<br />
Looking for an alternative, the day after my own talk I went to the Berlin meeting of the George Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking. More on that tomorrow.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-79413400067851739442012-02-11T18:01:00.000-08:002012-05-07T03:07:55.777-07:00Greco-America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ATEY1GQFWCWY4eWafUNJ0kKjw0kIOZMi7JiWS6we9jIxGQGAmbQRVIt_M-fABpbkSZDosXei0GVsnPd_jm_dpzfevRa1SZnXhCDxHiU7bzeb4_la5dyd_nWLgQgeOjd_hnc9bw/s1600/Greek-protesters-police-clash-at-parliament-6QV4QSR-x-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ATEY1GQFWCWY4eWafUNJ0kKjw0kIOZMi7JiWS6we9jIxGQGAmbQRVIt_M-fABpbkSZDosXei0GVsnPd_jm_dpzfevRa1SZnXhCDxHiU7bzeb4_la5dyd_nWLgQgeOjd_hnc9bw/s320/Greek-protesters-police-clash-at-parliament-6QV4QSR-x-large.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
My favorite Capitalist Pal, trader Phillip Lewis, has a remarkable section in <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/357571-fall-back-friday-greece-not-yet-fixed">yesterday's post</a> that is worth quoting in full. Are European leaders going to force Greece to go the way of Russia under Yelstin, in which public health falls off the cliff? It's another omen of a new dark age. The deep psychological question is why elites are ok pushing things this way. As Davis points out, they can't save themselves either.<br />
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**** Davis follows:
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Let's shift gears for a moment and discuss how the Greek crisis CAN KILL YOU! That's right, even as we speak those "necessary" austerity measures that cut back medical care in Greece and caused a crisis in their pharmacies, making medicine unavailable to millions <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/greek-doctors-battle-hospital-superbug.html" rel="nofollow" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">has already spawned a pneumonia-causing superbug that most existing antibiotics can't stop</a>. According to Bloomberg: <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">The culprit is spreading through health centers already weighed down by a shortage of nurses. The hospital-acquired germ killed as many as half of people with blood cancers infected at Laiko General Hospital, a 500-bed facility in central Athens.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">"We're not used to seeing people die of an untreatable infection," said John Rex, vice president for clinical infection at London-based AstraZeneca, which is developing a new generation of antibiotics. "That's like something in a novel of 200 years ago."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">"We know what to do, but if you don't have the personnel, you can't do it," Daikos said in an interview in his office, deep in a side wing of the sprawling hospital. "If you don't have enough nurses, how can I assign a dedicated nurse to carriers?"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"><img align="right" height="263" hspace="6" src="http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/2/10/saupload_horsey-republican-priorities_t470.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; max-width: 480px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" vspace="6" width="350" />Welcome to the Republican dream of independent health care without government aid. I'm sure my conservative readers aren't worried even though Greece remains a major tourist hub and many of them are flying on planes that may have been in Greece the day before but what happens when this is the news out of Detroit or Miami? Will you still not care? What happens when depriving the poor of adequate healthcare means your maid shows up for work with a very nasty-sounding cough or you see you waiter wipe his nose - will you care then?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">Just like crime, which is relatively under control these days, the top 10% tend to forget how bad things can get when you let that social safety net collapse. For good or bad, we are one big global family now and what happens in one country absolutely affects another and Greece is just a preview of what will happen under the crushing austerity programs that are being demanded by the ECB, the IMF and the GOP.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">We are just a 10% cut in Social Security away from creating millions of more underwater mortgages as food costs, energy costs and local taxes are impacting the ability of senior citizens to continue paying their mortgages with fixed incomes. Out of 4.5M homes in Florida with outstanding mortgage loans, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/30/florida-housing-crisis-home-foreclosures?newsfeed=true" rel="nofollow" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #024999; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2M (44%) are already underwater</a>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">"People have no safety net. They get ill, a spouse dies, they lose their jobs and they have no support. All of these things can lead to foreclosure," said Carolina Lombardi, a senior lawyer with Legal Service of Greater Miami. "We are seeing all kinds of people, middle earners who are now on food stamps."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #FFFFFF; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">David Chandler Hicks, of Alliance Legal Group, which operates all over the state, has many clients who are 65 or older but who have been forced to come out of retirement because "they are about to go broke."</span></div>
