U.S. pork exports to Mexico have fallen in value in the face of Mexico's retaliatory tariffs, while European and Canadian pork producers are seizing the opportunity.
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
From the Winning! desk:
quote unquote: J. M. Keynes
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” ― John Maynard Keynes
Bookkeeping
Spend like there is a tomorrow.
Liberals and progressives should be wary of making an issue of deficits, despite the imbalance resulting from the GOP's hypocritical tax cuts. The federal debt, per se, is not a problem. If the government used deficit spending to invest in the nation's future prosperity, as it must and should, there would be no occasion for complaint. What needs to be attacked is our retrogressive tax system, corporate welfare, and military waste and adventurism. Deficit funding -- on efficient and economically competitive infrastructure; health care; lifetime education (not just pre-K to college and technical school, but skill-maintenance and retraining to avoid obsolescence); housing; and guaranteed basic income -- would be a bargain in the long run.
"My enemy's enemies...?"
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| Юлий Ганф |
A Soviet-era cartoon from the 1950s satirizing American politics.
Must Read
"For example, the idea that wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation, is easy to succumb to if one has not been exposed first to Marx’s poignant argument that precisely the opposite applies: wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights that rely, for their reproduction, almost exclusively on false consciousness."
Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff, wrote this searing account of European capitalism and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes: How I became an erratic Marxist by Yanis Varoufakis (Guardian).
Download: Reframing the debate
[This is from the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research]
By Dean Baker (2011)
Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.
This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.
This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.
By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments -- that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward. (Hard copies are available for purchase, at cost.) Distributing the book for free not only enables it to reach a wider audience, but Baker hopes to drive home one of the book's main points via his own example. While the e-book is free, donations to the Center for Economic and Policy Research are welcomed.
Read the book (other formats coming soon)
PDF | Kindle (.AZW) | NOOK (.EPUB) | .MOBI
Paperback
The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
By Dean Baker (2011)
Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.
This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.
This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.
By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments -- that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward. (Hard copies are available for purchase, at cost.) Distributing the book for free not only enables it to reach a wider audience, but Baker hopes to drive home one of the book's main points via his own example. While the e-book is free, donations to the Center for Economic and Policy Research are welcomed.
Read the book (other formats coming soon)
PDF | Kindle (.AZW) | NOOK (.EPUB) | .MOBI
Paperback
Punditry
Here's a handy list of blogs edited by The Economist:
- Analects | China
- Americas view | The Americas
- Babbage | Science and technology
- Bagehot's notebook | British politics
- Banyan | Asia
- Baobab | Africa
- Blighty | Britain
- Buttonwood's notebook | Financial markets
- Charlemagne's notebook | European politics
- Clausewitz | Defence, security and diplomacy
- Democracy in America | American politics
- Eastern approaches | Ex-communist Europe
- Feast and famine | Demography and development
- Free exchange | Economics
- Game theory | Sports
- Graphic detail | Charts, maps and infographics
- Gulliver | Business travel
- Johnson | Language
- Leviathan | Public policy
- Lexington's notebook | American politics
- Newsbook | News analysis
- Prospero | Books, arts and culture
- Schumpeter | Business and management
The economy: Professor Robert Reich Explains It All for You
Got a couple of minutes? Want to understand what's up with the economy? Here you go:
Alternatives: Beyond Capitalism
The Alternative Economy Cultures (alt.econ.cult) program last spring brought together leading international and Finnish thinkers, cultural practitioners and activists to present alternative economic visions. The aim was to tackle not just financial, but social, cultural, institutional, human, material, emotional and intellectual forms of capital; not just individual gain, boosting, balancing or bail-outs, but common good, peer-to-peer, shared wealth and appropriate reward-for-effort.
"Parecon" stands for Participatory Economics, a vision for an alternative way to operate an economy, neither capitalism nor twentieth century socialism. Here, activist and economist Michael Albert introduces Parecon to the gathering in Finland.
"Parecon" stands for Participatory Economics, a vision for an alternative way to operate an economy, neither capitalism nor twentieth century socialism. Here, activist and economist Michael Albert introduces Parecon to the gathering in Finland.
The Economic Crisis: Lies. Damned Lies. And Statistics.
We have a jobs crisis not a regulatory uncertainty problem. "The demand for goods and services is depressed because of the collapse of the housing and stock market bubbles—the financial crisis—that has led to both a deleveraging (paying off debts) of households and a cratering of the construction sector. The initial shock of the bubble’s burst then cascaded into non-construction business investment that dried up as customers disappeared. Finally, all of this led to state and local governments cutting back services and jobs as tax revenues plunged." Regulatory uncertainty: A phony explanation for our jobs problem by Lawrence Mishel (Economic Policy Institute 2011-09-27).
Economy: In the middle of the worst economic decline in over 80 years, we need fiscal stimuli, not fiscal austerity
In the political current climate, mainstream Keynesianism, as espoused by economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, has come to seem almost left-wing. Is the Keynesian critique of austerity correct, and is a return to Keynesianism what we need?
Must read: Freezing Out Hope by Paul Krugman -- After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?
Keynesianism only seems left-wing because the center has caved rightward. First, even a Nobel Prize does not protect one from ostracism by the mainstream of the economics profession today if you persist in dispensing Keynesian wisdom and challenge the assumption that unfettered markets always know best. As hard as this may be for non-economists to believe, Stiglitiz and Krugman are now persona non grata within the economics profession. Second, in the 1950s and 60s even Tories and Republicans had to begrudgingly accede to the wisdom of financial regulation and Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies. But that day is long past. Now even Labour and Democrats buy into the myth that markets, including financial markets, can be relied on to self-regulate, and governments must engage in fiscal austerity when recessions create temporary budget deficits. When the center caves right, center left appears to be left.The rest of the story: Digging In A Hole -- Robin Hahnel, economics professor at American University and author of Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation and, with Michael Albert, of The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, discusses the continuing mismanagement of the economic crisis in the UK, Ireland and the US with Alex Doherty of New Left Project.
There are two important lessons to be drawn. (1) While socialists should not have to lead the charge for Keynesian policies to ameliorate capitalist crises, unfortunately that is the position we find ourselves in. Right now we must not only do our own work – explaining why all versions of capitalism are far less desirable than participatory, democratic socialism – but do the work of Keynesian reformers as well who have lost influence in all major political parties. (2) There is no point in trying to explain to Tories and Republicans why their policies are flawed. They have chosen to embrace ill-advised, discredited, nineteenth century economic policies because these policies serve their most important purpose – further pressing the class war they have been winning for more than three decades. Their first instinct when a crisis hits is not to search for policies that would actually solve the crisis. Instead they search their “wish list” for ways to take advantage of the crisis to press for changes that serve their class interests – further cuts in social spending, further concessions regarding wages, benefits, and working conditions, more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and of course more corporate welfare like the bailouts doled out to the financial industry. The fact that every one of these policies will only deepen the current crisis is of no concern to them.
When capitalism proves completely incapable of putting our productive potential to good use what is called for is replacing capitalism with socialism. A return to Keynesianism would be to settle for only part of a loaf, and leave us vulnerable to another counter revolutionary roll back of hard won gains, like the one we have been living through. However, unless I am pleasantly surprised, and leftists can win the loyalty and support of a majority of the population for replacing capitalism with socialism much sooner than I foresee, there is no road to participatory, democratic socialism that does not run through many successful reform campaigns to bring Keynesian policies back in vogue.
