Casa Cognito

Toward a 21st Century Economic Patriarchy

2012-02-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

This is just a brief rumination. I've not thought too deeply or too long about it, so perhaps there is something I am missing or there is some wrinkle I don't see that makes the metaphor not work . . . but it struck me a little while ago how seemingly connected is the economic Right Wing's worship of the uber-rich "job creators" and the social Right Wing's denigration of women as second-class citizens.

Bear with me on this one, while I try and tease out these thoughts.

Here's how it started: I was reading this LA Times op-ed about the Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfuffle when I ran across this statement: "The Komen decision will probably prompt more attacks on Planned Parenthood, which has long provided low-cost medical care to women in need." (emphasis added) Because I am (i) a guy, and (ii) a language nerd who owns an unabridged copy of the OED and who frequently speculates about word and term origins, one of the first things that struck me about that phrase was the idea that anything that called itself Planned Parenthood would necessarily be focused on women's health-care needs -- after all, it takes two people to make a child and men are parents too.

(Put down the pitchforks, please . . . I'm getting to it.)

Of course, immediately following my word-nerd reaction was the real-person understanding that - duh - parenthood doesn't affect men and women the same way. It just doesn't. Biologically speaking, a man can be a parent after a moment's worth of seizure and the contribution of a single sperm. A woman becomes a parent after nurturing a little person in her own body -- often at the sizable expense of her own health and welfare -- for nine months. Delivering that little person into the world is sometimes vastly dangerous and very often extremely painful. And none of this even touches on the fact that the (putative) "Daddy" may already be long gone, leaving the (undeniable) "Mommy" solely responsible for caring for a new soul that will be without the capacity to care for itself for years and years and years.

Yeah . . . it takes two to reproduce, but only one of those two has a choice about whether to shoulder the burden of that reproduction, and the one without any such choice is always the woman. I'm all for gender equality and treating Men and Women the same, but not when doing so flies in the face of Reality. When it comes to reproduction, Men and Women are not the same and we do ourselves and our very reason a disservice when we try to pretend that they are.

"Planned Parenthood," "reproductive rights" . . . these are all issues that primarily impact women and we men -- even we men who are wholly behind and supportive of these issues, and women, and feminism, and etc. -- we are mostly just along for the ride to offer encouragement, moral and political support.

* * *

The next thought I had was how weird it is that for most of recorded history, men have claimed their children as their own, like a property right. As if a man has any right to his child merely by contribution of a spasm and a sperm cell compared to all that the woman has had to contribute: her own time, her own body, her own agony, her own nutrition.

"I fathered that boy, Rebecca," we've all seen some version of this in our movies or our books or our etc., "and I won't let you take him from me."

Really? Really? You grunted out half an epileptic fit on top of some woman and now you and you alone own the fruits of her body? How insane is that idea?

Note . . . I'm not talking about daddies. Anybody can be a father, it takes someone important to be a Daddy. What I'm talking about is the mindset that can believe for a second that an instant's worth of seed results in a lifetime's worth of claim.

* * *

And now, maybe, you've intuited where I'm going with this.

By far, the supporting refrain I've heard most often about how Rich People are "the job creators" is the slogan "A poor person never hired anybody." I think it is intended to shut down debate, and that the implicit argument goes like this: nobody can get a paying job unless there is somebody who can pay them, and the only people who can pay people to work are rich people. Ergo, if you punish rich people, they will stop hiring others and the jobs will go away.

It is a witless argument, but let's consider it on its merits.

Essentially, the idea is that rich people have the seed money to drop into productive enterprises. Those enterprises, nurtured by the work, sweat and toil of their employees, will produce goods and/or services that others will want, which will -- in turn -- increase demand for more of those goods and services. Which will result in even more jobs.

But - according to the "job creator" understanding of the world -- what is important in this formulation is not the people who had the vision for this new company, and it is not the people who worked hard to keep this new company afloat, and it not the people who sacrificed their blood, sweat and tears to keep the company going . . . No. No, none of that gestational stuff is important at all.

The only thing that is important is the seed money. If you deliver the seed money, you get to claim ownership of the offspring. And so the important thing, whenever you look at a productive enterprise, is not the people that work there or the people who support it or the people who keep it going . . . no, the important thing is that there was once someone there to provide it with seed capital.

Once there was an investment banker - I forget his name, child, but he was a charmer, yes he was, and he and he alone is responsible for the fact that your Daddy had a job he could go to until the day he worked himself to death - and he and he alone will be responsible for the fact that you, too, will one day drop dead while still working.

Sing His Praises.

Democracy by Date Rape, Representation by Roofie

2012-01-28T17:01:00.000-08:00

So this morning I was alerted - via Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice -- about this Jon Chait piece regarding Mitt Romney. I've read the Chait piece in its entirety and its premise is that Mitt Romney is just a goddamned liar. He lies repeatedly, he lies often, he lies regularly, and he lies without regard for the truth. Good. Glad Chait recognizes that.

But then, there's this from that same piece:

I've always had a soft spot for Mitt Romney, who strikes me, in a way I can't completely define, as a good guy. The fact that he is an audacious liar does not strike me as a definitive judgment on his character, but primarily a reflection of the circumstances he finds himself in -- having to transition from winning a majority of a fairly liberal electorate to winning a majority of a rabidly conservative one, one that cannot be placated without indulging in all sorts of fantasies.

[snip]

I see him as a patrician pol, like George H. W. Bush, who believes deeply in public service but regards elections as a cynical process of pandering to rubes.

I gotta tell you . . . I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I understand what Chait is saying here -- and I understand that his main take-away is that Romney is, in fact, an inveterate liar on the campaign trail -- but couple that with the foregoing and I think what I am listening to is an excuse for Romney to be a huge liar on the campaign trail.

The excuse goes something like: Yeah, sure . . . Romney is lying, but he's only saying things he doesn't believe in order to get elected. Deep down and underneath it all, he's not a bad guy -- he's like Poppy Bush.

Excuse me but . . . WTF?!? This entire thing smacks of the very elitism and self-regard that the 99% are always railing about regarding the 1% - economically speaking.

First . . . either you believe in democratic self-governance, or you don't. Either you believe the people can govern themselves, or you don't. Jefferson said it best when he said the great mass of men break down between those who trust the people, and those who fear the people and who prefer instead an aristocracy. It can be an aristocracy of Aristotle's arete (which never has been tried) or it can be an aristocracy of wealth and privilege (tried many times before with - uhhmm - disastrous results), but it is definitely not a democracy.

Second . . . if you declare that the people are fit to govern themselves and that you believe in democracy, you don't get to point to all the people's flat-out failures of self-governance (for example, giving George W. Bush a second term), as a reason to justify pandering to and duping them. Self-governance counts for nothing if the people are duped into voting for their leadership; that is democracy as date-rape, that is governance by the consent of the roofied.

Third . . . if you cast your lot with representative democracy and you think that the people often make amazingly poor decisions (as, personally, I do) then you must ask yourself why that is; why have the people - in whom the very hope for democracy rests - failed themselves?

My favorite answer is that the pundits and the political media have failed us. People like Chait, who at once can say they think Romney is a nice guy and then excuse his lying and pandering as "just something one needs to do to get elected" are the ones who already think they are not "of the people." They obviously think that "the people" are those other, lesser masses, the great unwashed and unlearned who cannot be reached but only patted on the head and distracted with a pretty lie.

Personally, my belief in democracy is a bit stronger. I'm pretty sure that my next door neighbor would have no problem recognizing right and wrong if the people reporting on our politics weren't so goddamned gun-shy about being called "partisan" whenever they pointed out that -- oh yeah, by the way -- Mitt Romney is lying again.

Just yesterday I was listening to Diane Rehm's Friday News Roundup, and she had -- as always -- three political pundit/reporters on. One was talking about Mitt Romney and his claim that the US is militarily weaker now than it ever has been before because -- for instance -- we have less ships in the Navy now than at any time since 1917.

"This is a nonsense argument," the guy said, "because of course we have different types of ships now. We have aircraft carriers with sonar and radar and we can control a huge amount of sea with less actual ships. So this is like comparing apples to oranges and doesn't really tell us anything.

"Of course," he continued, "it is technically true, so Romney can make this argument and I guess we'll have to see how this plays out in the campaign."

Really? Really? "Romney can make this argument and we'll have to see how this plays out in the campaign?" And you -- the guy the rest of America looks to to tell them the news -- have no obligation to point out that Romney is fucking lying to us all?

And then these same pundit/reporters want to sneer about how dumb the American electorate is, and how politicians have to pander to us, and they never - ever - think that maybe they are even the least bit responsible for this state of affairs. That maybe if they were actually journalists -- and not stenographers and theater critics -- our democracy might actually work a little bit better.

* * *

The First Amendment's concerns for the freedom of the press weren't inscribed so that political star-fuckers could hitch their wagons, get famous on the TeeVee, and live well. Those concerns were put in place because -- when we started the going concern that is the United States of America -- it was understood that somebody had to speak Truth to Power, and that somebody had to call BULLSHIT! when they saw bullshit happening.

That somebody was supposed to be the press. The press was supposed to be something other than, different than, better than entertainment and propaganda.

Politics as a bloodless bloodsport, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets, pick your teams, try to forget that it doesn't really make a difference and never, ever pay attention to the little man whose hand is in your pocket and whose accomplice is stealing your future.