</blockquote>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-22795618749630810312012-01-08T22:15:00.000-08:002012-11-05T11:43:21.217-08:00How Subsidized Capitalism Hurts Innovation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiucBVFhE3-6qQ1Ik9YosS44FSaB9BTEFe-JVWEOwtNFlOtpFn-NCDkJPEMmh3iIpkn_LQfl1BxzSuAFhJIQuNDdS_8x-zT8iR7YoOdtEYB1e_O2VJhudU-haRX3XDQolprsNbVbw/s1600/crying-baby-doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiucBVFhE3-6qQ1Ik9YosS44FSaB9BTEFe-JVWEOwtNFlOtpFn-NCDkJPEMmh3iIpkn_LQfl1BxzSuAFhJIQuNDdS_8x-zT8iR7YoOdtEYB1e_O2VJhudU-haRX3XDQolprsNbVbw/s200/crying-baby-doll.jpg" width="151" /></a></div>
Last week I <a href="http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2012/01/higher-ed-in-2012-background-thoughts.html">posted</a> on our more active <a href="http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/">university blog</a> about how <i>subsidized capitalism</i> damages both the funding and popular understanding of the central role of public services in building economies and societies. <br />
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The post was just a first poke for the new year into a huge hole in Anglo-American capitalism's theory of itself. This theory ignores the extent to which it has spent the conservative 1980-2010 period absorbing public resources into its own revenues. Most of this theory's public apologists denounce public spending, which has helped <a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/chart-day-corporate-taxation-america">massively reduce their tax obligations</a> -- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?scp=1&sq=general%20electric%20tax%20avoidance&st=cse">tax avoidance has become a major profit strategy</a> -- while justifying private appropriation as putting public money to better use. <br />
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The <i>New York Times</i> has a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/business/states-pay-to-train-workers-to-companies-benefit.html">good example of the problem</a>. Caterpillar is spending $426 million building a new factory in North Carolina. It has gotten the state to pay $51 million in various incentives, including $5.3 million in direct costs to train future Caterpillar workers. Since most of the training is being done by a local college called Forsyth Tech, the state is footing other costs as well.<br />
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This suggests serious weakness in the economic theory itself. The co-founder and longtime CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm">wrote a while back</a> that "the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs." Intel spent $3600 in adjusted dollars for every job it had 10 years after its founding. This cost has exploded to $100,000 per job at some of the country's most successful high-tech companies -- Genentech, Google, etc. Here's the chart that accompanied the article:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6pUGSdm_n9-Jxp898vHGxEVjSEIib0WNezJyuGN9WRIYvoarCylTnDbGBISDgbF7jyc_Y9mptlm-heUyg34AxcIrKZ2I-RMTSyBWkN6Z-L7nJc5XQeNLvkFp1Itwwev8RWJnovA/s1600/Cost+Jobs+Grove+BW0710.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6pUGSdm_n9-Jxp898vHGxEVjSEIib0WNezJyuGN9WRIYvoarCylTnDbGBISDgbF7jyc_Y9mptlm-heUyg34AxcIrKZ2I-RMTSyBWkN6Z-L7nJc5XQeNLvkFp1Itwwev8RWJnovA/s400/Cost+Jobs+Grove+BW0710.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The cost of each new Caterpillar job in North Carolina is $130,000 - well above Google's cost. But that is <i>only the state of North Carolina's contribution. </i>Add in the company's own investment in the new facility, and you get an incredible $1.2 million per job. Caterpillar is very inefficient at creating jobs, and has gotten North Carolina to pick up some of the excess cost.<br />
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The use of the chart above isn't entirely fair, since the 392 jobs is this Caterpillar plant's immediate workforce and not the workforce 10 years out. But the point of the new plant is to use technology to suppress workforce growth, suggesting future growth will be limited. And the huge cost per job can only be justified, if at all, through some extraordinary and unlikely tech-fueled level of productivity. These are not obviously sustainable jobs, and the article points out that some of the same workers in the new state training program have been burned before by hit-and-run companies.<br />
