The U.S., in 2009, entered negative savings territory, not even able to finance maintenance of its existing capital stock.
Macro and Other Market Musings: More Dependent Than Ever
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Principles of the Opposition
Health Reform And Personal Responsibility | The New Republic:
I've written for quite a while that American politics has become increasingly uni-linear: a continuous variation along one dimension -- "worldview" -- from Right to Left.
A number of people on the Left insist that racism lies beneath the hostility of many of the tea party activists, and there's some evidence in favor of that thesis, but I think it is actually the breakdown of racism, and a breakdown of a felt sense of solidarity, that drives the anger. Now, in the past, that felt sense of social and political solidarity was based, for many people, implicitly on race or, more generally, on membership in the dominant culture. What defines the "dominant culture" has expanded over time, with the last big intake taking place in the 1960s, when Catholics and immigrants were embraced. From the 1840s through the 1920s, nativist hostility to immigrants was a big factor in American politics; in the 1960s, it was all forgotten.
Something bigger has emerged in American politics -- Class. And, we don't know what to do with it. The elite -- across politics, business, finance, academia -- has proven itself hostile to the interests of the mass of Americans, and incompetent in managing the nation's economy and foreign affairs. But, the elite remains firmly united in resisting demands for relief and reform.
The sense of frustration is palpable across the political spectrum, but people don't know what to make of their frustration. The elite is feeding them -- everyone -- propaganda. Much of that propaganda is completely unbelievable, but there exists little alternative -- no narrative or leadership. Just a steady drumbeat insisting that "entitlement reform" is seriously needed. Iraq is oh so worrisome. What is politically practical is so limited, we cannot consider good proposals, only what is being proposed and compromised to death . . . And, so on.
The American body politic is in a state of extreme disorganization. People don't derive much of a sense of identity from their membership in various groups and organizations, because, frankly, they are not likely to be all that active, as a member of a social group or organization. Ethnic neighborhoods have become, mostly, historical curiosities. Ghettos are mostly just slums, as the prosperous and ambitious elites have moved away. Black people don't have to live in Harlem; gay people don't have to live in West Hollywood. Clubs, like the Elks or the Shriners have aged and declined in importance. Groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution have faded into idle hobbies, their ability to confer status long gone. Unions have faded in power, membership and economic importance.
So, we are left with the rare clarity of a politics that divides on worldview -- nothing with even enough philosophical substance to qualify as ideology -- but just the most superficial collection of attitudes translated directly into policy.
It is not "redistribution" that is being objected to here, it is, at bottom, that most basic, implicit assumption of government organized around nationality: that "we" are in this, in life, in government, in society, together.
I don't think people actually "oppose" solidarity, per se. That would require opposing human nature. But, they feel its absence and its absence makes them angry, and it makes them mad.
Now, it may be that the last shreds of that sense of solidarity, for some people, was in race, or in religion, or in traditions like hunting, or even feeling that they were "the real" Americans. Where those last, fading shreds were can affect the focus of their rhetoric, or carry telling demographic markers, but I think we miss important details, if we only relate these phenomena to a racist past, when it is economic oppression by a predatory elite in the present, and the economic decline that entails, which drives the frustration.
"the heart of what animates the staunchest opposition to health care reform [is] a principled opposition to the idea the fortunate should be forced to subsidize the unfortunate.
A person who has [a serious disease], unless he is very affluent, is not going to be able to afford the cost of his own medical care. He is going to need to be subsidized by healthier or wealthier people -- either by being lumped in with them in an employer-based insurance pool, or getting government-provided insurance like Medicaid, or government subsidies, or the enactment of regulations that force insurers to offer him insurance at a regular price (meaning healthy people would pay higher rates.) Any way you slice it, somebody else is going to have to pay for his health care. But that's the kind of redistribution the right increasingly cannot stomach."
I've written for quite a while that American politics has become increasingly uni-linear: a continuous variation along one dimension -- "worldview" -- from Right to Left.