To be sure, today's political press will never tell you.

An Old Man in School

2012-01-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back. The frequency of posting obviously has gone down since the nursing classes in which I enrolled actually started. The classes themselves consume 30 hours a week, and I am still juggling professional responsibilities in the Life from which I am slowly disentangling myself.

Also, a lot of my free time has been consumed by a bunch of additional extraneous errands necessary to get through the nursing program. First, I had to get my shot records, which I was unable to find anywhere (I have never really had a regular doctor) and so just this Wednesday I ended up getting hit with about 6 different vaccines all at once and was sick as a dog for two days. I also had to get a brief physical, which, it turns out, you can't get unless you can produce your shot records (had the physical today, and am in good health - if not great shape - thank you very much). And finally - for some reason - a dentist has to say that my teeth look alright (I'm taking care of that Monday afternoon).

All of this is in addition to getting CPR certified (taken care of last week) and passing the criminal background check (which, between you and me, is the only one I was worried about and yet the easiest one to get through . . . mostly because it didn't require any effort on my part.)

Oh yeah . . . and I've moved again, which involved relocating myself, a good deal of my possessions, and the dogs.

So while I've been keeping abreast of recent goings on I haven't really had an opportunity to comment much on them. And I intend to, shortly, but first I thought I'd talk about one aspect of my experience in the nursing program: being the oldest guy in the class.

As I mentioned earlier, my program is the Certified Nursing Assistant program -- the CNAs are the people who actually provide direct care to patients. So we are learning all kinds of practical things, like how to turn patients (without injuring them) so that they do not develop bed sores, or how to change the bed linen of a patient who cannot get out of bed.

Typically, the first 2 hours are spent in lecture, and the remaining time in class is spent practicing the actual physical skills that we are supposed to be able to do. The classroom is outfitted with 6 practice hospital beds, and my class of 12 has been divided into 6 pairs. My partner is a young woman named Danielle.

Because we are expected to be able to actually do this stuff in the Real World, it is insufficient for us to simply demonstrate a technical knowledge of each skill that we learn; we also are expected to be able to communicate with our patients. The school wants to inculcate in us a reflexive respect for the patients' dignity and an empathy that goes beyond mere professionalism. So in addition to demonstrating technical skill, we also are required to role play; one person plays the CNA, the other person is in the bed, playing the role of the patient.

And each skill practice/demonstration begins the same way. You knock on the door and wait for permission to enter the room. Then you greet the patient, introduce yourself, and then ask the patient to confirm they are who they are supposed to be. (Because you want to make sure that you're not giving care to someone for whom it was not prescribed.) You do that by asking the patient to state their full name and date of birth while you check what they say against the medical bracelet on their wrist. (Kind of like being a bouncer, if you think about it.) Finally, you draw the privacy curtain (very important) and proceed to the skill set.

The goal is to make this routine so standard that we do it reflexively, without thinking. The two most important aspects, of course, are (i) confirming the patient's identity by name and birth date, and (ii) drawing the privacy curtain.

Of course, what this means in Real Life is that you end up knowing exactly how old is any person with whom you end up working. Our instructor told us when classes began that if we liked we could lie about our ages and I very briefly contemplated doing so, but dismissed the idea as the weakest sort of vanity. I am who I am -- I'm the Old Guy. My only concession to vanity was to stop, a few days into the exercises, actually giving my birth date by month, day and year, and substituting instead a string of numbers: "1-8-69." The string of numbers seemed slightly euphemistic.

As it turns out, my partner - Danielle - was born the same year I graduated High School. I've known this now for some weeks, and still remember being hit with the knowledge the first time she answered when I asked for her date of birth. And then, just this past Thursday, I worked briefly with another young woman - April - and I discovered that she was born the same year I graduated college. Damn.

But by far the worst of these is Jessica. On the very first day of class, when we were all asked to introduce ourselves, Jessica explained that she had just graduated High School. Thinking quickly, I figured that meant that she was probably born the same year I was graduating from law school. Of course, I didn't feel any real need to draw anybody else's attention to this fact. But it wouldn't stay unremarked upon for too long.

This Tuesday, during the very first of our skill set practices, I was lying in the hospital bed pretending to be the patient and Danielle was standing over me and asking for my name and date of birth. When I said "1-8-69" the privacy curtain flew open and there was Jessica staring at me gob-smacked and gap-mouthed.

"My God," she said, "do you know that you're older than my Mom?"

"What?!?" I exclaimed in mock outrage. "What! What the hell kind of information is that to hit a guy with at eight o'clock in the morning? What the hell is the matter with you? Do you think I need to hear that this early in the morning? Jesus! What's the matter with you?""

Of course, one of the great things about the truly young is that they are easy to bluff. Jessica's mouth went from gap-mouthed open to the more common "O"-open of embarrassed shame. "No, no," she stammered, obviously thinking she had committed a faux pas, "you don't understand. My Mom, she's very young, she's a young Mom, she -"

"No, no," I said, "no, don't try to walk it back. You can't un-ring that bell, Jessica. You've ruined my morning, just go." And I made that little shooing sign with my hands, and sighed very loudly. Jessica retreated behind the privacy curtain again and I winked at Danielle, who giggled.

* * *

Later, Danielle would let Jessica know that I wasn't really upset, which, y'know, I really wasn't. I was mostly just amused by it all, but also I took it as an opportunity to reflect on how everyone's sense of identity plays out inside of ourselves.

When I was growing up, I was very close with my mother's parents. My grandmother was named Ammy, and my grandfather was Papa. And, by the time I was about 12 or 13, I was an acolyte in the Episcopal church in which my grandmother played the organ. My parents never went to church, so whenever I was required to serve I would spend that Saturday night with my grandparents, and then catch a ride with them to church next morning.

Maybe my strongest memory of my grandfather comes from one of those nights spent sleeping over at their house. I was crashed out on the couch, and my grandfather and my uncle had gone out for beers after closing up the bookstore that evening. When my grandfather came home he was trying to be quiet, but he made enough noise to wake me up anyway. When he saw that I was awake, he pulled up a chair to talk to me.

We talked about a lot of stuff, I suppose -- I think the conversation went on for more than an hour. I can't remember what any of it was about, now. I remember realizing that he was a little drunk. But I'll never forget how he ended that conversation.

"You know," he told me, "you look at me and you see an old man. You've never known me any other way. But it's weird, y'know . . . I still feel the way I felt when I was 17 -- like I'm just getting started. I think everybody feels that way, all the time. You grow up, you get a job, you get married, you have a family. People start to look to you like you know things, like you have the answers. But you don't, not really. Really, you're always just the kid you've always been.

"At least, that's how I've always felt. And y'know? It's how I expect I always will feel -- like a kid who doesn't know anything, and who is just getting started." Then he kissed me, and went off to bed.

I've thought about that conversation many, many times over the years. It was the centerpiece of the eulogy that I delivered on the day my grandfather's body was buried. And I believe now, as I believed then, that he was right about that. We none of us really change; we just become more and more who we already are.

* * *

This isn't exactly on point but just the other day, while we were taking a break, Jessica and Danielle and Crystal were debating the deliciousness of pomegranates. April said that she loved the seeds, Crystal claimed not to be able to stand them. "Eat the seeds, go to hell," I told April.

"What?"

"You've never heard that story?" April shook her head. So I gave her an abbreviated version of the Persephone abduction story, and how it explains the changing of the seasons:

When the world was new and the Gods were young, Demeter was the goddess of green growing things and she had a beautiful daughter named Persephone.

One day Persephone was walking in the fields of Earth and Hades, Lord of the Underworld, looked up and said: "That's the girl for me." The earth split open under Persephone's feet and Hades, in a chariot drawn by four large, black horses, grabbed the girl and took her to stay with him in his kingdom under the Earth.

When Demeter could not find her daughter she became so sad that the green things stopped growing, and so the rest of the gods joined together and approached Hades and told him that he must give the girl up.

"Fine," said Hades, "but only if she has taken nothing from me and my kingdom."

Unfortunately, Persephone had eaten 6 pomegranate seeds while she was in the Underworld. And so a deal was reached. Persephone would spend six months of the year - one for each pomegranate seed -- in the underworld with Hades, and the rest of the time with her mother.

And so it came to pass that - once a year - Persephone goes underground and Demeter grows sad, and the growing things die and we have Autumn and, eventually, Winter. But, after six months have passed, Persephone returns and Demeter is so overjoyed we have Spring again.

And so it has been going, year upon year upon year, forever after. The Seasons themselves turn because of a mother's love.

When I was done, April smiled. "That's a nice story," she said.

And she has a beautiful smile, and I thought suddenly how nice it is to have had the time to learn the stories that can do that for people.

Romney: The Worst of Both Worlds for the GOP

2012-01-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

I came across two interesting posts this morning that got me thinking some more about the Republican nomination contest.

The first is Steve Benen’s summation of Mitt Romney’s most recent political woes:

Think about where Mitt Romney stood a week ago. He’d won the nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire; his national lead was large and getting larger; and he enjoyed double-digit leads over his squabbling competitors in the South Carolina primary.

And then think about where Romney stands this morning. It turns out he lost Iowa to a candidate he outspent 7 to 1; his national lead has, according to Gallup, “collapsed” over the course of the last several days; he struggled through two widely-panned debate performances; and polls suggest he’s likely to lose the South Carolina primary.