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The problem with the expected public subsidy of capitalism has several parts. The first is that U.S. federalism has put states and local jurisdictions in competition in a "race to the bottom" to offer the weakest union protects, weakest safety requirements, lowest wages, and highest subsidies. Yes there are practical limits to all this and no not all firms are slave-driving exploiters of labor and plunderers of the public purse. But the downward spiral is the logic of the system, and a well-paying company with good labor conditions (that support creativity) in New Jersey or Minnesota is vulnerable to competition from cheap operators in states like, well, North Carolina.<br />
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The second problem is deeper, and Andy Grove points it out. U.S. companies are less efficient at creating jobs, he says, because the country has spent the last few decades shipping manufacturing know-how overseas, attached to the jobs it has shipped over there. Grove focuses on the capacity for "scaling," which is the way that a good invention becomes an industry that supports lots of employment. The million little problems that must be solved require complex knowhow that is housed in people. Solutions require an entire, "effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer." When this ecosystem is already established as it famously is in a place like Silicon Valley, new jobs are generally less expensive to create. When you don't have that ecosystem, they cost a lot and, just as importantly, they are less secure.<br />
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Universities are central to an innovation ecosystem, and constantly cutting their budgets weakens the ecosystem as a whole. But interestingly, cuts ironically drive up the cost of new jobs rather than lowering them (usually defined as lower taxes). A weaker innovation ecosystem can destroy a new industry before it gets started. Grove's example is lithium-ion batteries for the next generation of electric cars and trucks.<br />
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The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up. </blockquote>
Subsidized capitalism conceals the real problem, which is the weakening of the overall social environment in which innovation and sustainability take place. It has been weakened by social underinvestment. Grove calls explicitly for jobs policy -- for "jobs-centric" leadership. <br />
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We won't get something that intelligent because both parties like to shovel public money toward private firms, even when it means taking public funds away from the social ecosystem on which the firms depend.<br />
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To wrap up, subsidized capitalism kills two birds with its one big stone. First, it hurts public services. Subsidized capitalism has enabled the takeover of the charter school movement by education companies whose existence depends entirely on taxpayer funding. The same goes for-profit university-company sector, which depends so totally on federal loan money that it pipes through its student-customers that the government has had to cap their receipt of federal funds as a share of total revenues at 90%. This sector sells educational services, but makes its money by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/26/for-profit-colleges-spend_n_867175.html">not spending revenues on education,</a> and produces <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Report-Faults-For-Profit/125486/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en">bad educational results.</a> The bad drives out the good, as the for-profit sector's existence convinces many policymakers that they can get away with spending less public money on real-thing public education. The same has happened to transportation. A somewhat funny example is <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_34/b4192044579970.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories">Chicago outsourcing its parking meters</a>, which historically helped pay for street improvements. More seriously, the UK House of Commons's Treasury Committee published a <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/treasury-committee/news/pfi-report/">study</a> last August, 20 years into its "Private Finance Initiatives" experience that included privatizing its rail system. The committee found among other things that PFI deals typically added<a href="http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/at-a-glance/main-section/exclusive_taxpayers_spending_4bn_in_contracts_rip_off_1_3720228"> 40% to the service costs</a>. <br />
<br />
The second victim of subsidized capitalism is the private sector itself. Demanding tax reduction with one hand and receiving taxpayer funding with the other, corporate America has ignored the role of public funding in building the advanced society on which its own survival depends. After nearly 40 years of this, in 2012, it's not clear that the U.S. will ever catch up.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-58993041725505118822011-11-02T10:43:00.000-07:002011-11-02T10:43:55.718-07:00Democracy vs. Finance Capitalism: Greece and SolarHat tip to Brad for the headline that summarizes the whole "problem" created by the Greek government putting the Poverty Now plan-of-the-week to save-punish Greece to an actual vote: <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/45129450">"Democracy Wipes Out Gains for Stocks."</a><br />