A number of people on the Left insist that racism lies beneath the hostility of many of the tea party activists, and there's some evidence in favor of that thesis, but I think it is actually the breakdown of racism, and a breakdown of a felt sense of solidarity, that drives the anger. Now, in the past, that felt sense of social and political solidarity was based, for many people, implicitly on race or, more generally, on membership in the dominant culture. What defines the "dominant culture" has expanded over time, with the last big intake taking place in the 1960s, when Catholics and immigrants were embraced. From the 1840s through the 1920s, nativist hostility to immigrants was a big factor in American politics; in the 1960s, it was all forgotten.
Something bigger has emerged in American politics -- Class. And, we don't know what to do with it. The elite -- across politics, business, finance, academia -- has proven itself hostile to the interests of the mass of Americans, and incompetent in managing the nation's economy and foreign affairs. But, the elite remains firmly united in resisting demands for relief and reform.
The sense of frustration is palpable across the political spectrum, but people don't know what to make of their frustration. The elite is feeding them -- everyone -- propaganda. Much of that propaganda is completely unbelievable, but there exists little alternative -- no narrative or leadership. Just a steady drumbeat insisting that "entitlement reform" is seriously needed. Iraq is oh so worrisome. What is politically practical is so limited, we cannot consider good proposals, only what is being proposed and compromised to death . . . And, so on.
The American body politic is in a state of extreme disorganization. People don't derive much of a sense of identity from their membership in various groups and organizations, because, frankly, they are not likely to be all that active, as a member of a social group or organization. Ethnic neighborhoods have become, mostly, historical curiosities. Ghettos are mostly just slums, as the prosperous and ambitious elites have moved away. Black people don't have to live in Harlem; gay people don't have to live in West Hollywood. Clubs, like the Elks or the Shriners have aged and declined in importance. Groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution have faded into idle hobbies, their ability to confer status long gone. Unions have faded in power, membership and economic importance.
So, we are left with the rare clarity of a politics that divides on worldview -- nothing with even enough philosophical substance to qualify as ideology -- but just the most superficial collection of attitudes translated directly into policy.
It is not "redistribution" that is being objected to here, it is, at bottom, that most basic, implicit assumption of government organized around nationality: that "we" are in this, in life, in government, in society, together.
I don't think people actually "oppose" solidarity, per se. That would require opposing human nature. But, they feel its absence and its absence makes them angry, and it makes them mad.
Now, it may be that the last shreds of that sense of solidarity, for some people, was in race, or in religion, or in traditions like hunting, or even feeling that they were "the real" Americans. Where those last, fading shreds were can affect the focus of their rhetoric, or carry telling demographic markers, but I think we miss important details, if we only relate these phenomena to a racist past, when it is economic oppression by a predatory elite in the present, and the economic decline that entails, which drives the frustration.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Twilight of the Elites
The Twilight of the Elites - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years - TIME:
"In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.
In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible."
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Desperately needed?
Brad DeLong: "more macroeconomists who think like Ben Bernanke are desperately needed on the FOMC" [Federal Open Market Committee -- the Federal Reserve's principal body responsible for monetary policy through the setting of short-term interest rates]
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Team Sports in the Winter of Our Discontent
I sometimes use a pretty simple analytical model to sort out the dynamics of American politics, beginning with the observation that politics is a team sport. In the U.S. two-party system, it is a team sport played by three teams, one of which doesn't know that it is a team or that it is playing.
There's the Republicans on the Right, the Democrats on the Left, and then there are various folks, including most professional journalists, who identify as political "independents" or non-partisans. None of these groups is homogenous, of course; that's what it means to be "a team". They are coalitions, which act in a semi-coordinated way in the competition to acquire and exercise political power.