It’s likely, in about 12 hours, the only contest Romney will have won will be in the state he lives in for much of the year.

Benen goes on to point out that far and away Romney’s biggest political liability is that voters just don’t like him – the more people see of him, the less likely they are to want to vote for him.

This ties in very well with Steve M.’s comment “A Blind Romney Finds a Nut,” in which he argues that Romney’s apparent refusal to participate in Monday’s GOP debate in Tampa may be the best way to quash Newt Gingrich’s surging momentum. Newt doesn’t have the money to fund an ad campaign that can keep up with Romney’s in Florida, but Newt does very well in debate formats and has successfully leveraged those performances to keep his candidacy viable.

Steve M. goes on to speculate that – as the “establishment Republican candidate” – Romney may well benefit by the GOP establishment deciding to simply cancel any further debates, thereby depriving Gingrich of the oxygen he needs to continue his assault on Romney. I would suggest that such a move might also benefit Romney directly by keeping him from further alienating primary voters with his very personality.

Assuming both Steves’ observations are more or less on point, my question is: what does the Republican Party hope to gain by engineering the nomination of the guy that the rabid Republican base simply cannot stand?

After all, Romney’s big selling point – the reason he was supposed to be the inevitable Republican nominee – has always been his supposed “electability.” Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich . . . each was considered too extreme a candidate to do well in the general election. So while the GOP base switched from one candidate to the other searching for the anti-Romney, a candidate about whom they could be excited, the GOP political apparatus quietly lined up behind Mitt. The thinking seems to have been that nobody in the Republican Party liked Romney, but in the general election they would all hold their noses and grudgingly vote for him and that he might in fact be able to beat Barack Obama in November.

But while Romney may not be too blatantly “extreme,” it sure is beginning to look like he is too patently unlikeable to actually win. When it comes to Romney, even the slightest degree of familiarity is sufficient to breed truckloads of contempt.

But if Romney is just as unelectable as the other candidates (albeit for a slightly different reason), then I just don’t see what the downside is for the Republicans if they ran Gingrich or Santorum instead. They’d lose – sure – but at least they’d be running a candidate that actual Republican voters could be enthusiastic about. Instead, what they are likely to end up doing is running a candidate that actual Republican voters simply cannot stand and then lose the contest anyway – the worst of both worlds for the GOP.

Unfortunately, it may very well be a lousy outcome for the rest of us as well.

As others have pointed out before me, losing with Romney will only exacerbate the current craziness of the GOP. If they run Mitt Romney and he loses to Barack Obama – the man whom most Republican know-nothings have convinced themselves is the most reviled president in modern history – it will only be further confirmation that they lost by being too moderate.

They will – just as they did after the 2006 and 2008 elections – double-down on the Crazy. If you thought the American political landscape has been a bit nutty since the Tea Partiers got started, just wait until you see what it’s going to be like after the unlikable “moderate” Mitt Romney dashes all those Teabaggers’ dreams.

The Crazification Factor will go all the way up to Eleven.

Another Reason to Organize, Occupadores!

2012-01-15T08:49:00.000-08:00

Over at DKos Mark Sumner is rounding up the pundits and has this to say about Sam Tanenhaus's op-ed about Tea Party weakness:

What's making for weak Tea? In this case, the formula seems to contain plenty of uprising, but few core beliefs. The only demand placed on Tea Party candidates is that they be rabidly mad at Democrats, for any number of mostly make-believe reasons. That may be enough to win an election cycle, but as it turns out, it's not enough to sustain a movement. This party's over. (emphasis added).

Seriously?

Look . . . I'm a Sumner fan and I don't like the Tea Party . . . but how is this also not an indictment of the Occupy movement as well? Don't get me wrong, I think that the Tea Party is as doomed as a political movement as Sumner thinks it is but . . . well, doesn't the same thing apply to Occupy?

This is the reason I and so many other people have been saying that Occupy needs to rally around/behind at least one or two political causes: because without having something to fight for, any movement eventually just becomes noise.

Making a Life Change

2012-01-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

Well, I’ve not been around for a while. Real Life, as they say, has gotten in the way of blogging. If anyone’s missed the running commentary, I’m sorry ‘bout that and I promise to try to do better in the coming weeks. Although that may not always be easy.

I’m trying something new these days, and it is gripping and exciting and very, very different than anything I’ve done before with my adult life, but it is also demanding quite a bit of my time, so blogging may be a bit sporadic until I get more of a routine down. I’ll tell you about it, but let me first back into it by telling you a bit more about me and how I came to be where I am today . . .

Decades ago, when I was just graduating High School, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. But I wanted to make a nice living and I knew that I was fairly smart and I came from an immediate family that never had produced a member of the “professional class” and so – like about 1/3 of that year’s graduating High School seniors – I decided I would be a doctor. It sounded nice, y’know . . . I’d get paid well and be smart and respected and, well, that was it, really. That was about as far as my 17 year old brain took me with that idea.

The truth is that I hadn’t a clue what I would do, I just knew that I was blessed enough to be smart enough to do whatever I turned my mind to and I figured, “eh, being a doctor sounds alright.” It was an amazingly feckless way to launch myself on what we always are told is a Very Important Decision.

And in large part because I didn’t really care too much about that first decision, it was an easy enough one to abandon. I came home from school after my freshman year at college and started dating a woman who had been one of my best friends since junior high (and whom I had known for much longer) and I thought Hot Damn! This is It! This is Love!

And, seriously, how could it not have been Love? I was dating one of my best friends, a woman (girl) I had known since elementary school except now we could do the naughty stuff too – this must be that Love thing people have been telling me about, I thought. And so I decided to transfer to a new school to be close to her, but the closest school to which I could transfer on a moment’s notice did not have a pre-med program. No problem.

I’ve decided I don’t wanna be a doctor, I told my parents (who were paying for their son to become a professional), I think I wanna be a lawyer instead. I’ve always like learning about how business works – I’ll get a business degree and then go to law school. What the hell, I didn’t care . . . I was all of 18 years old and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew I wanted to stay with Her. And so I followed my True Love off to her school.

Which was – of course – a huge mistake. I had made my decision impetuously at the beginning of the summer, and by the end of the summer the two of us no longer were dating. (Yeah . . . I know.)

But my transfer already had taken place. I still remember the first day of the second semester that second year, waking up in my 11^th floor dorm room at 5:30 a.m. to perk coffee in my (illegal) coffee percolator and to stare at the 3 feet of snow on the ground – snow I would have to walk through on the mile long hike to my first early morning class on the other side of campus.

You know, I can still remember thinking to myself, a year ago you were waking up in a dorm room in Miami where the window was never closed. When the wind was right you could smell the salt air from Biscayne Bay. You used to walk to your classes barefoot. You had a beautiful girlfriend, fraternity brothers, and the beach whenever you wanted it. And you gave all of that up for a girl. And now you don’t even have the girl.

You screwed up really big, somewhere.

But as Life tends to do if you take a long enough look at it, things worked out. I moved on and even – years later – happily attended that girl’s wedding. I also transferred to yet a third school where I met a crew of people who are even now among my closest friends, and I did end up going to law school which taught me – wonder of wonders – how to actually think. And by that I mean how to think critically, and logically, and structurally, and also how to couch a good, logical argument in an emotionally gripping – and therefore persuasive – way.

So I can’t really regret any of what got me to that point, or how I spent the years afterward, putting the skills I learned in law school and then later, in the real world, to work. Like I said . . . things tend to work out.

* * *

I, of course, have changed a bit over the years.

When I was still a freshman pre-med student down in Miami I got a job as a computer programmer at the local VA hospital. They needed someone to decipher a Frankenstein program that had been cobbled together by a number of grad students over the preceding few years and nobody had bothered to put any documentation into the code; it was a huge puzzle, and I delighted in showing up at the hospital with my pass and my lab key at 1:00 a.m. to pull pages and pages of print sheets out on the floor so I could try to follow the variables and solve what it was doing (the lab was paying me to make it do something slightly different). I loved being alone in a quiet room painstakingly going over row after row of code, sussing out what it all meant and how the program worked and where it could be improved. It was sterilely elegant.

And, at the same time, I hated the chemistry labs I had to spend at least one evening a week doing. I hated the imprecision of it all, the ugliness of it all. This plus That equals Something Else . . . . maybe. If you got it all right then . . . maybe. Real Life wasn’t as elegant as abstract life and I found it . . . messy. Dealing with the idea of Things, I discovered, is always easier than dealing with the Things themselves.

But not only was Real Life inelegant, it was also unpoetic. I remember the precise moment I turned against the Life Sciences: I was driving back to UM after an evening spent in my VA computer lab. To avoid traffic I had taken a residential street that paralleled US-1 and as I drove I noticed that the leaves on the trees were curled up. I knew that meant a storm was on its way.

But what saddened me was how I now knew that for storm sign. I had grown up playing in the pinewoods of eastern North Carolina, but even those woods had leafy trees. Nobody had had to tell me what curling leaves mean – after a few years of playing in the woods, you just figured it out for yourself: take shelter when you see the silvery side of leaves because a squall is about to hit.

But back then, driving in my car to UM, all I could think was that I had just learned that leaves have special cells that contract when the humidity in the air increases, so that they can soak up more moisture before a storm. And that is the reason why the leaves curl.