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A nice analysis comes from Yves Smith on the <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/greece-the-debtor-that-roared.html">"debtor that roared."</a> The rescue was only going to accomplish the continuing impoverishment of the Greek population without actually stabilizing the banking system, and forget about inspiring investment and recovery.<br />
<br />
Thinking about the examples of recoveries in places as different as Argentina (early 2000s) and Signapore (late 1990s), it would be interesting to imagine an actually democratic alternative to the financial system we have now. The minimum elements would be much smaller banks and regulation around lending that would push them close enough to local needs for investment capital that it would be more straightforward to nationalize them.<br />
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We hear a lot about financial innovation, but finance is now of no obvious help to innovation in general. The most important kind involves environmentally sustainable development, and solar energy is a perfect example of a mature technology whose rate of installation needs to <a href="http://www.pv-tech.org/mobile/blogs/intersolar_na_can_the_industry_achieve_2020_challenge_of_1_w_system_cost_20">increase by an order of magnitude in the next decade</a> if we are going to avoid the International Energy Agency's prediction that current policy leads to 650 ppm of CO2 by mid-century.<br />
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Lehman Bros had a decent renewables portfolio before it collapsed in the fall of 2008 and precipitated the debacle from which our governments have not rescued us. But the margins required by commercial banks are very high. Second and third generation solar technology is coming along fairly slowly, attracts very little venture capital, and depends on government support for both research and development that has been discredited in many political circles by the bankruptcy of one of the Department of Energy's pet loan recipients, <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=UKTRE78M75U20110923">Solyndra</a>. Meanwhile, China has tripled or quadrupled its market share in California and even in Germany, which still has one of the strongest solar industries in the world. <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/195048-3-reasons-to-avoid-investing-in-solar-stocks">Investors have been staying away from solar</a>, and this is going to continue as prices fall and existing technology is commoditized by volume players from Asia.<br />
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China exploits labor on a mass scale, and this, along with currency manipulation and related strategies greatly assists its power in a range of markets. But American policymakers aren't thinking through the extent to which China's near-takeover of a socially-vital high-tech sector - silicon-based solar photovoltaic modules -- shows our innovation system to be obsolete. Venture capital is not so good at socially-useful technology development and great at generating large fortunes off of huge consumer markets in technologies like computer software that had been under development for decades before the big fortunes were made. Leading VC guru <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/john_doerr_sees_salvation_and_profit_in_greentech.html">John Doerr declared war on climate change in 2007</a>. In the four years since, Silicon Valley has lost any hope of leadership in PV solar, where its deep experience with silicon wafers might have been thought to give it a natural advantage.<br />
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In order to preserve both its working/middle class and something close to current global temperatures, the US needs to change its innovation system. The Greek referendum offers an important hint.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-59812195980912225832011-10-12T22:44:00.000-07:002011-10-12T22:48:28.001-07:00Wall Street Dissidents Backstop the Occupation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCmppF3zHxT4jTA2Yw2C8fE2WonK8eGXLeH93rBvm5se-7iyOVNe80l91HCB9vk9855k26qM3RVw277Zw781FWOFlOSmrqbCe7tT09y84p_xkxLZAvsMncXjsydJAiL36ZC7k2fg/s1600/angrytrader.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCmppF3zHxT4jTA2Yw2C8fE2WonK8eGXLeH93rBvm5se-7iyOVNe80l91HCB9vk9855k26qM3RVw277Zw781FWOFlOSmrqbCe7tT09y84p_xkxLZAvsMncXjsydJAiL36ZC7k2fg/s320/angrytrader.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>A crucial development in 2011 has been the way the Wall Street has managed to alienate so many of its natural supporters among economists, top economic journalists, and financial professionals.<br />