Must read: Freezing Out Hope by Paul Krugman -- After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?
Saturday Catchup 2010-08-21
"It's about the economy, stupid": "Pundits and politicians are working themselves into hysteria over a mosque near Ground Zero. But this election won't be about mosques in Manhattan. It won't even be about the deficit, really. It will be about manufacturing on Main Street, and which party can talk effectively about the progressive solutions Americans desire. Not surprisingly, polls from Gallup to the Wall Street Journal show Americans are worried most about the economy and jobs. And a just-released poll -- from progressive outfits Campaign for America's Future and Democracy Corps with sponsorship from MoveOn.org Political Action and two labor unions -- gives a more detailed look at what voters are looking for. Respondents, in particular the 'rising American electorate' -- youth, single women and minorities that constitute a majority of voters and are President Obama's most supportive base -- support bold steps for renewing the economy." -- It's about Main Street, not the mosque by Katrina vanden Heuvel (Washington Post 2010-08-13).
Another overnight success: "The story in American history I most like to tell is the one about how women got the right to vote 90 years ago this month. It has everything. Adventure! Suspense! Treachery! Drunken legislators! But, first, there was a 70-year slog. Which is really the important part." -- My Favorite August by Gail Collins (New York Times 2010-08-13).
CSI Wall Street: "The government's $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG's collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand-moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public." -- The AIG Bailout Scandal by William Greider (The Nation 2010-08-06).
Game Day: "On Sunday in DC, I attended the 17th ballpark protest of the Arizona Diamondbacks during the 2011 baseball season. Like the other actions - in cities from Houston to San Francisco to Milwaukee - people chanted a loud and clear message to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig: move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona and make the state pay a price for enacting legislation that sacrifices immigrant families at the altar of election year politics. But this demonstration was also deeply different from the 16 others. It was a day of rain, risk-takers, racists, and rancor. And it couldn't have been more terrific." -- 'Today We Did Some Good': The Diamondbacks Demonstration in DC by Dave Zirin (TheNation/TheNotion 2010-08-16).
Go away: "Frank and Jamie McCourt are embodiments of the boom-and-bust ethos of the past decade, a miraculous period when a pair of relative unknowns could borrow and bluster their way into a lifestyle that includes mansions, private planes, and one of the premier trophy properties in the history of sports. Now, as it all threatens to unravel along with their 40-year relationship, the McCourts have embarked on one last luxury binge, hiring some of the priciest lawyers in the business, including, on Jamie's team, David Boies, who just successfully fought to have California's same-sex marriage ban overturned, and Bert Fields, who has represented the Beatles and Tom Cruise, among others. In Frank's corner is Stephen Susman, a Houston-based litigator described by the American Bar Association Journal as "a voracious animal" who "scares people on his own side." As allegations have flown back and forth like spitballs, efforts to settle the case have been unsuccessful, and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon has raised the possibility that if the couple can't reach an agreement, the Dodgers might have to be sold for no other reason than to pay their legal bills." -- Extreme Moneyball by Richard Siklos (Business Week 2010-08-12).
Although this is obviously meant to avenge Hayek, it's not a bad representation of both sides of the argument. Just so there's no misunderstanding, though, here's Paul Krugman's explanation of why Hayek and his ilk are utterly full of crap.
Wipeout: When people's homes are being destroyed and other people's children are taken away from them for years at a time, a few pieces of foam-core that float in the water hardly seem like the most pressing cause to fight for. But that's exactly where Surfing for Peace, a rag-tag group of Israeli beach boys, international activists and a founding father of surfing, has decided to draw a line in the sand. -- The Siege vs. the Surfboards by David Sheen (Haaretz 2010-08-12).
The movies in your mind: "'North of the Border' is at once an engaging, provocative, revealing and amusing documentary and a searing indictment of North American anti-war and social justice activists, journalists and film-makers for their failure to break with President Obama. Written and directed by the first-time documentary film-maker Gilbert Hurricane, the film uses Oliver Stone’s recent documentary 'South of the Border' as its inspiration and tactical departure point, beginning with a brief recap of the advances made by socialist leaders in South America and asking 'What about North of the border?'" -- A review of the Gilbert Hurricane documentary “North of the Border” by Gary Gordon (Fire Dog Lake 2010-07-29).
Speaking of movies: "'Eat, Pray, Love,' the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir, received mediocre reviews when it was released last week. But the film’s premise, the journey of self-discovery for one modern, working white woman, it’s sure to inspire droves of other women to book similar trips to faraway destinations — if they can afford it. And it’s all in the name of self-discovery. Sandip Roy writes at New America Media that for white women, the more exotic the backdrop, the better the degree of introspection. 'It’s not Gilbert’s fault, but as someone who comes from India, I have an instinctive reflex reaction to books about white people discovering themselves in brown places. I want to gag, shoot and leave.'" -- Eat, Pray, Love and Leave? by Naima Ramos-Chapman (ColorLines 2010-08-16).
Always room for Dion:
The Return of Deja Vu: "Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, 'It's deja vu all over again.' Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq war showed us the same thing — and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger — and yet the new financial 'reform' bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing — and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again. In a Yogi Berra country, the jarring lessons of history are remembered as mere flickers of deja vu — if they are remembered at all. Most often, we forget completely, seeing in George Santayana's refrain not a dark warning, but a cheery celebration. Why have we become so dismissive of history's lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history's mistakes?" -- Insanity all over again by David Sirota (Creators Syndicate 2010-08-21).
Must-See TV: There once was a time when nobility, courage and unbending optimism were the norm not the exception: "Ask most people today what the Freedom Rides were, and they can't tell you. Or they misunderstand its significance, painting the Freedom Riders as lightweight pacifists who just lay down and allowed themselves to be beaten. That couldn't be further from the truth. Those who, like me, were alive during that time have since seen pictures of John Lewis being beaten up, but I'd forgotten that white Southerners had actually set a bus on fire. It was a remarkable moment. They were literally holding the door closed. The bus was a crematorium on wheels. Thankfully, the Freedom Riders managed to escape." -- Civil Rights' Most Misunderstood Moment: The Freedom Rides by Stanley Crouch (The Root 2010-08-17). To arrange a showing of Freedom Riders, contact Firelight Media (http://firelightmedia.org/.
A Day In The Life: "At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning. After breakfast and a quick read of the papers, the president sees his daughters, Sasha and Malia, off to school. Then he enters the private, wood-paneled family elevator—installed in the same shaft used by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin to bring his pet pony upstairs—perhaps taking a moment to straighten his tie in the mirrored back wall of the cab. He descends two stories, alights on the ground floor, just outside the White House kitchen, passes down a short, vaulted corridor and through a greenhouse-like antechamber known as the Palm Room, and walks along the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden and leads to the Oval Office. His 450th day in office has begun." -- Washington, We Have a Problem by Todd Purdum (Vanity Fair 2010-08).
Hey, kids, rock 'n' roll wasn't always as bland as porridge. Back in the day...
Tourism: "Everywhere you go in Pyongyang, the skyline is dominated by a huge 105-story concrete pyramid, the Ryugyong Hotel, which looms over the city like the pyramid-shaped Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984. It was intended to be the world's tallest hotel, but it turned out to be structurally unsound, so it was never completed. It's been standing there, abandoned, since 1992. It doesn't appear on any official maps, and nobody ever talks about it, because it's such a horrendous embarrassment. The most memorable thing about Pyongyang, though, is the total darkness that descends at night. Because electricity is in short supply, there are hardly any lights at all -- a couple of bulbs here and there, and the headlights of passing buses. People are out and about, but all you can see are the dark shapes right beside you. Back at the hotel, you look out the window and there's just nothing. It's like the whole city was just swallowed up." -- What's It Like to Be a Tourist in North Korea? (Foreign policy 2010-08-16).