Which is interesting, I thought, and I am sure it is in some way useful . . . but it isn’t poetic or particularly special. I remember looking at the upturned leaves that day and thinking about the physics and the chemical reaction that went into making the leaves curl up, and realizing that with that knowledge a little bit of magic had gone out of my world.

* * *

But now I think I’ve come full circle, in at least two ways.

First . . . I now think it is cool to know why things work the way they do. I can find poetry in the stoma cells of a leaf, I can find elegance in the science of a chemical reaction. I think maybe with age comes the relaxation of one’s grip on Newtonian cause-and-effect, and – as an adult – one begins to understand the truly wondrous possibility of probability. The Rules make Knowledge possible, but the Exceptions keep Life exciting.

More than that, though . . .

I have grown tired of the sterile elegance of models and ideas and argument. I want to see the messy side of things, I want to see the messy side of Life. Not to mock or to recoil, as I might have done when I was a kid, but to help out. I want to help do something for other people, and it has occurred to me that I don’t have any really useful skills. I can think, and I can reason, and I can argue and I can write . . . but I can’t help. Not in a hands-on kind of way. Which really, really sucks.

So, a few weeks ago, I enrolled back in school. I’m going to be a nurse.

* * *

My local nursing program only has a few slots, and I took the last of the entrance exams today. It is a computerized exam on reading, writing, math and science, and you get your score back immediately after finishing the test – I aced it. I say that with a small bit of pride, sure, but it’s just a fact; I’ve always been a very good test-taker. Unfortunately, there are very few seats available in the RN program (a result, apparently, of the fact that there are few hospital seats in my rural community so there are limited clinical opportunities), and I am competing against a bunch of other people who already have a good deal of health care experience. So even though I aced all the tests, I think the odds of me getting into the program this year are not that great and I’ll have to re-apply in about 9 months.

But for my purposes, that’s okay. Even before you can enroll in the nursing program you’ve got to become a Certified Nurse Assistant, which means you have to actually learn and provide direct care. I am not a CNA, so I am enrolled in that course right now. If I beat the odds and get into the RN program, then being in the CNA program this Spring means I’ll be able to go into the RN program next Fall; if the odds beat me and I don’t get into the RN program this Fall, well . . . then I’ll still be a CNA in a few months and I can try again for next year’s program.

And that’s neat because CNA’s are the people that feed patients, walk patients, bathe patients, change (if incontinent) patients . . . all that stuff. CNA’s are the people who actually tend to the patients. Which, quite frankly, terrifies me.

Until about 10 years or so ago, I spent a lot of my time dedicating myself to not letting my Life get messy. I had a career, I had a plan, I had a house. I would have had girlfriends but the job usually kept that from happening. It was a terrible existence and I dropped out of it, but the truth is that I still find myself keeping most people at an arm’s length. I’m a “hale fellow, well met” kind of guy, but I’ll shy away if you invite me ‘round to your house for a bar-b-que if I think it might mean that now I’ll have to see you every other day. I like people, I do, but I’m not particularly sociable.

The point is that I think I’m usually best when dealing with people at arm’s length. I know how to be fairly funny (without being obnoxious) and since turning about 22 I’ve only made a handful of really, really good friends. I find it easier to be facile with most people.

But I’m learning something new in my CNA class. For one thing, we all have to role-play and put our hands on each other, moving each other around and talking to each other. It is very unlike almost all the academic classes I have ever taken, where you didn’t have to interact at all if you didn’t want to. This one demands that you interact verbally and physically.

And it is weird, because I can almost kind of feel my personality come out when I interact with the women in my class (oh yeah . . . just to make this all that much weirder, I’m the only guy in the class), and I realize that it isn’t a persona I’m putting on so much as it is just a different aspect of me, an aspect that hasn’t had much exercise since I stopped having to go to court. Court Guy was a sociable guy, but it turned out he was also me.

The other thing I find myself thinking about more and more are the clinical aspects of the course, and the dealing with patients and residents. I actually am excited to work with these people, and to help them. In my head, there are two polar opposites of what that might turn out to be like:

Scenario A: Way back when I was about 20, I was home for summer break. My great-grandmother lived in the house next door to my family, and we took care of her. This particular day, I had gotten up late and made a brunch of grapefruit juice and vodka, and then had retired to float around in the pool reading Hunter S. Thompson. (I know this sounds like I’m making it up, but I had just discovered Thompson and this is, in fact, what I did.)

On the second or third trip back into the kitchen to fill up my greyhound, the phone rang. It was my dad, who asked me to go next door and tell Great-Nana that he would be late for lunch, but that he would be along shortly to prepare it for her.

So I went over and found my Great-grandmother sitting in her wheelchair in front of the glass front door, looking outside. I opened the door and – yelling at her so that she would hear – I explained that Dad was running late but that she should not worry.

“I just want you to know,” she said, patting my hand in hers, “that I am so very happy that neither you nor your sister smoke or drink.”

Well. I was fairly heavily buzzed by all that vodka I had just been drinking down at the pool, and I felt amazingly guilty. So I sat down next to her and, until Dad showed up about an hour later, I listened – really, really listened – to her stories of what it was like to grow up around the turn of the last century.

That was an amazing afternoon, and because of it I ended up spending hours and hours later with my great-Nana that it never would have occurred to me to do but for that one day. (Yay, Vodka! And Guilt!)

Scenario B: will involve an old woman suffering from dementia, whom I will have to help calm down and clean up after she has shat herself. It will be degrading for her, and terrible for me. And, of course, unspeakably gross.

But – and this is the real point – it is something that will still need to be done. Just because something is ugly or foul or unpleasant doesn’t mean it is something that doesn’t exist. The messy bit is what the rest of it is about.

After my great-grandmother finally slipped and broke her hip and we put her in the nursing home, somebody had to clean her. Somebody had to take care of her. Somebody had to make sure she was fed, and comforted, and that she did not get sores.

And I am sure that the people who had to take care of my great-grandmother thought that a lot of what they were doing was, well, disgusting . . . but I hope they also were taking pains to ensure that in her last years she had as much dignity and respect as she deserved. Which was all of it.

* * *

I’ve written before about the fact that – were I to consider myself a religious man at all – that religion would have to be Buddhism. And I’m self-aware enough to realize that there is a selfish part of me that wants to do this. I look forward to being a CNA because it seems to offer almost a perfect opportunity to exercise compassion. This will be a compassion work-out, no doubt about that. Doing this job will be like going to the gym.

Anyway . . . that’s what I’m doing these days. I’ll still be blogging, of course, and Reading Marx and maybe – now that I’ve come clean about what I’ve been up to these past few weeks – I’ll be blogging about the nursing thing.

So, y’know . . . keep tuning in.

Santorum: Fishing in the Crab Pot

2012-01-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

There is a disturbing tendency among a lot of people to equate suffering with virtue, to equate ignorance with “common sense,” and to equate sacrifice with value. It appears that Rick Santorum is treading these well-worn boards on the campaign trail.

It should be noted that Santorum earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a lobbyist, a corporate consultant, and one of Fox News' gunsels-for-hire (go ahead . . . click on the link to find out what the word “gunsel” really means). It should also be noted that his tax plan, were he to be elected president, would actually add about $6.5 trillion to the national debt, mostly by cutting taxes for corporations and the richest 1%.

Yet despite the fact Santorum is an unapologetic mouthpiece for the plutocracy, in two recent campaign speeches he can be seen attempting to garner working-class votes by telling voters they are the backbone of America and the salt of the earth -- even as he works to screw those people over. Unfortunately, a great number of these Americans pay almost no attention to politics and therefore have no idea what Santorum's policies really portend, so when they hear someone like L'il Ricky give a speech lauding their willingness to work hard for little pay they naturally think: Hey, he appreciates me.

No, no he doesn't. He appreciates the fact that some of these people will vote for him even though he does intend to make them work harder for much less compensation, and he appreciates that some of the people that vote for him can be persuaded afterward that because they will then be suffering even more they will have somehow proved themselves to be "better" than people (like Santorum) who don't have to suffer at all. Simply stated, Santorum is trading on the propensity people have to turn themselves needlessly into martyrs.

Some people, I swear, you have to physically take the hammer and the nails away from them because otherwise they'll be climbing up on that cross the first moment your back is turned just so they can prove their superiority by suffering more than you. It is arrogance disguised as humility, it is the elitism of the self-consciously put-upon, and it is the stock in trade of a good deal of conservative rhetoric about how absolutely fantastic are the average Americans pointlessly being broken on the wheel of Conservative economic dogma:

Ms. Mornin: Okay, I’m a divorced, single [57 year-old] mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.

Pres. Bush: Fantastic. First of all, you’ve got the hardest job in America, being a single mom . . . .

Ms. Mornin: I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.

Pres. Bush: You work three jobs?

Ms. Mornin: Three jobs, yes.

Pres. Bush: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)

Ms. Mornin: Not much. Not much.

In L'il Ricky's case, the first moment his "martyr ploy" came to my attention was when he gave his celebratory speech after tying Mitt Romney for first place in the Iowa caucuses. A good part of that speech was an encomium of his grandfather, who upon coming to America promptly sold himself into debt slavery in the Pennsylvania coal mines.