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Lots of mainstream finance commentators finally went ballistic over the state of financial policy. The most interesting group are the professional investors who have turned on their masters. I get to them at the end of the list of dissidents.<br />
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<b><u>The Angry Keynesians</u>. </b>Paul Krugman is Exhibit A, a 1990s liberal free-trader where strong state intervention was the exception more than the rule, but who opposed the Bush tax cuts and for the ten years since has railed tirelessly about every replay of deregulatory trickle-down business-led plutonomics. He summarized the Bush Years as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html">"The Big Zero," </a> denounces <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/opinion/25krugman.html?sudsredirect=true"> "The Austerity Delusion," </a> <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/the-urge-to-purge/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto">"The Urge to Purge," </a> <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/cockroach-ideas/">"Cockroach Ideas," </a>among many others. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/economic-bleeding-cure.html?src=me&ref=general">The "Economic Bleeding Cure" </a>is a classic of this genre.<br />
<blockquote>Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects. </blockquote>Keynesians care about the development of society, and are confused and enraged by the casual blowing off of these concerns by policymakers in the US and the EU alike. "Well, this is a miserable step in the wrong direction" says <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/11/dont_punish_the_poor_economist_jeffrey">Jeffrey Sachs, </a>starting a denunciation of both parties in the US. "From a self-preservation angle, this is lunacy," notes <a href="http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/04/09/the-ugly-the-ugly-and-the-ugly-a-look-at-the-2011-funding-deal/">David Dayen. </a><br />
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Nicholas Kristof alienated some Occupier supporters with a somewhat patronizing attempt to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/opinion/sunday/kristof-the-bankers-and-the-revolutionaries.html">suggest demands, </a>but he is also the author of the excellent summation "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1&hp">Our Banana Republic,"</a> voicing anger at policy suports for social devolution. But you know these people.<br />
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<b><u>Prophetic Re-regulators</u>. </b> This group consists of high-end experts in technical domains -- mortgage industry regulation, complex credit instruments, international banking relationshiops -- who have become relentless and sometimes furious bloggers. They focus on the non-improvement of the financial system itself -- not so much on its social effects as its continuing rottenness, now propped by massive government subsidies (a 0.16% interbank funds rate for example) and complicity in the perpetuation of the shadow banking system that caused the problem in the first place. You know most of these folks too: the sober Simon Johnson and James Kwak at the <a href="http://baselinescenario.com/">Baseline Scenario</a>, Dayen on <a href="http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/10/09/this-time-isnt-different-because-the-banks-made-that-decision/">housing</a>, and Yves Smith at the remarkable <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/">Naked Capitalism</a> on housing, banking as a criminal enterprise, and idiotic political dynamics that are forcing a choice between shooting the economy (Republicans) or <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/team-obama-fiddles-while-debt-ceiling-fires-burn.html">bleeding it to death</a> (Dems). <br />
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<u><b>Cassandras of Systemic Failure.</b></u> The lead people here are in Europe, with Martin Wolf at the front of the pack. These are a mixture of journalists and economists who accept the need for "adjustment" of the most crisis-ridden economies -- read drastically lowered living standards for the 99 percent -- but think politicians aren't being smart or independent enough to manage even that. Wolf recently predicted a lost decade unless governments simply <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/045aab84-e61c-11e0-960c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ZPnH3A9r">cranked up the printing press </a>and created money, denouncing sadism towards populations along the way. He often points out that <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f84a5d76-f368-11e0-b98c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1adOyrJr6">economic failure was not caused by bad behavior</a> but by not very enlightened market judgements, e.g. public debt burdens that were lower in Ireland and Spain than in France and Germany. This is the Japan Syndrome writ large by pro-capitalists who see that financial corruption and momentum have undermined the systems that made capitalism stable for a while.<br />