Politics, particularly Party politics, in the U.S., through most of American history, has tended to be much more complicated that it currently is, even though the two-party paradigm has usually been sustained successfully, even in times of great stress, like the Civil War. Even scholars of the second two-party system, 1824-1856, when the Whigs contended against the Jacksonian Democrats, struggle to explain the social identity differences between the Parties, or why a particular person was a Democrat or a Whig. Strong political movements or causes, like anti-slavery, or temperance, or women's suffrage, tended to develop obliquely to the Parties. In the 1850s, anti-immigrant sentiment played a part in destroying the Whigs and building the Republican Party; in the 1880s and 1890s, populism divided the Democrats; in the early 20th century, Progressivism affected both Parties. Religion and regional identities and ethnicity also played a large part. Virginia and Massachusetts dominated the country's politics, beginning with the independence movement; in the late 19th and early 20th century, Ohio seemed to dominate the affairs of the Republican Party, while the Solid South of agrarian white supremacist Southerners came to anchor the politics of a Democratic Party that was turning to urban constituencies in the North.
Since the Democrats became the unlikely instrument for finally ending segregation and legalized racial discrimination in the 1960s, the presumptive loyalty of white Southerners to the Democratic Party has been eroding. And, with the decline in labor unions, the Democratic Party's base among the working classes has also declined. The relatively poor are still more likely to vote Democratic, than Republican, and white males are more likely to vote Republican, but these differences reflect primarily differences in worldview and economic circumstances. In contrast to the past, Party identification has lost its complicated, orthogonal character, and become almost entirely a matter of political attitudes and worldview -- "ideology" in a fairly weak sense. All Republicans are conservative; all Democrats are progressives or liberals. Almost every Republican in the Senate or House is more conservative than almost every Democrat.
If you like quantitative data, there are some folks, who've done some number crunching on Congressional voting, and it is quite revealing
http://polarizedamerica.com/#POLITICALPOLARIZATION
This political polarization is related in a variety of complex ways to both a relative decline in the salience of issues of race and ethnicity, and a rise in economic inequality.
Not to belabor the point, American politics is increasingly dominated by the agenda of the very wealthy and of the social and economic class, which runs large American business corporations. Other organizations, which might represent broader constituencies, like labor unions and professional organizations, as well as fraternal, ethnic and religious organizations, have declined in sometimes absolute, but always relative power, in comparison to large business corporations.
The Corporate Executive Class has become the sole and dominating political center of gravity in the Land, around which all three political Parties -- the two Political Parties, plus the "independents" -- revolve. I am not saying that either the Republicans or the Democrats are some kind of false front for Corporate interests, or that the relationship of either Party's politicians or voters to Corporate money and power is simple or uniform, nor that the Non-Party's relationship to Corporate money and power is simple, either. I propose to use the simple, three-Party scheme of analysis to identify some of the complexity and dynamics.
It is a discouraging analysis, because to look honestly at the dynamics of American politics is to realize that the Republicans, the Democrats, the Independent Voters and the Mainstream (non-partisan) Media are all manipulated instruments, if not actual creatures, of Corporate Business Power. I intend to avoid too much passionate ranting, but I'm deeply dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and the self-destructive policy course it seems to condemn the country to follow.
The uni-dimensional continuum of American politics has put the vast majority of those inclined toward an authoritarian cluster of political attitudes -- those to whom so-called populist appeals are traditionally made in American politics -- into the Republican Party. That, by itself, is an unusual state of affairs. In most eras, the cross-cutting of regional interests and ethnic identifications has tended to divide the authoritarians between the Parties. It has changed the character and style of the Republican Party in ways that make the Republican Party less attractive, even to many well-educated, secular conservatives. The increasingly authoritarian character of the Republican Party, as a Party of the Right, has always undermined its competence in governance, which has further alienated some of its Corporate Executive supporters. The Obama coalition and strategy in 2008, revolved around welcoming into the Democratic coalition, a small slice of conservative voters and elite leadership, increasingly alienated by the Republican Party, and a big slice of Corporate financial support. The demonstrated incompetence of the Bush Administration was an object lesson, as well as a means to various ends.