Rick Perlstein at Crooks and Liars did a masterful take down of this portion of Santorum's speech, and I highly recommend clicking on the link to check it out in its entirety. But the essential story is as follows: Santorum's grandfather went to work for a coal mining company that would not pay him in actual money, but instead paid him in company "scrip," which could only be redeemed at the local company store -- stores that were notorious for rejiggering the books so that miners ended up perpetually in debt. Without money, miners could not move to seek better employment; worse, because almost all were kept in debt bondage to the company they worked for, if they were to leave they could be arrested for attempting to flee a debt.

This system -- a system that chewed workers up, spat them out, and usually prevented them from seeking any kind of life outside of perpetual slavery to the mining company itself -- was where the oft-covered and immortal song Sixteen Tons came from:

And it is this system that Santorum praised as inherently superior to "government interference in the free market" -- even to the government interference that was responsible for ending the kind of debt slavery his grandfather suffered under.

(One of the most annoying things about listening to professional Conservatives describe American history is that they always point with pride to the suffering our grandparents and great-grandparents endured during the Depression and World War II, and they always leave implicit the argument that in America if you are just willing to work hard and suffer enough then everything'll eventually turn out okay -- just as it did in generations past. But they always ignore that the reason things ended up turning out okay in generations past is that those generations embraced liberal economic policies like FDR's New Deal and Social Security and Medicare, and it was our unwillingness to just continue suffering that actually brought an end to what was for many a hideous way of life.)

* * *

The second time I noted L'il Ricky nakedly appealing to class distinctions and urging working class voters to identify with him and against President Obama was when ThinkProgress pointed out that only a few days Santorum had accused Obama of "elitist snobbery" for declaring that everybody in America should have the opportunity to go to college. What really shocked me was to hear the applause this attack line elicited:

The only way this is an applause line is if one assumes that the people listening to Santorum spew this bilge think that Obama - by mere dint of suggesting that people should be able to go to college if they want -- is somehow sneering at or looking down on people who didn't go to college, or - more accurately -- who didn't have the opportunity to go to college.

I can only imagine the "thinking" that goes on in someone's head when they hear Obama's aspirational goal for the country and immediately see themselves as victimized by it: Well, Mr. SmartyPants, I didn't go to college. I guess you think that makes me dumb, huh? Well, I'll show you! Ima gonna vote for Rick Santorum!

I'm sorry, but . . . huh? The President of the United States said it would be a good thing if everybody who graduated High School had the opportunity to go to college. Rick Santorum used this -- the most bland, "education is good" general policy statement imaginable -- to stir up class-based resentment amongst (I am assuming) the working class who did not have the inclination and/or opportunity to get an education beyond High School. And it might be working.

* * *

In Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett introduced the sociological idea of "the Crab Pot." See, when you dump a bunch of crabs into a pot filled with boiling water, all the individual crabs scramble to claw their way out of the pot. But any crab that gets close to clawing itself out of the pot is immediately pulled back down by its fellow crabs, so ultimately they all end up boiling together.

For humans, the "Crab Pot" is the natural tendency we all have to insist on our individual dignity and pride. Unfortunately, that means we have a tendency to take pride in almost anything. If we are poor, then there is a large number of us who will insist on taking pride in our poverty and will resent people who suggest we can do better. If we are uneducated, we will take pride in our ignorance and deride people who suggest that maybe our children could get a better education.

The Crab Pot people are all too willing to pull down anyone who tries to make their lives or the lives of their children even just a little better. But they will more than happily vote for the candidate - like Santorum - who tells them that accomplishing little and suffering greatly is all it takes to make them great too. And - really - what could be easier? The Crab Pot people were planning on doing that anyway.

Sure, if they elect Santorum their lives will suck just a little bit more, but at least L'il Ricky (and all his intellectual comrades) will tell them they are great just for being who they are, and for the Crab Pot people being told you're great -- when you've got nothing else -- is all it really takes.

Reading Marx – Part XIII

2012-01-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

(Routine Introduction: For reasons explained here, I’m in the process of slogging through Marx’s Capital. The plan is to read it in conjunction with watching David Harvey’s free on-line lectures about the book. I’ll be posting notes and initial impressions as I read. This will be an extremely long-term project.)

Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 2, Subsection c

Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection c “Coins and Symbols of Value”

--Marx points out that the only difference b/w coin and bullion is one of shape, but that once a coin leaves the mint it begins wearing away, some more, some less; “coins of the same denomination become different in value, because they are different in weight”;

--accordingly the circulating medium ceases to any longer be a real equivalent of the commodities whose prices it realizes; he apparently wishes to provide a historical explanation as to how mere tokens of money – paper money – can come to replace the actual universal equivalent commodity, which is gold; “the fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation b/w their nominal and their real weight . . . implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the same purposes as coins.”

--for Marx, the amount of paper money that any nation might issue is and must be limited to the amount of gold coins that can actually be current

Paper-money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented by the paper. Only insofar as paper-money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.

(NOTE: Wow! This I just do not agree with at all. As I understand Marx, he is suggesting that paper money has no actual value unless it represents gold (or some other commodity). But that just is not the case. The paper money we use now has value and it comes not from the fact that it is equivalent to gold but that it is equivalent to all commodities in ever shifting amounts, amounts determined by billions and billions of decisions being made in the marketplace (and by governments) that determines its fluctuating collective value. In a very real sense, the money we’ve been using for the past 40 years is just a collective agreement we all struck with each other; its value is real the way that Love, and Friendship, and Honor are real – non-material, but real nonetheless.

(I think Marx here is trapped by his own reductionist system of thought, because he desperately wants money to have some objective value – separate and apart from human fecklessness. I’d be willing to bet he started his consideration with gold as society’s money and then attempted to figure out how gold can be valued – given that it isn’t actually very useful in and of itself. He then figured that the only way to value gold is to measure the amount of labor that went into producing it, and decided that this was the proper determination of Value for all commodities.

(That very likely is why he started his discussion w/commodities to being with; he backdoors his way into explaining how gold comes to be the universal commodity, maybe because he is aware that his historical explanation is a “just so” story. But now he has to insist that paper money has no value unless it is backed up by gold . . . and we know that this just isn’t true.)

--Marx goes on to suggest that gold is replaceable by a token of no intrinsic Value (paper money) only to the extent that token is taking over the function of gold work as a circulating medium (although Marx implies that gold has other functions as well as serving as the means of circulatoin); each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation only so long as it keeps circulating; thus the minimum amount of gold (money) necessary in the system is that amount of money necessary to be circulating at any one time . . . which Marx claimed in the last subsection is relatively stable (although he did not show his work in making that claim; such a blanket statement seems a bit dubious);

--So, the minimum amount of gold necessary to circulate is what may be replaced by paper money; these tokens must have an objective social validity of their own, which they acquire by the compulsory action of the State to require that they be accepted as money;

IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAY: The function of money is the circulation of commodities (the economy) and to serve as the means of circulation. A minimum amount of money is necessary to remain in the system at all times, circulating away.

Next Up: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 3 “Money”, Subsection a “Hoarding” – Well, that was quick. And now the final section in Chapter 3 is coming up; it is divided into three relatively short subsections, and since today’s very short reading was a lot more fun than slogging through a bunch of this at once, I’ll probably break this down and do a separate entry on each of the short subsections in Section 3 “Money.”

Random Observations Re: Last Night’s Debate

2012-01-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

When I finally tuned out last night, the bobbleheads were calling the debate for Mitt Rombot because (i) the Rombot failed to completely short circuit on stage, and (ii) none of the other contenders really went after it. From the bobbleheads’ perspective, calling the debate in the Rombot’s favor is undoubtedly the safe call as the Rombot is almost certain to win the New Hampshire primary two days from now and apparently is topping the polls in South Carolina (curse you, Newt Gingrich! You have once again proven that I simply cannot predict what Republican voters are likely to do.)

In no particular order, below the fold are some random observations about last night’s GOP debate:

(1) The questions were pretty execrable. For example, Diane Sawyer asked Jon Huntsman why he would make a better Commander-in-Chief than the others, a lay-up question if there ever was one (although Huntsman refused to talk smack about the other candidates; I swear, it’s as if he doesn’t really want to be the nominee in 2012).

And George Snuffleupagus spent about 15 minutes asking Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul about whether they think states should be permitted to outlaw contraceptives. I know what Snuffie was trying to get at – the Right to Privacy – but he couched his question so badly that the candidates were able to skate right past it and the crowd began groaning.

For the record . . . Roe v. Wade declared the complete outlawing of abortion to be unconstitutional because it interferes with a person’s reproductive autonomy, which is protected by the “right to privacy” that the Court previously had held arises out a “penumbra” of the other civil right explicitly protected by the Constitution. (The Right to Privacy itself cannot be located in the text of the Constitution.) The candidates declared that Roe was wrongly decided, with Santorum and Ron Paul indicating that they did not believe in any right to privacy other than as spelled out in the Fourth Amendment, which only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

However, the Right to Privacy was also the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswald v. Connecticut, which held that the individual states could not ban access to contraception. Presumably, what Snuffie was trying to get at was where and whether Mitt and Santorum would draw the line: anti-Roe but pro-Griswald? (Although Santorum is pretty much anti-Griswald, too) And it that’s their position, why draw the line explicitly there?

But Stephanopoulos apparently felt that the debate format did not lend itself to a long lead-up question, and so skipped right to asking about whether states have the right to outlaw contraception. The Rombot essentially declared it was a stupid question because no states want to do that, and mocked George S. for asking it. Santorum – who has stated explicitly that he thinks the use of contraception is morally wrong – took advantage of the confusion to simply say that Roe was wrongly decided.