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<b><u>Raging Traders.</u> </b>These are working investors, many of whom write blogs to attract customers to their investment business, which often consists of selling their trading advice. Post-facto posts are the sign over the entrance meant to encourage signing up for the live action inside the tent. These people trade every day, feel shafted and betrayed, and are absolutely furious.<br />
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Here's the boss of Phil's Stock World on the horn last December talking about Obama's capitulation on the tax cut extensions. Remember, Phil likes numbers.<br />
<blockquote><span class="submit_an_article"></span><br />
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</blockquote><blockquote><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdFLPn30dvQ" rel="nofollow">Way to take it from your new Republican Masters</a>! Not since Jack sold his cow for some magic beans has a deal like this been made by our "leadership" where families earning between $35,000 and $64,000 go $7,800 further into debt to get a $613 tax break <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576023772342189318.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories" rel="nofollow">while families earning between $5M and $10M get $38,590</a> and families earning $50M to $100M get $380,590 and families (or Corporations, of course) earning $500M to $1Bn get $3,859,000 or about 12,590 times more than the average middle class family but, then again, they deserve it because – they are that much better than you are!<br />
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Face it, unless you are in an income category where your tax benefit has 5 digits, you are what George Orwell (who worked in England’s Ministry of Propaganda) called a "<i>Prole</i>." In <i>1984</i> the Proles (proletariat) were the vast majority of the populace, the working class of Oceana. Though the proles are the majority, they are unimportant. The Party explicitly teaches that the Proles are "<i>natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals</i>". As one of the Party Leaders observes: "<i>the relative freedom of working-class people is merely a symptom of the contempt in which they are held</i>". . . .<br />
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<a href="http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2010/12/17/saupload_englehart.jpg" rel="lightbox"></a>You’re not going to be any trouble are you? Enjoy your $613, little people. That’s what, about a month’s worth of gasoline and cable TV? Congratulations on your voting acumen – you certainly have gotten the Government that you deserve! . .. . </blockquote><blockquote><br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHcXtG_C3qM&feature=player_embedded" rel="nofollow">Congressman Ryan Paul . . . points out</a>: "<i>Whose money is this after all?</i>" It’s not your money that your family is going $7,800 further into debt to protect – it’s THEIR money. THEY earned it and THEY are darned well going to keep it. "<i>Hey</i>," you might say, "<i>I work for THEM – didn’t I make that money and isn’t this OUR country that’s in debt and needs responsible fiscal policy?</i>" Well, that’s just Commie talk and you’d better watch yourself – we’ve already sent your name of to HomeSec so consider yourself on notice… </blockquote><blockquote>The Proles in this country are dumb enough but what amazes me is the people who support the tax cuts thinking you are "<i>one of THEM</i>" when "<i>they</i>" look at you the same way you step over a homeless man in the streets. $858Bn is the NATIONAL Debt that we are taking on to fund these cuts. The cuts work out to about 0.75% of your income and your family share of the additional debt burden is $7,800 so, unless you are making AT LEAST $1M PER YEAR as a corporation or individual, this tax cut is a net loss for you. Once you clear that $1M hurdle, it’s all gravy flowing uphill to your plate! Even better if you are a "<i>Corporate Citizen</i>" – you have no real debt obligation to this nation because, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/12/business/main2558620.shtml" rel="nofollow">like Haliburton and many, many others</a> – you can simply move whenever you want – to avoid taxation AND prosecution!<br />
<img align="right" hspace="6" src="zotero://attachment/3345/saupload_images_1" vspace="6" /><br />
As Bloomberg proclaims today "<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/dec2010/pi20101215_516004.htm" rel="nofollow">It’s a Great Time to Be Rich</a>,"</blockquote><br />
You can often read this kind fury on Phil's blog. The<a href="http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/6284-philip-davis/200775-the-long-con"> "Long Con"</a> is a fascinating example for its somewhat Marx-like systematicity. Phil makes his money every day by betting on the blindly destructive greed and cowardice of financial and political leaders, which he describes as such.<br />