Get Into Reading is an initiative started nine years ago by Jane Davis, an English lecturer at Liverpool University with the purpose of introducing great literature to people who would never otherwise encounter it. That is still one of the principles of Get Into Reading, and the charity to which it gave birth, The Reader Organisation. Yet along the way, the goalposts shifted. Davis has effectively turned William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson and WB Yeats, into therapists. -- Well read: Literature is being used as part of revolutionary therapy to transform people's lives by Brian Viner (The Independent 2010-08-14).
Antoine Dodson's furious outburst on a news channel after a sex attack on his sister turned into a viral YouTube video and inspired a hit song. Now he is making the most of his fame. -- Antoine Dodson: from local news item to internet sensation by Paul Gallagher (The Observer 2010-08-15).
See also ‘Bed Intruder’ Rant Earns Family a New Home (New York Times 2010-08-19).
Ideas want to be free: Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might. -- No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? by Frank Thadeusz (Spiegel Online 2010-08-18). See also: The Costs of Ownership: Why Copyright Protection Will Hurt the Fashion Industry by Johanna Blakley (The Design Observer Group 2010-08-19).
Pray for Peas: Did Alcoholics Anonymous “dumb down” the Serenity Prayer? Much of the prayer’s worldwide popularity is due to AA. In the mid-twentieth century, AA adopted the prayer as a part of its culture of recovery, and it remains a mainstay today. AA’s version runs as follows: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s family, however, prefers a different text: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” -- You can quote them by Fred R. Shapiro (Yale Alumni 2010-7/8).
Antiquities: Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra in Jordan through the expertise of British conservation specialists from the Courtauld Institute in London. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti. The British experts removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose "exceptional" artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art. -- Discovery of ancient cave paintings in Petra stuns art scholars by Dalya Alberge (The Observer 2010-08-22}.
Not The Onion: Those Whacky Republicans, Democrat division:
Another overnight success: "The story in American history I most like to tell is the one about how women got the right to vote 90 years ago this month. It has everything. Adventure! Suspense! Treachery! Drunken legislators! But, first, there was a 70-year slog. Which is really the important part." -- My Favorite August by Gail Collins (New York Times 2010-08-13).
CSI Wall Street: "The government's $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG's collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand-moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public." -- The AIG Bailout Scandal by William Greider (The Nation 2010-08-06).
Game Day: "On Sunday in DC, I attended the 17th ballpark protest of the Arizona Diamondbacks during the 2011 baseball season. Like the other actions - in cities from Houston to San Francisco to Milwaukee - people chanted a loud and clear message to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig: move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona and make the state pay a price for enacting legislation that sacrifices immigrant families at the altar of election year politics. But this demonstration was also deeply different from the 16 others. It was a day of rain, risk-takers, racists, and rancor. And it couldn't have been more terrific." -- 'Today We Did Some Good': The Diamondbacks Demonstration in DC by Dave Zirin (TheNation/TheNotion 2010-08-16).
Go away: "Frank and Jamie McCourt are embodiments of the boom-and-bust ethos of the past decade, a miraculous period when a pair of relative unknowns could borrow and bluster their way into a lifestyle that includes mansions, private planes, and one of the premier trophy properties in the history of sports. Now, as it all threatens to unravel along with their 40-year relationship, the McCourts have embarked on one last luxury binge, hiring some of the priciest lawyers in the business, including, on Jamie's team, David Boies, who just successfully fought to have California's same-sex marriage ban overturned, and Bert Fields, who has represented the Beatles and Tom Cruise, among others. In Frank's corner is Stephen Susman, a Houston-based litigator described by the American Bar Association Journal as "a voracious animal" who "scares people on his own side." As allegations have flown back and forth like spitballs, efforts to settle the case have been unsuccessful, and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon has raised the possibility that if the couple can't reach an agreement, the Dodgers might have to be sold for no other reason than to pay their legal bills." -- Extreme Moneyball by Richard Siklos (Business Week 2010-08-12).
Although this is obviously meant to avenge Hayek, it's not a bad representation of both sides of the argument. Just so there's no misunderstanding, though, here's Paul Krugman's explanation of why Hayek and his ilk are utterly full of crap.
Wipeout: When people's homes are being destroyed and other people's children are taken away from them for years at a time, a few pieces of foam-core that float in the water hardly seem like the most pressing cause to fight for. But that's exactly where Surfing for Peace, a rag-tag group of Israeli beach boys, international activists and a founding father of surfing, has decided to draw a line in the sand. -- The Siege vs. the Surfboards by David Sheen (Haaretz 2010-08-12).
The movies in your mind: "'North of the Border' is at once an engaging, provocative, revealing and amusing documentary and a searing indictment of North American anti-war and social justice activists, journalists and film-makers for their failure to break with President Obama. Written and directed by the first-time documentary film-maker Gilbert Hurricane, the film uses Oliver Stone’s recent documentary 'South of the Border' as its inspiration and tactical departure point, beginning with a brief recap of the advances made by socialist leaders in South America and asking 'What about North of the border?'" -- A review of the Gilbert Hurricane documentary “North of the Border” by Gary Gordon (Fire Dog Lake 2010-07-29).
Speaking of movies: "'Eat, Pray, Love,' the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir, received mediocre reviews when it was released last week. But the film’s premise, the journey of self-discovery for one modern, working white woman, it’s sure to inspire droves of other women to book similar trips to faraway destinations — if they can afford it. And it’s all in the name of self-discovery. Sandip Roy writes at New America Media that for white women, the more exotic the backdrop, the better the degree of introspection. 'It’s not Gilbert’s fault, but as someone who comes from India, I have an instinctive reflex reaction to books about white people discovering themselves in brown places. I want to gag, shoot and leave.'" -- Eat, Pray, Love and Leave? by Naima Ramos-Chapman (ColorLines 2010-08-16).
Always room for Dion:
The Return of Deja Vu: "Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, 'It's deja vu all over again.' Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq war showed us the same thing — and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger — and yet the new financial 'reform' bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing — and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again. In a Yogi Berra country, the jarring lessons of history are remembered as mere flickers of deja vu — if they are remembered at all. Most often, we forget completely, seeing in George Santayana's refrain not a dark warning, but a cheery celebration. Why have we become so dismissive of history's lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history's mistakes?" -- Insanity all over again by David Sirota (Creators Syndicate 2010-08-21).
Must-See TV: There once was a time when nobility, courage and unbending optimism were the norm not the exception: "Ask most people today what the Freedom Rides were, and they can't tell you. Or they misunderstand its significance, painting the Freedom Riders as lightweight pacifists who just lay down and allowed themselves to be beaten. That couldn't be further from the truth. Those who, like me, were alive during that time have since seen pictures of John Lewis being beaten up, but I'd forgotten that white Southerners had actually set a bus on fire. It was a remarkable moment. They were literally holding the door closed. The bus was a crematorium on wheels. Thankfully, the Freedom Riders managed to escape." -- Civil Rights' Most Misunderstood Moment: The Freedom Rides by Stanley Crouch (The Root 2010-08-17). To arrange a showing of Freedom Riders, contact Firelight Media (http://firelightmedia.org/.