"The demonstrated incompetence of the Bush Administration was an object lesson, as well as a means to various ends." I quote myself, knowing that this is a curious proposition. Remember though, that I am writing about complex, mass behavior. Politics is a team sport. There's a division of labor, a division of intentions and interests and roles, leadership and followership, glory and spoils. Division is what it is all about, and just enough unity to get to 50.1%.
When I started this blog, it was because in the wake of Bush's election in 2004, I felt fairly certain that the country was headed toward a crack-up, a confluence of unfortunate events following in train from Bush's unwise policy-making, which would create some kind of political "perfect storm" that would precipitate a political realignment and restructuring.
The "storm" came in the rise of the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, but the reforms of the political economy I looked for, have been stifled. Few of the useful lessons, I hoped the American body politic might draw from its experience with George W. Bush, appear to have been learned. Far from overthrowing the regime constructed by George W. Bush, the Obama Administration has been intent on confirming and reinforcing it, with just a thin veneer of enhanced competence and a more progressive manipulation of symbols.
Adding a small slice of conservatives to the Democratic coalition, put the Democrats into power, but, it made the Democratic Party slightly more conservative, and in the coalition of moderate conservatives with progressives, which makes up the core of the Democratic Party, the conservatives have demanded all the power to govern. The result has been a continuation of conservative government, under the aegis of the progressive Party, effectively removing all means for progressive or liberal opposition to governance on conservative and neo-liberal principles.
The liberals and progressives are not able to introduce liberal or progressive policy, but they are being blamed for the failures and shortcomings of continuing neo-liberal, conservative policy.
In the meantime, the increasingly authoritarian Conservative Party -- the Republicans -- have adopted an obstructionist attitude, and await the swinging of the proverbial political pendulum from the failed Party -- now the Democrats -- back to the Republicans. That Republicans are obstructing policy ideas that they actually favor is an irony noted by a few observers, while progressive Democrats are demoralized by their own impotence -- co-opted into desperately supporting an agenda of economic policies that they would ordinarily oppose, adamantly.
In this strange dynamic of the powerlessness of the supporters of the Party in Power, the Non-Party third Party -- the "independents" and their "leadership" (journalists and journalist-pundits) -- have played a powerful and necessary role, in pushing narrative analysis and description that tends to narrow the agenda and to confirm the powerlessness of the leading politicians in the Democratic Party. More about this in a subsequent post (I hope).
There's the Republicans on the Right, the Democrats on the Left, and then there are various folks, including most professional journalists, who identify as political "independents" or non-partisans. None of these groups is homogenous, of course; that's what it means to be "a team". They are coalitions, which act in a semi-coordinated way in the competition to acquire and exercise political power.
Politics, particularly Party politics, in the U.S., through most of American history, has tended to be much more complicated that it currently is, even though the two-party paradigm has usually been sustained successfully, even in times of great stress, like the Civil War. Even scholars of the second two-party system, 1824-1856, when the Whigs contended against the Jacksonian Democrats, struggle to explain the social identity differences between the Parties, or why a particular person was a Democrat or a Whig. Strong political movements or causes, like anti-slavery, or temperance, or women's suffrage, tended to develop obliquely to the Parties. In the 1850s, anti-immigrant sentiment played a part in destroying the Whigs and building the Republican Party; in the 1880s and 1890s, populism divided the Democrats; in the early 20th century, Progressivism affected both Parties. Religion and regional identities and ethnicity also played a large part. Virginia and Massachusetts dominated the country's politics, beginning with the independence movement; in the late 19th and early 20th century, Ohio seemed to dominate the affairs of the Republican Party, while the Solid South of agrarian white supremacist Southerners came to anchor the politics of a Democratic Party that was turning to urban constituencies in the North.