(2) Newt deployed his favorite rhetorical trick for not answering a question: refocusing the debate until you’re looking at it from so far away you might as well be in outer space.

At one point the candidates were asked about whether they were in favor of bringing the troops back home from Afghanistan. When it was his turn, Newt just sighed and said that we were not seeing the big picture, and then proceeded to list all the dangers of “radical Islam” that he could think of, including Iran. By the time he had wrapped up with some standard boilerplate about America taking a “firm stand against this serious threat” nobody remembered that he had failed to answer the actual question.

(3) Ron Paul’s decision to go after Santorum as a “big government Conservative” for voting to increase spending – No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Prescription Drug Amendment, voting to raise the debt ceiling on numerous occasions – struck me as a little weird.

First, it’s an incredibly ineffective attack. Conservatives say they’re in favor of reducing spending and shrinking government, but they like big government just fine if it’s spending money on them and things of which they approve. It’s only when they think money is being given to the poor, to foreign countries, or to lazy, shiftless black and brown people that they get upset. Arguing that Rick Santorum isn’t conservative because he voted to give old people prescription drug assistance is just lame.

Second, it seems strategically strange to attack another Not Romney and not to attack the Rombot itself. Sam Seder of The Majority Report has floated the possibility that Ron Paul wants to use whatever leverage this last race gives him to extract some concessions from the GOP on behalf of his son Rand, and that this might explain why Paul has gone so easy on Mitt Romney during the race. I confess that Seder’s speculations flitted through my mind once or twice during last night’s debate.

(4) Nobody seemed to notice, but Santorum made the most radical statement of the night by declaring that he believed the business of marriage is legitimately a federal concern because, he said, it lies at the heart of American society. This despite the fact family law always has been a state issue, and is an area of which the federal government has always steered clear. Simply unbelievable. This guy thinks the 10^th Amendment (which reserves to states the powers not delegated to the federal government) means that the fed cannot impose environmental restrictions on polluting corporations, but that it can dictate to the states and their citizens what “marriage” means.

Newt Gingrich added to the confusion by saying that he respects gay couples in long-term, loving relationships, but that this doesn’t mean the government needs to extend to gay couples the “sacrament” of marriage that it extends to heterosexual couples. Psst . . . . Newt! A marriage license is not a “sacrament” – “sacraments” are something you receive from a church.

And the Rombot appeared to be the most addled, drawing the line against gay marriage by arguing that America has an interest in fostering families that have both male and female parental figures, and that in order to encourage such unions we grant married couples certain legal and financial benefits. So . . . Romney thinks people get married for the government benefits? Or that gay people might renounce their homosexuality and marry opposite sex partners if the government just sweetens the pot a little bit? Jesus . . . what a poorly designed tool.

(5) Oh, and speaking of the federal government dictating to its citizens whom they can love, marry and have sexual relations with . . . I think pretty much everybody at some point talked about the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and how they are fighting for our “freedom,” or “to keep America free,” or how it is only our military that ensures we “remain free.”

To me, it sounded like they were all speaking in tongues or invoking some ritualistic incantation designed to please the Great God GOP. And, good lord, I wish I could have strangled this trope in its crib. The plain fact is that American freedom is not in any danger from terrorists or mullahs or foreign nations of any sort. It may be in danger here at home from our own elected representatives who want to give the president the authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without charge or trial, or who want to proscribe the most intimate contact two people may share with one another, but sad fact remains that there isn’t a single service member wounded or killed in either Iraq or Afghanistan who made any person in America any more “free.”

America is the world’s preeminent nuclear power, and nobody else on the planet even punches in our weight class when it comes to conventional warfare. Which is why absolutely nobody (else) in the world is trying to destroy America, or take it over, or proscribe our freedoms – because they know there isn’t a chance in hell they’d succeed. These days our active military engagements are used to project American power, not to defend the country against nations attempting to conquer it.

PerhapsThers said it best:

A lot of the point of [my] blog is to say bad words on the Internet as a way of blowing off steam. But the other idea is to find the touch moments of ideological censorship and fuck with them. For instance, no active military service member is fighting for the freedom of any American civilian. Individual American freedom is not now seriously threatened by any foreign enemies, nor has it been for generations. Likewise, no service member who has died in Iraq or Afghanistan sacrificed their life so that any American might be more free. It is just the facts.

(6) With the exception of Ron Paul, everybody seemed to be itching for a new war, this time with Iran. No wonder Iran might think it’s a good idea to get its hands on a nuclear weapon. Quick history note – number of countries with nuclear weapons the US has attacked or invaded: zero.

(7) Finally, I was struck by the candidates’ conception of US/China relations and what it means to be “competitive” in the 21^st century.

China remains a reflexive bug-a-boo in conservative circles and – who knows – maybe they even believe China is a threat. Hell, prior to 9/11 the Bush Administration -- or at least Dick Cheney’s wife -- was lobbying hard for declaring friggin’ war on China. And, of course, we have this nastily paranoid and jingoistic anti-Huntsman ad put out by someone who supports Ron Paul:

The Rombot argued that America needs to slash taxes in order to remain “competitive,” but it isn’t clear with whom he thinks we are competing. America’s effective corporate tax rate (what companies really pay) is already among the lowest in the industrialized world, and if we are looking for comparators to gauge our economic success I would rather look to the industrialized countries of Europe (whose manufacturing industries, with high worker salaries and benefits, higher real corporate tax rates, stronger unions and a greater social safety net, appear to be doing just fine) than to, say, the emerging BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), where the standard of living is far, far below that found in Europe or here.

More fundamentally, I wonder whether “competing” is still the best way to view our relationship with other nations. Historically, nations have competed with each other either in the exploitation of resources or in warfare. I would like to think that humans are slowly getting out of the idea that declaring war on a country in order to annex them/subjugate them/steal from them is a good or even a valid idea (although, let’s be honest, that is exactly what George Dubya was attempting to do in Iraq).

And now that there are no new frontiers to grab, nations simply are not competing against each other to colonize, monopolize and exploit newly discovered natural resources. Wherever natural wealth is found, countries have to – or, at least, they are supposed to – negotiate with the people already living there to expropriate and exploit that wealth.

I suppose one could say that nations compete with each other for markets, but even that isn’t really true. Multi-national corporations compete with each other for markets, and increasingly it is of little interest to any nation’s actual citizens which of these enormous corporations can obtain a particular competitive advantage – especially if, as everyone on stage last night seemed to argue, those corporations should pay nothing in taxes. What do I care whether ExxonMobile or BP gets to exploit an Iraqi oil field if not a penny of that money is going to be taxed in order to help pay for the common good here in America? I am not ExxonMobile, and I certainly am not going to cheer if they beat out BP for a lucrative contract because “they’re my team.” Because no . . . no they are not. They’ve been making it quite clear for some time now that they aren’t playing on my behalf.

Besides, in an increasingly interconnected world of global trade, the richer China gets the richer America gets. China is growing its wealth by exporting to us, and we are eagerly snatching up all the cheap Chinese goods we can pack into our Wal-Mart shopping carts. Americans love getting cheap shit, and we’ve got a lot of it now. I suppose Americans would love it even more if they could get all that cheap shit without paying for it at all, but if continuing to purchase cheap Chinese crap means that China continues to grow, the American consumer is going to think that is a pretty good trade.

And although the Rombot argued that China is “taking” our manufacturing jobs, that isn’t true either. We are giving those jobs away by failing to do anything but reward US manufacturers who ship jobs overseas because labor costs are cheaper. If we’re not shipping those jobs to China then we’re shipping them somewhere else, and the only government that can halt this race to the bottom is the US government.

As Europe’s manufacturing industry demonstrates, racing to the bottom in terms of lower wages and less benefits isn’t the only way to compete in today’s world, it’s just the way the 1% wants America to compete. In the end, it isn’t China that’s impoverishing this country, it’s the American plutocrats who control it.

Reading Marx – Part XII

2012-01-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 2, Subsection b

Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection b “The Currency of Money”

--Marx argues that the circulation of commodities (Commodity --> Money --> Commodity) is a closed circuit for commodities (one commodity ultimate is exchanged for another commodity); but while money circulates in an economy it does not form a closed circuit, but rather always gets further and further away from its source; (well, maybe, but one could say the same thing of the linen, I suppose; the original linen never comes back to the weaver; maybe it doesn’t always move further away from the weaver because it is intended to be consumed, but then again many commodities are sold not for final consumption but for resale, i.e., wholesalers sell to retailers; I’m not sure this is a valid distinction to draw b/w money and commodities);

--the course of money continuing away from its “source” (which also seems a little arbitrary; the source seems to be wherever Marx decides to first start tracing the movement of money) Marx deems its “currency” (‘Currency’ thus is a defined term, i.e. the movement of money);

--Marx argues that in the market it appears that trade is effected by money circulating amongst traders, but in reality it is the commodities’ circulation that constitutes trade (?); Marx assumes that upon the sale of any commodity it is immediately consumed (or, maybe, transformed into another commodity, like linen being turned into a shirt), and thus in trade commodities are constantly dropping out of the market while money continues to circulate;