A Day In The Life: "At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning. After breakfast and a quick read of the papers, the president sees his daughters, Sasha and Malia, off to school. Then he enters the private, wood-paneled family elevator—installed in the same shaft used by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin to bring his pet pony upstairs—perhaps taking a moment to straighten his tie in the mirrored back wall of the cab. He descends two stories, alights on the ground floor, just outside the White House kitchen, passes down a short, vaulted corridor and through a greenhouse-like antechamber known as the Palm Room, and walks along the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden and leads to the Oval Office. His 450th day in office has begun." -- Washington, We Have a Problem by Todd Purdum (Vanity Fair 2010-08).
Hey, kids, rock 'n' roll wasn't always as bland as porridge. Back in the day...
Tourism: "Everywhere you go in Pyongyang, the skyline is dominated by a huge 105-story concrete pyramid, the Ryugyong Hotel, which looms over the city like the pyramid-shaped Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984. It was intended to be the world's tallest hotel, but it turned out to be structurally unsound, so it was never completed. It's been standing there, abandoned, since 1992. It doesn't appear on any official maps, and nobody ever talks about it, because it's such a horrendous embarrassment. The most memorable thing about Pyongyang, though, is the total darkness that descends at night. Because electricity is in short supply, there are hardly any lights at all -- a couple of bulbs here and there, and the headlights of passing buses. People are out and about, but all you can see are the dark shapes right beside you. Back at the hotel, you look out the window and there's just nothing. It's like the whole city was just swallowed up." -- What's It Like to Be a Tourist in North Korea? (Foreign policy 2010-08-16).
Get Into Reading is an initiative started nine years ago by Jane Davis, an English lecturer at Liverpool University with the purpose of introducing great literature to people who would never otherwise encounter it. That is still one of the principles of Get Into Reading, and the charity to which it gave birth, The Reader Organisation. Yet along the way, the goalposts shifted. Davis has effectively turned William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson and WB Yeats, into therapists. -- Well read: Literature is being used as part of revolutionary therapy to transform people's lives by Brian Viner (The Independent 2010-08-14).
Antoine Dodson's furious outburst on a news channel after a sex attack on his sister turned into a viral YouTube video and inspired a hit song. Now he is making the most of his fame. -- Antoine Dodson: from local news item to internet sensation by Paul Gallagher (The Observer 2010-08-15).
See also ‘Bed Intruder’ Rant Earns Family a New Home (New York Times 2010-08-19).
Ideas want to be free: Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might. -- No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? by Frank Thadeusz (Spiegel Online 2010-08-18). See also: The Costs of Ownership: Why Copyright Protection Will Hurt the Fashion Industry by Johanna Blakley (The Design Observer Group 2010-08-19).
Pray for Peas: Did Alcoholics Anonymous “dumb down” the Serenity Prayer? Much of the prayer’s worldwide popularity is due to AA. In the mid-twentieth century, AA adopted the prayer as a part of its culture of recovery, and it remains a mainstay today. AA’s version runs as follows: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s family, however, prefers a different text: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” -- You can quote them by Fred R. Shapiro (Yale Alumni 2010-7/8).
Antiquities: Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra in Jordan through the expertise of British conservation specialists from the Courtauld Institute in London. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti. The British experts removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose "exceptional" artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art. -- Discovery of ancient cave paintings in Petra stuns art scholars by Dalya Alberge (The Observer 2010-08-22}.
Not The Onion: Those Whacky Republicans, Democrat division:
quote unquote: British liberal theorist Leonard T. Hobhouse on the Titans of Industry
The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business
has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order -- a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin. - L. T. Hobhouse
Extra credit: excerpts of Liberalism (1911) by L.T. Hobhouse
has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order -- a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin. - L. T. HobhouseExtra credit: excerpts of Liberalism (1911) by L.T. Hobhouse
Economics: Common sense Nobel
by Jamie Bartlett
This month's most surprising Nobel Prize winner was not Barack Obama but Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist from the University of Indiana who picked up the coveted Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science.
Not only is Ostrom the first female recipient, she is also not an economist. For the past 20 years, the Prize has been dominated by financial economists for their work on weird and wonderful sounding things like "option pricing formula" (Robert Merton, 1997 winner). When the financial markets were inflating the bubble, that was fine. But the Nobel panel clearly gets the zeitgeist. Awarding this year's prize to someone like Robert Engle (the 2003 winner who came up with a new formula for predicting volatility in financial markets) would seem rather odd after the biggest financial meltdown in the modern era. Ostrom, on the other hand, is the perfect choice. Her life has been dedicated to understanding humans can live sustainably with our environment. And coming just a month before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change, it couldn't be more topical.
Ostrom has been entirely devoted to understanding one thing: managing what are known as common pool resources. Common pool resources are resources that are ‘non-excludable' (it is impossible to prevent individuals from using them) and "rival" (use by one individual means that there is less available for next). In other words, no one really owns them, and we can all use them to destruction. Farming on a public field or fishing in common waters are the classic examples. The problem is this that is in everyone's interests to limit usage to ensure there are enough cod in the North Sea for the stock to replenish. But, left to our own devices, we will all over fish and exhaust these finite resources, and all be worse off for it.
Why does this happen? Suppose I am concerned about my carbon emissions and decide to walk to work rather than drive. I alone bear the costs of this altruism - getting wet, arriving to work late and so on. But everyone, including people who still drive, benefit just as much as me from the reduction in emissions and congestion that my act of civic duty afforded. I am left with what the economist calls the "sucker's pay-off" - all the costs and just a fraction of the benefit. And because no one can be excluded from enjoying the "positive externalities" of my sacrifice, (known as free-riding), I conclude, quite rationally, that driving to work is the best strategy, and wait for some other sucker to act first. So does everyone else.
Our environment is the biggest and most important common pool resource we have. But apply the logic to installing solar panels, taking a coach to southern France rather than a cheap flight, or taking my rubbish to the recycling point. Then multiply it by 60 million people. Then by six billion. The result is that we are unable to act together to achieve our mutual goals and all rush, quite sensibly and entirely rationally, towards ruin. In 1968 Garrett Hardin rather beautifully dubbed it the "tragedy of the commons".
Traditionally, there have been two major approaches to getting ourselves out of this rather unfortunate spot and they dominate political debate to this day. The first is the oldest of all: a government with coercive powers forcing us to act enforcing restrictions. A Leviathan that can manage the resource for us, setting limits on fishing for example, thereby forcing us to cooperate for the common good. The second is to harness the power of the market: privatise common-pool resources so the selfish farmer bears the cost of his actions, rather than passing it on to society. The economist calls this "internalizing the cost of the externality" - and so he then has an incentive to manage his consumption more wisely. In environmental terms, carbon trading is the obvious example, the "polluter pays" principle.
More than anyone else, Ostrom sought out and theorised a third way, based on the assumption that we do have the psychological and socio-moral capacity to find our way out of this unhappy malaise without coercion. In her classic work Governing the Commons (1990), she showed how across the world communities of people have been able to come together to manage collective resources sustainably, "who" as she puts it "are in an interdependent situation and can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically." In one famous example, Swiss Alpine cheese-makers with a grazing commons for their cattle managed to govern it sustainably with a simple rule - if you got three cows, you can pasture them in the commons, provided you carried them over from last winter - but you can't bring new cows in just for the summer. The community simply polices itself. Everyone knows whose cow is whose and no one transgresses the rule. This is what Ostrom calls polycentric governance.