Since the Democrats became the unlikely instrument for finally ending segregation and legalized racial discrimination in the 1960s, the presumptive loyalty of white Southerners to the Democratic Party has been eroding. And, with the decline in labor unions, the Democratic Party's base among the working classes has also declined. The relatively poor are still more likely to vote Democratic, than Republican, and white males are more likely to vote Republican, but these differences reflect primarily differences in worldview and economic circumstances. In contrast to the past, Party identification has lost its complicated, orthogonal character, and become almost entirely a matter of political attitudes and worldview -- "ideology" in a fairly weak sense. All Republicans are conservative; all Democrats are progressives or liberals. Almost every Republican in the Senate or House is more conservative than almost every Democrat.
If you like quantitative data, there are some folks, who've done some number crunching on Congressional voting, and it is quite revealing
http://polarizedamerica.com/#POLITICALPOLARIZATION
This political polarization is related in a variety of complex ways to both a relative decline in the salience of issues of race and ethnicity, and a rise in economic inequality.
Not to belabor the point, American politics is increasingly dominated by the agenda of the very wealthy and of the social and economic class, which runs large American business corporations. Other organizations, which might represent broader constituencies, like labor unions and professional organizations, as well as fraternal, ethnic and religious organizations, have declined in sometimes absolute, but always relative power, in comparison to large business corporations.
The Corporate Executive Class has become the sole and dominating political center of gravity in the Land, around which all three political Parties -- the two Political Parties, plus the "independents" -- revolve. I am not saying that either the Republicans or the Democrats are some kind of false front for Corporate interests, or that the relationship of either Party's politicians or voters to Corporate money and power is simple or uniform, nor that the Non-Party's relationship to Corporate money and power is simple, either. I propose to use the simple, three-Party scheme of analysis to identify some of the complexity and dynamics.
It is a discouraging analysis, because to look honestly at the dynamics of American politics is to realize that the Republicans, the Democrats, the Independent Voters and the Mainstream (non-partisan) Media are all manipulated instruments, if not actual creatures, of Corporate Business Power. I intend to avoid too much passionate ranting, but I'm deeply dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and the self-destructive policy course it seems to condemn the country to follow.
The uni-dimensional continuum of American politics has put the vast majority of those inclined toward an authoritarian cluster of political attitudes -- those to whom so-called populist appeals are traditionally made in American politics -- into the Republican Party. That, by itself, is an unusual state of affairs. In most eras, the cross-cutting of regional interests and ethnic identifications has tended to divide the authoritarians between the Parties. It has changed the character and style of the Republican Party in ways that make the Republican Party less attractive, even to many well-educated, secular conservatives. The increasingly authoritarian character of the Republican Party, as a Party of the Right, has always undermined its competence in governance, which has further alienated some of its Corporate Executive supporters. The Obama coalition and strategy in 2008, revolved around welcoming into the Democratic coalition, a small slice of conservative voters and elite leadership, increasingly alienated by the Republican Party, and a big slice of Corporate financial support. The demonstrated incompetence of the Bush Administration was an object lesson, as well as a means to various ends.
"The demonstrated incompetence of the Bush Administration was an object lesson, as well as a means to various ends." I quote myself, knowing that this is a curious proposition. Remember though, that I am writing about complex, mass behavior. Politics is a team sport. There's a division of labor, a division of intentions and interests and roles, leadership and followership, glory and spoils. Division is what it is all about, and just enough unity to get to 50.1%.
When I started this blog, it was because in the wake of Bush's election in 2004, I felt fairly certain that the country was headed toward a crack-up, a confluence of unfortunate events following in train from Bush's unwise policy-making, which would create some kind of political "perfect storm" that would precipitate a political realignment and restructuring.
The "storm" came in the rise of the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, but the reforms of the political economy I looked for, have been stifled. Few of the useful lessons, I hoped the American body politic might draw from its experience with George W. Bush, appear to have been learned. Far from overthrowing the regime constructed by George W. Bush, the Obama Administration has been intent on confirming and reinforcing it, with just a thin veneer of enhanced competence and a more progressive manipulation of symbols.