(NOTE: it seems to me that Marx is using a pretty free hand here to define his terms; I’d be curious to know what it is he specifically means by “circulation of commodities,” which I am reading as “the market”; it simply is not true that in every sale of a commodity the commodity drops out of trade circulation; some commodities are incorporated into other, larger commodities (a computer chip into a laptop, for example), which are then re-sold; I suppose Marx could mean that the commodity drops out of that particular market (the market for computer chips), but it looks like he is attempting to make a more global statement and I just don’t know if that statement holds up; it doesn’t appear to)

(NOTE: I think I understand the point Marx is attempting to reach, but I am suspicious that in order to get there he is invoking a simplified model of “the market” that does not actually correspond to real life; if the model doesn’t relate in a material way to real life then no useful lesson can necessarily be drawn from that model)

--every commodity, when sold, falls out of circulation only to eventually be replaced by other commodities (when the money acquired by selling the first commodity, i.e., the linen is used to purchase something else); but money, as the medium of commodity circulation, never leaves the system; Marx wants to know how much money the “sphere of circulation” constantly absorbs;

--Looking at the total commodities offered for sale in a nation, the amount of money that must be present in order to effect those sales is the sum total of all their prices; but while their collective Value (the socially necessary labor time to produce those commodities) always remains constant, their prices will vary with the Value of gold (the material of money) as it falls or rises;

--I think it is important to note that Marx seems to be assuming that gold is constantly entering the system as it is mined and refined around the world; this is very different than what happens now; so gold is “entering into the sphere of circulation but is never dropping out of it, as other commodities do”; of course, as more gold enters the market the Value of any individual piece of gold (expressed as a fraction of the total gold present) goes down, and so more gold is needed to equate to the Value of commodities and their prices rise; if gold were to become more rare (and how can that happen if it never drops out of circulation?) then each small piece of gold is a greater fraction of the Gold Commodity in the global market, hence more valuable, hence less is needed to equate to the Value of the commodities (i.e., prices go down);

* * *

---Hhhhmmmm . . . Marx then states:

A one-sided observation of the results that followed upon the discovery of fresh supplies of gold and silver [the New World], led some economists in the 17^th and particularly in the 18^th century, to the false conclusion that the prices of commodities had gone up in consequence of the increased quantity of gold and silver serving as means of circulation.

If I understand this correctly, what Marx is saying is that what led to the inflation Europe experienced after Spain found the riches of the New World was not just that now there was more gold and silver in circulation, but that the Value of any particular piece of gold was less because the total gold in circulation was more. In other words, supposing there are 100,000 oz. gold total in the market. Of the Total Value (socially necessary labor time) expended to get 100,000 oz. gold into the market, 1 oz. represents 1/100,000 of that total Value;

Let’s call SNLT a unit, and say that one SNLT unit is required to get 1 oz. gold on the market;

But suppose a treasure trove of say, another 100,000 oz. gold is discovered that requires less SNLT units to get on the market – let’s say one SNLT unit gets 10 oz. of this new gold on the market; now we have a total of 200,000 oz. gold, which collectively requires 110,000 SNLT units to produce.

Under the original circumstances, 100,000 oz gold = 100,000 SNLTs; under the changed circumstances, 200,000 oz gold = 110,000 SNLT; So, 1 oz gold use to equate to 1 SNLT; but now, 1 oz gold equates to 0.55 SNLT; but the Value of the linen (say, 10 SNLT) hasn’t changed; so whereas before it would take 10 oz gold (10 SNLTs) to equate to the linen, now it takes 18.19 oz gold (10 SNLTs) to equate to 10 SNLT Value of linen);

I think the point Marx is trying to make here is that it isn’t just the greater amount of money in circulation that drives up prices, but that the greater amount of money in circulation reflects more gold being produced at less socially necessary labor time, i.e., its Value has decreased

* * *

--All of the foregoing notwithstanding, Marx concludes by merely asserting that for purposes of this discussion he is going to treat the Value of gold as a fixed given (as it is at any particular point in time);

--Okay, now . . . Marx is going to assume that the quantity of all commodities remains constant; he also is assuming that the value of gold is fixed; thus, the amount of money that is going to be necessary in the global market will vary depending on the fluctuations of the prices of the commodities (how can those prices fluctuate if the Value of gold is fixed? I assume because either there are differences in the socially necessary labor time needed to produce these commodities, or else changes in the supply and demand of and for each product);

--generally speaking, as the total sum of prices goes up, more money must be put into circulation, as the total sum of prices goes down, less money is needed (so, contra earlier, money can drop out of circulation – I knew it);

--now, if four articles are sold in different localities to different purchasers, and each of those articles has a price of $2, it follows that there must be $8 dollars in circulation. But suppose each of these articles is sold as part of a chain: a farmer sells wheat for $2, and purchases 20 yds of linen for $2; the weaver takes that $2 and purchases a Bible, and the bookbinder takes the $2 and purchases 4 gallons of brandy, then we only need $2 to be in circulation; the point here is that time is required for the completion of the series;

“Hence the velocity of the currency of money is measured by the number of moves made by a given piece of money in a given time.”

--suppose in this example the circulation of the 4 commodities takes a day; the sum of the prices is $8, the number of moves the money makes is 4, and the quantity of money circulating is $2. Generally speaking, the quantity of circulating money is equal to the sum of the prices of the commodities in circulation divided by the number of moves made by money of the same denomination;

--since the total money changing hands is going to be equal to the sum of the prices of all the commodities in circulation, then the higher the velocity of money the less quantity of money is needed (because the same money can be reused more quickly), and the lower the velocity of money the more money is needed; thus, if money velocity speeds up, more money will drop out of circulation, and if money velocity slows down, more money must enter into circulation in order to keep trade going;

--although commodity prices remain constant, the amount of money in circulation may increase either because the number of commodities increases, the velocity of money decreases, or some combination of the two;

--on the other hand, money will drop out of the system when there are less commodities available or if money velocity increases, or both;

--when prices rise, the quantity of money in circulation will remain the same provided the number of commodities available decreases proportionally to the increase in prices, or provided the money velocity increases at the same rate as prices rise (the quantity of commodities in that case remaining constant);

--if prices fall, the quantity of money in circulation will remain constant provided the number of commodities increase proportionally to the fall in prices, or provided the money velocity slows down at the same rate as prices fall (the quantity of commodities in that case remaining constant);

--finally, although the monetary velocity, the quantity of commodities and their prices may all vary, they may do so in a way that mutually compensates each other such that the sum total of commodity prices in the market and the amount of money in circulation remains more or less constant; Marx suggests that – looking at the big picture – the quantity of money in circulation in any country remains more or less a constant;

FINAL POINT: What Marx wants to get at here is that given the sum of the values of all commodities and the average velocity of money in an economy, the quantity of gold that is in circulation depends on the Value of the gold; he argues that economists’ previous understanding – which held that prices depend on the amount of money present in the system – is erroneous. Marx argues that this opinion “was based by those who first beheld it on the absurd hypothesis that commodities are without a price, and money without a value, when they first enter into circulation . . . .”

MY THOUGHTS: Marx wants to assign an objective Value to the money commodity – gold – equivalent to the SNLT to produce a given quantity of gold; he seems to making an argument about causation; prices go up because the Value of gold goes down, which requires more gold to enter the market; it is not that the Value of gold goes down because more gold enters the market. I think that’s correct.

Next Up: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection c “Coins and Symbols of Value” – another subsection coming up! And it’s a short one! Yay for totally unjustified feelings of accomplishment after completing short segments.

Some Honest to God Good Employment News

2012-01-07T04:20:00.000-08:00

Last month the US added 200,000 new jobs, and the official unemployment rate dropped to 8.5%. This is a big deal, because as a rule of thumb the US needs to add about 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. So, roughly speaking, 200,000 new jobs means that not only did we manage to accommodate all the new workers entering the labor force, but also that about 50,000 people who previously had been unemployed were able to get a job.

Yay, us.

There's still a long way to go, and all the usual caveats about potential future crises still apply (I for one am still keeping a wary eye on Europe), but good news on the employment front is fairly rare these days and I'm happy to have an opportunity to remark on something positive for a change.

Shameless Nixon Speculation

2012-01-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

By now you may already have heard about Don Fulsom’s new book Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President. It has attracted some attention because in it Fulsom suggests that Richard Nixon may have been a closeted homosexual who carried on a long-term affair with Bebe Rebozo.

Is it true? Who the hell knows? My understanding is that the book’s argument is entirely circumstantial and that Nixon’s alleged homosexuality cannot be definitively proved one way or the other, even if the individual reader may find Fulsom’s argument persuasive. I won’t be reading the book myself because my interest in a dead president’s sexual orientation ranks about on the same level as my interest in reading the US tax code from beginning to end.

I will say this though: it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. As a matter of fact, when I heard about the book my first thought was, That actually would explain a lot. From everything else I’ve read about Nixon, the man’s naked ambition and lust for power seemed driven by a deep sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. I can easily see how being a closeted homosexual – especially if he was a closeted homosexual who felt that his orientation made him “less of a man” – could have been the fuel that fired both Nixon’s self hatred and his unquenchable need to triumph over his enemies and detractors.

And I’d be willing to bet that – if Nixon really was homosexual – in his deepest heart of hearts he was always whispering to himself: “If the President does it, it is not gay.”

Elder Abuse and Police Brutality

2012-01-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

I learned something today that I did not know before about elder abuse, especially as it occurs in privately run assisted living facilities: the inappropriate use of physical restraints for punishment or for the convenience of the staff is prosecutable as “elder abuse.”