Her work suits the times. It also has huge practical resonance for any number of local small-scale collective action problems. Her hopes that she would "shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation" has more than been realized. Her design principles of how to collectively manage resources have been applied all over the world, with the emergence of civic-led groups coming together off and on-line to get things sorted without government intervention. Not only that, Ostrom deserves great praise for the way she conducts the research itself, developing theories in the field by studying people's behavior, rather than generating a-historical models about human nature from a library. All in all, few would begrudge her the Nobel Prize.
And yet as the Copenhagen Summit approaches, some caution is needed. The relevance of Ostrom's award to the Summit - which hopes after all to deal with the greatest collective-action problem the world has ever seen - is widely noted. The timing itself is conspicuous. However, as Ostrom quite openly admits, the conditions for mutual collective management in the way she describes are quite restrictive - it tends to take place in small communities, with high visibility, high social capital, and clear enforceable sanctions. These conditions are certainly not met in a world of six billion people.
Therefore, I hope that Ostrom's work will be taken for what it is - proof that not every common pool problem can be best solved by government or market. But Ostrom herself has always been vocal that many collective action problems do need government enforcement. And when it comes to climate change, we don't have time to experiment with a multitude of potentially interesting civic led options; because we can't really afford to fail. The real task for Copenhagen will be to figure out where Ostrom's insights can be used - often together with government and the market incentivising collectively responsible behavior - and where only the clunking fist of national government legislation will do.
Jamie Bartlett is head of the independence program at the think tank Demos.
____________________________________________
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See, also: The Commons: From Tragedy to Celebrity (United for a Fair Economy 2009-10)
This month's most surprising Nobel Prize winner was not Barack Obama but Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist from the University of Indiana who picked up the coveted Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science.
Not only is Ostrom the first female recipient, she is also not an economist. For the past 20 years, the Prize has been dominated by financial economists for their work on weird and wonderful sounding things like "option pricing formula" (Robert Merton, 1997 winner). When the financial markets were inflating the bubble, that was fine. But the Nobel panel clearly gets the zeitgeist. Awarding this year's prize to someone like Robert Engle (the 2003 winner who came up with a new formula for predicting volatility in financial markets) would seem rather odd after the biggest financial meltdown in the modern era. Ostrom, on the other hand, is the perfect choice. Her life has been dedicated to understanding humans can live sustainably with our environment. And coming just a month before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change, it couldn't be more topical.
Ostrom has been entirely devoted to understanding one thing: managing what are known as common pool resources. Common pool resources are resources that are ‘non-excludable' (it is impossible to prevent individuals from using them) and "rival" (use by one individual means that there is less available for next). In other words, no one really owns them, and we can all use them to destruction. Farming on a public field or fishing in common waters are the classic examples. The problem is this that is in everyone's interests to limit usage to ensure there are enough cod in the North Sea for the stock to replenish. But, left to our own devices, we will all over fish and exhaust these finite resources, and all be worse off for it.
Why does this happen? Suppose I am concerned about my carbon emissions and decide to walk to work rather than drive. I alone bear the costs of this altruism - getting wet, arriving to work late and so on. But everyone, including people who still drive, benefit just as much as me from the reduction in emissions and congestion that my act of civic duty afforded. I am left with what the economist calls the "sucker's pay-off" - all the costs and just a fraction of the benefit. And because no one can be excluded from enjoying the "positive externalities" of my sacrifice, (known as free-riding), I conclude, quite rationally, that driving to work is the best strategy, and wait for some other sucker to act first. So does everyone else.
Our environment is the biggest and most important common pool resource we have. But apply the logic to installing solar panels, taking a coach to southern France rather than a cheap flight, or taking my rubbish to the recycling point. Then multiply it by 60 million people. Then by six billion. The result is that we are unable to act together to achieve our mutual goals and all rush, quite sensibly and entirely rationally, towards ruin. In 1968 Garrett Hardin rather beautifully dubbed it the "tragedy of the commons".
Traditionally, there have been two major approaches to getting ourselves out of this rather unfortunate spot and they dominate political debate to this day. The first is the oldest of all: a government with coercive powers forcing us to act enforcing restrictions. A Leviathan that can manage the resource for us, setting limits on fishing for example, thereby forcing us to cooperate for the common good. The second is to harness the power of the market: privatise common-pool resources so the selfish farmer bears the cost of his actions, rather than passing it on to society. The economist calls this "internalizing the cost of the externality" - and so he then has an incentive to manage his consumption more wisely. In environmental terms, carbon trading is the obvious example, the "polluter pays" principle.
More than anyone else, Ostrom sought out and theorised a third way, based on the assumption that we do have the psychological and socio-moral capacity to find our way out of this unhappy malaise without coercion. In her classic work Governing the Commons (1990), she showed how across the world communities of people have been able to come together to manage collective resources sustainably, "who" as she puts it "are in an interdependent situation and can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically." In one famous example, Swiss Alpine cheese-makers with a grazing commons for their cattle managed to govern it sustainably with a simple rule - if you got three cows, you can pasture them in the commons, provided you carried them over from last winter - but you can't bring new cows in just for the summer. The community simply polices itself. Everyone knows whose cow is whose and no one transgresses the rule. This is what Ostrom calls polycentric governance.
Her work suits the times. It also has huge practical resonance for any number of local small-scale collective action problems. Her hopes that she would "shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation" has more than been realized. Her design principles of how to collectively manage resources have been applied all over the world, with the emergence of civic-led groups coming together off and on-line to get things sorted without government intervention. Not only that, Ostrom deserves great praise for the way she conducts the research itself, developing theories in the field by studying people's behavior, rather than generating a-historical models about human nature from a library. All in all, few would begrudge her the Nobel Prize.
And yet as the Copenhagen Summit approaches, some caution is needed. The relevance of Ostrom's award to the Summit - which hopes after all to deal with the greatest collective-action problem the world has ever seen - is widely noted. The timing itself is conspicuous. However, as Ostrom quite openly admits, the conditions for mutual collective management in the way she describes are quite restrictive - it tends to take place in small communities, with high visibility, high social capital, and clear enforceable sanctions. These conditions are certainly not met in a world of six billion people.
Therefore, I hope that Ostrom's work will be taken for what it is - proof that not every common pool problem can be best solved by government or market. But Ostrom herself has always been vocal that many collective action problems do need government enforcement. And when it comes to climate change, we don't have time to experiment with a multitude of potentially interesting civic led options; because we can't really afford to fail. The real task for Copenhagen will be to figure out where Ostrom's insights can be used - often together with government and the market incentivising collectively responsible behavior - and where only the clunking fist of national government legislation will do.
Jamie Bartlett is head of the independence program at the think tank Demos.
____________________________________________
See, also: The Commons: From Tragedy to Celebrity (United for a Fair Economy 2009-10)
The Bailout: TARP -- threat or menace?
Neil Barofsky, the inspector general of TARP, is nearly as outraged about the mishandling of the bailout as you are. MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan interviews:
Compare the haste with which our leaders facilitated the theft of $24 trillion of our money with the reluctance of the same exalted personages to spend a fraction of that amount on our health. A hundred or so years ago, our great-grandfathers would have gotten a few neighbors together, driven the wagon to town, burned down the banks, and tarred and feathered the congressman. What're we going to do instead?