<br />
Here's another professional financial advisor, Adam Lass, the editor of Wealth Daily, writing about <a href="http://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/wealth-preservation-during-depression/3259">Wealth Preservation During Depression</a><br />
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<blockquote>The central bankers want us to think their fountains of unlimited imaginary money are our sole hope of escaping yawning pits of economic hell. For these apparatchiks, it's all about hanging on to the levers of power any way they can.<br />
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The private bankers claim that if we just turn them loose from the stranglehold of post-crash regulation — and allow them to tangle the world in a impenetrable web of insanely profitable derivatives and bonds again — they will plant our feet firmly on the road to financial nirvana. </blockquote><blockquote><br />
To these guys, you and I are just foot soldiers and cannon fodder. Our jobs, homes, wealth, and health? Collateral damage.</blockquote> Here its class war <i>on</i> Wall Street, not just between Wall Street and Main Street.<br />
<br />
My final example is from the <i>Wall Street Examiner</i>, where Lee Adler states, <a href="http://wallstreetexaminer.com/2011/10/09/i-stand-with-the-protesters/">"I Stand with the Protestors."</a> It is a howl of rage that starts like this:<br />
<blockquote>We as a society must stop pretending. Most of us think that we still have money in the bank to protect, so we go along with the game of extend and pretend. For some of us, the game has already ended. The rapacious zero interest rate policy that I call Bernankecide has already robbed millions of savers of their life savings. This is the reality that has yet to hit home for many Americans who are content to wallow in the status quo. Unfortunately, the longer it takes for them to wake up, the worse their, and our, fate will be. </blockquote><blockquote><br />
My mother and millions of other senior citizens are among the victims of the game that policy makers and those who empower them are playing. Their life savings are gone because Bernankecide, the financial genocide of the elderly, forced them to spend their principal. Now the government is indirectly confiscating 8% of my income because I must support my mother. That percentage is likely to grow as her health deteriorates.<br />
Millions of other boomers are in the same boat. They are forced to pay this immoral hidden tax because Ben Bernanke decided that the innocent must pay for the sins of the guilty. While Bernanke’s ZIRP goes on allowing the banksters to continue to collect their fat bonuses, it steals the savings of millions of Americans, eliminates their disposable income, and cuts the spending power of millions of others who must now support those rendered destitute. The guilty benefit, and the innocent are punished. </blockquote><blockquote>Bernanke knows that, yet he continues to side with the criminal bankers in support of the financial genocide of the super elderly, and their children, the baby boomers who must increasingly support them.</blockquote><br />
Adler identifies himself in effect as Wall Street's 99 percent - screwed by the investment Bigs and with no end in sight. <br />
<br />
In the late 1990s I wrote an article called "Business Civil Wars." It was clearly premature. Occupy Wall Street has brought this last group to the surface, and they are providing endless detail about the contradictory social relations within finance capitalism itself.Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-14357962139489655862011-09-29T12:24:00.000-07:002012-05-07T02:06:31.961-07:00Feeding the Financial CrisisThe situation is easily summarized.<br />
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In August 2007, the first clear signs surfaced that the financial sector had been piling up profits and individual payouts by greatly increasing the risk of their investments. They did this while convincing themselves and nearly everyone else that risk had not really increased. They used very high leverage, invented new instruments backed with dubious collatoral, etc - all this has been well analyzed in books like <i>Econned</i>. When many people began to notice the AAA collatoralized debt obligations were junk, their value crashed, along with market averages overall, while highly exposed firms either went out of business (Lehman) or were bailed out by the government -- to the tune of $10-11 trillion (or maybe <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/randy-wray-euro-toast-anyone-the-meltdown-picks-up-speed.html">$29 trillion).</a><br />
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Government debts increased rapidly in Europe and the US. While some government stimulus for the real economy was provided, it was not enough. The financial crisis became an economic crisis, and there has been no real recovery -- only 16 of 100 American cities in one survey have recovered even 1/2 of the jobs lost during the initial downturn. <br />