Adding a small slice of conservatives to the Democratic coalition, put the Democrats into power, but, it made the Democratic Party slightly more conservative, and in the coalition of moderate conservatives with progressives, which makes up the core of the Democratic Party, the conservatives have demanded all the power to govern. The result has been a continuation of conservative government, under the aegis of the progressive Party, effectively removing all means for progressive or liberal opposition to governance on conservative and neo-liberal principles.
The liberals and progressives are not able to introduce liberal or progressive policy, but they are being blamed for the failures and shortcomings of continuing neo-liberal, conservative policy.
In the meantime, the increasingly authoritarian Conservative Party -- the Republicans -- have adopted an obstructionist attitude, and await the swinging of the proverbial political pendulum from the failed Party -- now the Democrats -- back to the Republicans. That Republicans are obstructing policy ideas that they actually favor is an irony noted by a few observers, while progressive Democrats are demoralized by their own impotence -- co-opted into desperately supporting an agenda of economic policies that they would ordinarily oppose, adamantly.
In this strange dynamic of the powerlessness of the supporters of the Party in Power, the Non-Party third Party -- the "independents" and their "leadership" (journalists and journalist-pundits) -- have played a powerful and necessary role, in pushing narrative analysis and description that tends to narrow the agenda and to confirm the powerlessness of the leading politicians in the Democratic Party. More about this in a subsequent post (I hope).
Friday, February 26, 2010
Centrism
DougJ at Balloon Juice:
I watched a bit of it. I saw Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin stage a masterful dialogue, supposedly analyzing the politics, which confirmed Republican talking points. Rose managed the back-and-forth among the panel, so there was no contradiction of what they said. Ezra Klein was brought in next on a completely different point, not that the career-minded Washington Post Online columnist seemed inclined to oppose Rose and Halperin on whether Obama's proposal was too far left, or too ambitious, etc.
It just left me despairing for my country. And, DougJ is right: this, not the clowning of Beck, is what got us into Iraq. Rose is absolutely relentless in defining "sensible" centrism in ways that make not just the Left, but rationality and facts and intelligence disappear. Critical reason is simply excluded. And, the result is quiet, and boring and rambling, and, ultimately, monstrous.
"Apparently, Bill Frist and Mark Halperin are on Charlie Rose discussing today’s summit right now. (The good news is that Ezra Klein is on too.) I’d watch but I have no desire to take my own life this evening.
There are a lot of people out there who believe that our sorry state of affairs is caused by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and, if they’re really deluded, they’ll add “and on the left, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann”. I know plenty of people who say things like this.
The truth is, it’s more the fault of Charlie Rose and Tom Friedman and David Brooks. Glenn Beck didn’t get us into Iraq."
I watched a bit of it. I saw Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin stage a masterful dialogue, supposedly analyzing the politics, which confirmed Republican talking points. Rose managed the back-and-forth among the panel, so there was no contradiction of what they said. Ezra Klein was brought in next on a completely different point, not that the career-minded Washington Post Online columnist seemed inclined to oppose Rose and Halperin on whether Obama's proposal was too far left, or too ambitious, etc.
It just left me despairing for my country. And, DougJ is right: this, not the clowning of Beck, is what got us into Iraq. Rose is absolutely relentless in defining "sensible" centrism in ways that make not just the Left, but rationality and facts and intelligence disappear. Critical reason is simply excluded. And, the result is quiet, and boring and rambling, and, ultimately, monstrous.
Monday, February 22, 2010
What we wish to believe . . .
Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald columnist:
(Thanks to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly for the pointer.)
"To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.
I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather to the world as it is. . . .
But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it's a wall.
And you shouldn't have to hit it to find that out."
(Thanks to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly for the pointer.)
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