See, also: Geithner 'Ultimately Responsible' For AIG Missteps (NPR 2009-10-14)
Compare the haste with which our leaders facilitated the theft of $24 trillion of our money with the reluctance of the same exalted personages to spend a fraction of that amount on our health. A hundred or so years ago, our great-grandfathers would have gotten a few neighbors together, driven the wagon to town, burned down the banks, and tarred and feathered the congressman. What're we going to do instead?
See, also: Geithner 'Ultimately Responsible' For AIG Missteps (NPR 2009-10-14)
Essential Reading: Fixing a Broken System
In a two-part essay in the Times on The End of the Financial World As We Know It and How to Repair a Broken Financial World, business writer Michael Lewis and hedge fund manager David Einhorn recount the following:
Weeks after receiving its first $25 billion taxpayer investment, Citigroup returned to the Treasury to confess that — lo! — the markets still didn’t trust Citigroup to survive. In response, on Nov. 24, the Treasury handed Citigroup another $20 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and then simply guaranteed $306 billion of Citigroup’s assets. The Treasury didn’t ask for its fair share of the action, or management changes, or for that matter anything much at all beyond a teaspoon of warrants and a sliver of preferred stock. The $306 billion guarantee was an undisguised gift. The Treasury didn’t even bother to explain what the crisis was, just that the action was taken in response to Citigroup’s “declining stock price.”This is another example, at once striking and symptomatic, not only of government waste and corruption, but of the breakdown of our democratic institutions themselves. No one knows anything, William Goldman famously observed. As it turns out, no one is accountable for anything, either.
Three hundred billion dollars is still a lot of money. It’s almost 2 percent of gross domestic product, and about what we spend annually on the departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development and Transportation combined. Had Mr. Paulson executed his initial plan, and bought Citigroup’s pile of troubled assets at market prices, there would have been a limit to our exposure, as the money would have counted against the $700 billion Mr. Paulson had been given to dispense. Instead, he in effect granted himself the power to dispense unlimited sums of money without Congressional oversight. Now we don’t even know the nature of the assets that the Treasury is standing behind. Under TARP, these would have been disclosed.
Stimulus: Sanity returns -- briefly -- to the debate about fixing the economy
According to a report in this morning's Times, the Democratic majority is "short of the 60 votes needed to advance a $161 billion economic stimulus package toward approval in the Senate."
You may recall from civics class that it used to require a simple majority to pass most laws in the federal legislature. But since 2006, the Democrats have adopted a new theory of democracy under which no law can be advanced that is not veto-proof. The practical effect is to have the legislature held hostage by the president.
Some Democratic senators insist that the House stimulus plan, adopted under the super-majority theory, is a lousy bill that will benefit people who don't need help, hurt people who do, vastly increase the deficit, and not do much of anything for the economy.
Instead of crafting a responsible bill to address a perceived crisis -- and perhaps first determining whether there is a crisis, the House Democratic leadership, as is now its custom, caved in to the Bush administration's aversion to any economic program not made up primarily of tax cuts and payouts to the rich.
The senators are right. The House bill is pretty bad.
It creates humongous deficits at a time when we are already consumed with how we are going to continue to fund essential existing programs like Medicare and Social Security, let alone find the resources for important new efforts, such as universal health care. Because it consists largely of tax cuts, the resulting deficits will cause long-term interest rates to go up, an outcome more likely to further slow down the economy than to stimulate it, and add billions to the deficit by greatly increasing the cost of servicing the national debt.
And, of course, by agreeing not to raise revenues to pay for the expenditures, the Democratically controlled Congress is irresponsibly compounding an already catastrophic problem, passing it on to future generations of Americans and, more to the point, future generations of politicians.
Most important, as the latest sally in the administration's class war, the package continues the policy of redistributing national resources to those at the wealthiest end of the economic spectrum, not only sending money in the wrong direction but in this case dispatching huge amounts of it there. The average tax dividend dollar will go to superrich recipients whose primary source of income is taxable dividends, in other words, to people who not only don't need it, but, belying the rationale for the stimulus, to people who will have no incentive to spend it.
Conversely, the House proposal doesn't include immediate infusions of cash into the economy, as an expansion of the food stamp program would do; doesn't offer help to those who would be hurt by a recession, as an extension of unemployment payments would do; doesn't help state governments -- already suffering from declining tax revenues -- that bear most of the costs of social programs; and doesn't include expenditures -- on infrastructure projects, for example -- that would create jobs and improve the longterm strength of the economy.
Here's Democrat heavyweight Charles Schumer, New York's senior senator:
“If it fails, we’ll pass the House bill. But we’ll give it a try.”
Wow. The Republicans must be quaking in their Berlutis.
In case you're keeping track, here's another name you won't find in the next edition of Profiles in Courage:
Instead of fighting for better policy, the Democrats have decided to play political games with the legislative process. Having conceded ultimate victory to the conservatives, the Democrats hope to use the committee's bill and amendments from the floor to make "some Republicans potentially [pay] a steep political price, by voting against amendments that would be popular in their home states."
In opposing improved legislation, McConnell, whom the Times, as is its custom, gives the most ink and the last word, caps a recitation of the usual refrain about Democratic profligacy with a final tip of the hat to the bi-partisan, i.e., Bush-certified, House proposal.
How about this instead:
Pass the best bill you can. If Bush wants to veto it, so what? If the Republicans want to uphold the veto, same thing. Whether they succeed or fail, go to the American people in November and let them decide. Draw a clear line between the party of the people and the party of the rich. If they have an unambiguous understanding of whom they're voting for, no matter how it turns out, at least Americans will get the government they deserve.
You may recall from civics class that it used to require a simple majority to pass most laws in the federal legislature. But since 2006, the Democrats have adopted a new theory of democracy under which no law can be advanced that is not veto-proof. The practical effect is to have the legislature held hostage by the president.
Some Democratic senators insist that the House stimulus plan, adopted under the super-majority theory, is a lousy bill that will benefit people who don't need help, hurt people who do, vastly increase the deficit, and not do much of anything for the economy.
Instead of crafting a responsible bill to address a perceived crisis -- and perhaps first determining whether there is a crisis, the House Democratic leadership, as is now its custom, caved in to the Bush administration's aversion to any economic program not made up primarily of tax cuts and payouts to the rich.
The senators are right. The House bill is pretty bad.
It creates humongous deficits at a time when we are already consumed with how we are going to continue to fund essential existing programs like Medicare and Social Security, let alone find the resources for important new efforts, such as universal health care. Because it consists largely of tax cuts, the resulting deficits will cause long-term interest rates to go up, an outcome more likely to further slow down the economy than to stimulate it, and add billions to the deficit by greatly increasing the cost of servicing the national debt.
And, of course, by agreeing not to raise revenues to pay for the expenditures, the Democratically controlled Congress is irresponsibly compounding an already catastrophic problem, passing it on to future generations of Americans and, more to the point, future generations of politicians.
Most important, as the latest sally in the administration's class war, the package continues the policy of redistributing national resources to those at the wealthiest end of the economic spectrum, not only sending money in the wrong direction but in this case dispatching huge amounts of it there. The average tax dividend dollar will go to superrich recipients whose primary source of income is taxable dividends, in other words, to people who not only don't need it, but, belying the rationale for the stimulus, to people who will have no incentive to spend it.