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Four years after the 2007 beginning, the financial sector is again (or still) in systemic trouble.<br />
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Hence austerity: austerity, laced with free-market ideology now functioning less as thought than as a paralyzing hangover, is in effect forcing governments to keep all possible government resources liquid for the next bank bailout.<br />
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In addition, most observers are convinced that the real problem is not private but public debt. There is enormous discussion of the bad behavior of Greece, which has to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/27/eurozone-crisis-debt-policy">scrape for every ten billion euros</a> while private bank exposures are at least an order of magnitude larger. Ireland is also going through a finance-created depression but it is rarely mentioned, perhaps because the bad actors there cannot be said to be tax-avoiding shopkeepers but the country's entire banking sector.<br />
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Meanwhile, bank reform has been paltry and pushed back through the concentrated efforts of the financial sector. Regulators can't even see the majority of financial transactions, much less regulate or tax them. The head of the French banking authority recently estimated that <a href="http://www.europe1.fr/MediaCenter/Emissions/L-interview-de-Jean-Pierre-Elkabbach/Videos/Jouyet-denonce-une-grande-opacite-sur-les-marches/">opaque transactions form somewhere between 50% and 75% of the total.</a><br />
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There will be no recovery for economies, only for banks. That is the post-feudal tradeoff that rules policy. <br />
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Thus banks continue to make grotesque fortunes on a scale condemned by all known religions and ethical traditions in the same pre-2007 way, through junk and leverage (pious<a href="http://baselinescenario.com/2011/09/28/anti-american-bankers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29"> Deutsche Bank has "assets" (positions) 35x equity)</a>, added to which for several years has been essentially zero-interest public money on which they can make an automatic spread, meaning even more free money. The banks' position seems to be that: <br />
<ul>
<li>the government should buy everything forever, meaning unlimited bailouts at a moment's notice</li>
<li>but the financial sector should pay no t<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-28/eu-proposes-78-billion-a-year-financial-transaction-tax-to-start-in-2014.html">ax for govermments</a></li>
<li>hundreds of millions of ordinary people should just lower their standard of living accordingly. </li>
</ul>
There are deep cultural questions lying behind what is obviously a disgusting ethical situation: <br />
<ul>
<li> where did the banks get their sense of entitlement, particularly to salaries in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually for individuals? Someone who gets mad at the idea of being taxed at more than 15% a year on $300 million, as Steven <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/steven-schwarzman-obama-a_n_683178.html">Schwarzman</a> did, might be described as insane.</li>
<li>Why does it seem like the people protesting (e.g les "indignés" of Greece, Spain, Israel, Wall Street) are a tiny minority? Is it only media (non)coverage or <a href="http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/09/29/is-democracy-the-problem-or-money-corrupted-governance/">bad coverage</a>?</li>
<li>Relatedly, why is there no public or popular critique of the entire theory of economies and societies that underlay a banking system that had failed and had to be rescued?</li>
<li>It is said that (most) "people don't see any alternative," but WHY NOT? There are lots of ideas out there, and even more suffering and depression, so how long will the gelling take? Sure, the US Democrats and the French Socialists proposed nothing of any importance, but why are people waiting for them? </li>
</ul>
The "decline of the West" is being executed from within and from the top. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how the system's logic is now working. Governments are <a href="http://www.huliq.com/3257/dylan-ratigans-rant-msnbc-takes-both-parties-and-bought-congress">protecting extraction </a>at the expense of production. However, had I been Chairman Mao, believing that heightening the contradictions of capitalism would hasten the system's demise, I couldn't have done better than to gut manufacturing while feeling finance. Were I to rewrite the <i>Terminator</i> series, I couldn't do better than to replace the military net that generates the Schwarzenegger character with the bots behind program trading (though the <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/the-bots-of-fx.html">pros won't help me with the script).</a><br />
<ul></ul>Chris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.com0