Conversely, the House proposal doesn't include immediate infusions of cash into the economy, as an expansion of the food stamp program would do; doesn't offer help to those who would be hurt by a recession, as an extension of unemployment payments would do; doesn't help state governments -- already suffering from declining tax revenues -- that bear most of the costs of social programs; and doesn't include expenditures -- on infrastructure projects, for example -- that would create jobs and improve the longterm strength of the economy.
President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, and the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have all urged the Senate to adopt a slightly cheaper version of the stimulus plan that was approved by the House on Tuesday.This pathetic charade is an example of the behavior that has led to the public's contempt for the legislature. The senators know as well as you do that the House bill is seriously flawed, but in an election year looking responsible trumps being responsible -- we have to do something, even if we all know it's the wrong thing -- and because "(w)ithout cloture, opponents of a Senate bill would be able to prolong the debate indefinitely," the leaders of the Senate have already indicated they, too, are ready to cave.
But Senate Democrats, including the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, have insisted on pressing ahead with their own package [is that sound the Times tsk-tsk-ing?], which was approved by the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.
Only 3 of the 10 Republicans on the committee voted in favor of the plan, though — an early sign that the bipartisan cooperation that drove negotiations over the stimulus plan in the House was crumbling in the Senate.
The Senate stimulus plan would cost nearly $200 billion over two years, about $30 billion more than the House package [tsk-tsk] — and Democrats said they still intended to offer amendments that could add even more to the cost [tsk-tsk].
Sixty votes are needed under Senate rules to shut off debate on a measure and move to consideration of the measure itself, a step known as cloture. Without cloture, opponents of a Senate bill would be able to prolong the debate indefinitely.
Here's Democrat heavyweight Charles Schumer, New York's senior senator:
“If it fails, we’ll pass the House bill. But we’ll give it a try.”
Wow. The Republicans must be quaking in their Berlutis.
In case you're keeping track, here's another name you won't find in the next edition of Profiles in Courage:
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the assistant majority leader, said that Democrats’ strategy was, first, to seek approval of the Senate’s stimulus bill along with a small number of amendments. If that failed, he said, they would then turn to holding a series of votes to add components to the House’s version of the bill, and then ultimately call a vote on that plan.As it emerged from committee, the Senate bill that Durbin and Schumer have already abandoned is a big improvement on the Bush-league House bill. For example, the Senate proposal provides payments of $500 each -- not rebates, but cash that in most cases will be spent immediately -- to about 20 million low-income Americans over the age of 62 who survive on Social Security benefits, and to about 250,000 veterans dependent on payouts from a grateful nation. In a perfect example of what's wrong with the lower body's proposal, neither of these groups would receive a penny from the House.
The Democrats’ willingness to publicly discuss such a fallback strategy verged on the waving of a surrender flag: It indicated that they knew Senate Republicans could block the more expensive Senate stimulus plan, and that any delay in approving the House package would be dangerous politically, since it would leave the Democrats vulnerable to charges that they were impeding efforts to prop up the economy.
Both stimulus plans are meant to encourage spending through a combination of income-tax rebates, tax incentives for businesses, and stipends for tax filers who report at least $3,000 in earnings but do not pay enough income tax to qualify for rebates.You are supposed to be excited and uplifted by the sight Democrats and Republicans voting in large numbers for the same bill, as if bipartisanship and not policy was the point of this is exercise. We are expected not to notice that, like every outbreak of bipartisanship in Washington, the legislation is a by-product of the Democratic majority's abdication of its responsibilities in the face of intransigence by the Bush administration. The unpopular, failed, corrupt, incompetent, lame-duck Bush administration.
The House plan was forged in swift negotiations among Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Boehner and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. In those talks, Ms. Pelosi ultimately [swiftly, is more like it] dropped Democratic demands that unemployment benefits be extended and food stamps be increased, in favor of sending rebates and stipends to 35 million low-income families that would not have received them under a Bush administration proposal.
Instead of fighting for better policy, the Democrats have decided to play political games with the legislative process. Having conceded ultimate victory to the conservatives, the Democrats hope to use the committee's bill and amendments from the floor to make "some Republicans potentially [pay] a steep political price, by voting against amendments that would be popular in their home states."
For instance, the Democrats were nearly certain to propose an amendment to increase government assistance for rising home heating costs and other energy expenses — a program for low-income families that is hugely popular in the Northeast. Republican Senators up for re-election this year, like Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, would be forced to choose between casting a yes vote that would break with the Republican leadership or a no vote that would be unpopular with their constituents.Not only is the Democratic plan cynical, it's a loser. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell already knows he's going to get the House bill. Do you think he won't free up his team to vote in favor of amendments their constituents favor? Sununu, for example, can vote for the heating fuel subsidy, thus gaining an advantage with the huddled masses in New Hampshire, then vote against the final version of the Democrats' bill in the name of, oh, i dunno, "fiscal responsibility."
Praising the House bill, Mr. McConnell said: “Republicans and Democrats rose above politics and put the people and our economy first.”This is how "bipartisanship" works. The White House -- not the legislature -- decides what is "acceptable." Under the 60% theory, the majority introduces legislation that will head off the threat of a veto or, in the Senate, a filibuster (the 66% theory, I guess). I stress threat. Bush has vetoed only eight bills, and you could run a decent Democratic campaign for office on most of them (stem cell research, children's health insurance, health and human services expenditures, water resources, a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq). And while there have been a large number of cloture votes in this session, the Senate majority has not forced the minority to hold real, public filibusters with whatever political consequences such confrontations might hold. All you really need to do to intimidate the Democrats is to frown at them.
He continued: “Then all eyes turned to the Senate. Would we put our individual interests aside, or would we throw the whole plan into jeopardy by loading it down with gifts for anybody who came calling? Apparently the temptation for giveaways was too great for some to resist."
In opposing improved legislation, McConnell, whom the Times, as is its custom, gives the most ink and the last word, caps a recitation of the usual refrain about Democratic profligacy with a final tip of the hat to the bi-partisan, i.e., Bush-certified, House proposal.
“As soon as the bill hit the Senate, it started to look a lot like Christmas over here. Chairman Baucus added 10 new provisions before the bill was even considered in committee. Three more amendments were added in the committee. You could almost hear Bing Crosby’s voice coming out of the Finance Committee.Bi-partisanship is a smoke screen used to obscure the fact that -- forget Democrats or Republicans -- the Congress is dominated by a conservative majority.
“So the stimulus train is slowing, grinding to a halt here in the U.S. Senate, all of which only reinforces my view that the only way we’ll get relief to the people soon enough for it to work, will be to insist on speed over spending. And the only way to do that is to pass the bipartisan, House-passed bill.”
How about this instead:
Pass the best bill you can. If Bush wants to veto it, so what? If the Republicans want to uphold the veto, same thing. Whether they succeed or fail, go to the American people in November and let them decide. Draw a clear line between the party of the people and the party of the rich. If they have an unambiguous understanding of whom they're voting for, no matter how it turns out, at least Americans will get the government they deserve.
Populism and Evangelicalism: A Winning Combination?
Will Huckabee's candidacy create a new majority coalition in 2008?
One of the phenomena hardest for progressives to comprehend is the alliance between working- and lower middle-class social conservatives and the economic/foreign policy conservatives who have made the GOP what Mike Huckabee has called "a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street."
Aside from sharing the word conservative as their last name, these two groups have very little in common.
Polls show, in fact, as common sense suggests, that a majority of evangelicals do not embrace the Republican pro-Capitalist agenda. According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, more than two thirds of social conservatives agree that big corporations make too much money; almost three quarters -- 72% -- say too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few large companies; 78% want to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25; and 59% support having the government guarantee health care for all citizens.
No wonder the corporatist power brokers are freaked out by Huckabee's neo-populism. A Huckabee win could signal that the unholy alliance between the evangelicals and Wall Street is over.
It is likely that it is Huckabee's populist rhetoric, not his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, that is exciting his followers (in fact, as he has ratcheted up the red meat Christian rhetoric since Iowa his support has appeared to recede somewhat) . After all, his was not the only hand that was raised when the Republican presidential wannabes were asked who believed the biblical account of creation to be literally true, and with the exception of John McCain, the rest of the candidates have exceeded him in their zeal to take reactionary cultural, economic and political positions. But, tellingly, it is Huckabee who emerged from the pack.
Much has been made of McCain's narrow win in South Carolina, but it's worth noting that, although the Arizona senator did slightly better, both candidates got about one third of the vote, even though Huckabee was vastly outspent, faced a hostile conservative press, had Fred Thompson flanking him on the right, and had to rely on a relatively amateurish campaign staff. The campaign is far from over and, and despite corporate media animus toward him, Huckabee can be expected to do well. Even if McCain or Mitt Romney eventually prevails for the top job, it will be surprising if the former governor and televangelist is not on the ballot in November.
Although the economic conservatives regard him as practically a New Dealer, it goes without saying that not all of Huckabee's economic views are progressive. He supports, for example, a regressive consumption tax -- he gives it the Orwellian name FairTax -- that would pick the pockets of the low- and middle-income voters he is courting. Still, Huckabee is running against the standard-issue conservative trickle-down economic scripture, arguing that conservatives need to "quit being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, or else we're not going to win another election for a generation." He favors increasing the minimum wage and wants to provide health insurance to more children, positions that put him at odds with traditional economic conservatives.
And he is equally in conflict with many established religious leaders allied with the GOP. The editor of the National Review, who thinks Huckabee is a closet "liberal," is terrified of the governor because "he takes the Sermon on the Mount seriously," and indeed, this does seem to strike at the heart of his differences with the religious bosses who oppose him. Pat Robertson, for example, Rev. Ike-like, finds it convenient to quote Matthew ("To everyone who has shall more be given") rather than Luke ("From everyone who has been given much, much will be required"); the late Jerry Falwell found evidence in the Old Testament that capitalism is "part of God's plan for His people;" and Jim Wallis tasked Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, for placing Republican ideology ahead of biblical principles of justice.
Yet evangelical leaders such as these, and not just the dead ones, no longer command the following they once did. More importantly, they never accurately reflected the economic views of most evangelicals, who are not worshippers at the altar of economic conservatism but rather hold a wide range of views on economic issues roughly similar to other Americans. Among economically progressive evangelicals, Jim Wallis is hardly a lone voice. And Huckabee, more in tune with evangelicals than other, more ideologically righteous economic conservatives, doesn't make them choose between their social and their economic beliefs.
This is bad news for progressive Democrats. With their party apparently headed toward nominating one of the two candidates from Wall Street (or, in a real nightmare, having them both on the same ticket), the potential to elect a progressive congress next fall could be seriously compromised if Huckabee's populist brand of compassionate conservatism catches on. There will be little incentive for alienated Democrats who have been voting Republican for decades -- and in even larger numbers not voting at all -- to turn out and pull the lever for progressive Democratic congressional candidates if, once in office, those legislators will be, as they were during the Clinton years, triangulated into impotence by the leader of their own party.
One of the phenomena hardest for progressives to comprehend is the alliance between working- and lower middle-class social conservatives and the economic/foreign policy conservatives who have made the GOP what Mike Huckabee has called "a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street."
Aside from sharing the word conservative as their last name, these two groups have very little in common.
Polls show, in fact, as common sense suggests, that a majority of evangelicals do not embrace the Republican pro-Capitalist agenda. According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, more than two thirds of social conservatives agree that big corporations make too much money; almost three quarters -- 72% -- say too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few large companies; 78% want to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25; and 59% support having the government guarantee health care for all citizens.
No wonder the corporatist power brokers are freaked out by Huckabee's neo-populism. A Huckabee win could signal that the unholy alliance between the evangelicals and Wall Street is over.
It is likely that it is Huckabee's populist rhetoric, not his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, that is exciting his followers (in fact, as he has ratcheted up the red meat Christian rhetoric since Iowa his support has appeared to recede somewhat) . After all, his was not the only hand that was raised when the Republican presidential wannabes were asked who believed the biblical account of creation to be literally true, and with the exception of John McCain, the rest of the candidates have exceeded him in their zeal to take reactionary cultural, economic and political positions. But, tellingly, it is Huckabee who emerged from the pack.
Much has been made of McCain's narrow win in South Carolina, but it's worth noting that, although the Arizona senator did slightly better, both candidates got about one third of the vote, even though Huckabee was vastly outspent, faced a hostile conservative press, had Fred Thompson flanking him on the right, and had to rely on a relatively amateurish campaign staff. The campaign is far from over and, and despite corporate media animus toward him, Huckabee can be expected to do well. Even if McCain or Mitt Romney eventually prevails for the top job, it will be surprising if the former governor and televangelist is not on the ballot in November.
Although the economic conservatives regard him as practically a New Dealer, it goes without saying that not all of Huckabee's economic views are progressive. He supports, for example, a regressive consumption tax -- he gives it the Orwellian name FairTax -- that would pick the pockets of the low- and middle-income voters he is courting. Still, Huckabee is running against the standard-issue conservative trickle-down economic scripture, arguing that conservatives need to "quit being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, or else we're not going to win another election for a generation." He favors increasing the minimum wage and wants to provide health insurance to more children, positions that put him at odds with traditional economic conservatives.
And he is equally in conflict with many established religious leaders allied with the GOP. The editor of the National Review, who thinks Huckabee is a closet "liberal," is terrified of the governor because "he takes the Sermon on the Mount seriously," and indeed, this does seem to strike at the heart of his differences with the religious bosses who oppose him. Pat Robertson, for example, Rev. Ike-like, finds it convenient to quote Matthew ("To everyone who has shall more be given") rather than Luke ("From everyone who has been given much, much will be required"); the late Jerry Falwell found evidence in the Old Testament that capitalism is "part of God's plan for His people;" and Jim Wallis tasked Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, for placing Republican ideology ahead of biblical principles of justice.
Yet evangelical leaders such as these, and not just the dead ones, no longer command the following they once did. More importantly, they never accurately reflected the economic views of most evangelicals, who are not worshippers at the altar of economic conservatism but rather hold a wide range of views on economic issues roughly similar to other Americans. Among economically progressive evangelicals, Jim Wallis is hardly a lone voice. And Huckabee, more in tune with evangelicals than other, more ideologically righteous economic conservatives, doesn't make them choose between their social and their economic beliefs.
This is bad news for progressive Democrats. With their party apparently headed toward nominating one of the two candidates from Wall Street (or, in a real nightmare, having them both on the same ticket), the potential to elect a progressive congress next fall could be seriously compromised if Huckabee's populist brand of compassionate conservatism catches on. There will be little incentive for alienated Democrats who have been voting Republican for decades -- and in even larger numbers not voting at all -- to turn out and pull the lever for progressive Democratic congressional candidates if, once in office, those legislators will be, as they were during the Clinton years, triangulated into impotence by the leader of their own party.
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