In other words, the mere act of physically retraining a resident – be it by locking them in their room or raising the guard rails to keep them from getting out of bed – not even because the staff wishes to punish that resident or to hurt the resident, but just because doing so makes life easier for the facility’s staff, is considered to be a crime.

Instantly, I flashed on the increasingly common use by cops of non-lethal force such as pepper spray or tasers as a convenient means of coercing citizens to comply with police orders. From the infamous John Pike’s pepper-spraying of protesting college students at UC-Davis for refusing his order to disperse, to this story involving a middle-aged alumni couple being tazed for sitting in the wrong seats at a college football game, it seems increasingly clear that the police routinely employ physically abusive and quite painful practices simply because doing so makes the cops’ jobs more “convenient.” Why bother actually talking to and calming down an irate or confused citizen when you can simply tazer them into instant submission?

And yet somehow almost nobody in American society seems to have a problem with the cops’ use of such force. That really needs to change.

All Thane’s Day and the Occupy Movement

2012-01-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I wrote a post about the Occupy movement’s insistence on maintaining a non-hierarchical, horizontal organization even if keeping that kind of organization might not always be in its best interest. I pointed out that for thousands of years humans naturally have been organizing ourselves into hierarchies for good reason: a hierarchical structure brings with it a number of distinct advantages that consensus driven organizations just do not possess.

This afternoon, just to have something to look at while I ate my lunch, I randomly opened Jared Diamond’s fantastic book Guns, Germs and Steel and came across something Diamond wrote about social organization that seems to travel along the same line as my earlier critique. I’m going to get to Diamond in a moment, but first I’d like to tell you about All Thane’s Day.

All Thane’s Day is the name I and my best friends from college (for reasons too complicated to go into here) gave to the reunion we used to hold each year after we were graduated and had gone our separate ways. It was always a time of great fun and greater debauchery, a week-long event devoted to reminiscing, to remembering why we all care so very much for each other, and to playing the Sport of Kings . . . Beergammon. (Undoubtedly the subject, some day, of a post in its own right.)

Of course, over the years most of us would go on to marry and have children and as our individual families grew larger and the children grew older it became increasingly difficult to organize a full week away for everybody – there just was no longer any week that did not conflict with someone’s schedule. So even though we all still keep in touch and even get together from time to time, it’s probably been 4 years or more since we’ve had an honest-to-God, week-long All Thane’s Day reunion.

Which is a damned shame.

One of the last of these reunions was held at Nag’s Head, North Carolina, in the Outer Banks. We had rented a large beach-front house, one that could accommodate at least nine adults and six children. Unlike in years past, when we were younger and had stronger metabolisms, the focus of the week was not so much on playing Beergammon as it was on simply hanging out together.

Every night we would put together a communal feast involving absolutely enormous quantities of food. We would all gather around a single large table (kids ate elsewhere) to eat and drink and talk and laugh, and when everyone was finally full we would look about at the absolute mess that remained in the kitchen and on the table and on the porches, and then start shuffling around to clean up after dinner.

And I remember one night looking around at what we were all doing – without direction, without instruction, just everybody pitching in and doing what was necessary to clean up our mess – and marveling that nobody was slacking, nobody was shirking clean-up duty. No, quite the opposite. All of us were going out of our way to try and find ways to do more than our fair share. The enormous clean-up job was completed in probably less than 15 minutes.

This is what communal living is supposed to look like, I remember thinking. Everybody contributing voluntarily to the good of the whole community and it all being pulled off effortlessly. Why hasn’t this ever been able to work on a large scale?

And of course immediately I thought that question I had the answer: Because people only work together like this when they are part of the same family.

* * *

I pretty much still think that is true. No matter how reasonable the ideal of communal living is, no matter how much sense a completely egalitarian society seems to make in the abstract, no matter how much we all might benefit from a “non-hierarchical, completely horizontal, consensus-driven” social organization if only we were all angels. . . our very human nature means that social organizations of that kind just do not scale up.

When everybody knows everybody else – personally – those personal connections alone are sufficient to keep society functioning. Individuals genuinely want to help the community either because they legitimately (not intellectually, but emotionally) love and care about all the other individuals in that community, or because they just don’t want to be seen by people who actually know them to be getting a “free ride” while everybody else does all the work. (Actually, I’d be willing to bet it is almost always some combination of both factors.)

But when a group of humans grows too large for everybody to personally know everybody else (once that group contains more than a few hundred members, Diamond suggests) then the social cohesion that automatically forms around smaller groups breaks down. As much as we’d all like to think that humans are basically angels, the truth is that -- in the absence of some countervailing social structure -- when two strangers meet it’s very likely at least one of them is wondering why he shouldn’t just kill the other guy and take all of his stuff:

One reason why the organization of human government tends to change from that of a tribe to that of a chiefdom in societies with more than a few hundred members is that the difficult issue of conflict resolution between strangers becomes increasing acute in larger groups. A fact further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that almost everyone is related to everyone else, by blood or marriage or both. Those ties of relationships binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions of larger societies unnecessary, since any two villagers getting into an argument will share many kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent. In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.

(pp 271 – 72).

Yep. We’re not angels. We’re bastard-coated bastards with a creamy bastard filling.

And that is why I applaud and whole-heartedly support the Occupy movement’s messages of protest against crony capitalism, against the vast income and wealth disparity that exists in modern America, against the corporate control of our government by the 1%, etc., etc., etc., but I never have been able to work up much enthusiasm for the idea that Occupy was attempting by its example in Zuccotti Park or Dewey Square to create an alternative social organization that the rest of the country might be interested in emulating.

Interested in emulating the ideals of the movement, yes, of course . . . but in reproducing its social structure? For 300 million people?

I’m sorry, I just do not think that communal, strictly horizontal, wholly consensus-driven social organizations can possibly scale to the size of a nation. Don’t get me wrong -- it may have been a great idea for Zuccotti Park. But it always was an unworkable idea for the United States of America.

One Last Iowa Thought . . .

2012-01-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of time complaining about the sheer inanity of the US political press. But after the Iowa caucus results last night, I think it may have hit a new low.

Until last night, Rick Santorum was a joke candidate. Best known for the result one pulls up on Google when running a search on his last name, this is a man who has recently declared that the government should prohibit US citizens from using any form of contraception, and that no one should be having sex unless it is for the purposes of procreation.

You get that? His official presidential policy is: No Americans Are Allowed to Have Sex Just For Fun.

None of that has changed. And yet . . . I've been scanning the political punditry all day, and I've yet to see anybody claim other than that Rick "Frothy" Santorum is a credible candidate for the US presidency.

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

Either the world's gone insane or I have, but there is just no way in hell a guy whose presidential platforms is: The proper role of the government is to regulate your sex lives, Americans is anything other than a joke. I don't care if he did only lose the Iowa caucuses by 8 votes.

It simply boggles my mind that under the modern rules of political punditry they actually have to take this guy seriously.

The Scylla and Charybdis of Voting For Democrats

2012-01-04T19:57:00.000-08:00

One of the things I see a lot of on the Left is fighting amongst Progressives over the proper reaction to the perennial selling out and betrayal of liberal principles by Democratic politicians whom we elect to office. Every two years we mobilize on behalf of some Democrats, help to get ‘em elected and then – at some point during their term – find ourselves yelling, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”

It’s like clockwork.

Liberals believe in actual principles and not just in power for power’s sake. And so very often we are likely to declare that so-and-so has gone too far, that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Dems and the GOP, that we are going to “sit this election out” to teach those feckless Democrats that they can’t automatically count on liberal support, that if they want us to vote for them they have to cater to us at least as much as they cater to their corporate donors, etc., etc.

And then the inevitable pushback begins. “No, no,” some other faction will argue (they tend to call themselves 'pragmatists'), “we have to support the Democrats! Sure, they’re bad but they’re not as bad as the Republicans! If we sit out the election, then the Republicans win and our country is screwed!”

Personally, I admit to sympathy for both points of view but I fall more naturally into the second camp. The first two years of Obama’s term saw him bending over backwards to accommodate Republicans, making concession after concession after concession on the stimulus bill, on the budget, on the Affordable Care Act, until a lot of Libs – including me – wondered what the hell happened to the guy who was gonna change “business as usual” in Washington? So in 2010 a lot of the Democratic base – disappointed with what they perceived to have been a political bait-‘n-switch by Mr. Hope-and-Change – sat out the election.

And for their sins (I personally didn’t sit it out; after Florida, 2000 – never again) we all have been cursed with the worst, most obstructionist, most unresponsive federal legislature since the infamous “Do Nothing Congress” Truman ran against in 1948. And this during the worst economy since the Great Depression, when effective government intervention is needed more than ever.

But that is what happens when one of the nation’s only two political parties goes bugfuck, batshit insane – the other party knows that all the sane people in the country have no choice but to vote for it, and so level-headed liberals get taken for granted by that party. This – I know from personal experience – is extremely frustrating, but the bottom line is that our choices are limited and cursing the darkness won’t light a single candle.

* * *

About two months ago I took the time to write to one of my senators, Democrat Kay Hagan. You can read the entirety of the letter here. Hagan was elected in 2008 and though I did not actively campaign for her I did donate to her election and I made sure to vote for her the first day of early voting.

But it came to my attention that she is co-sponsoring with John McCain a plan for another overseas corporate tax holiday. Essentially, she wants to allow multinational corporations to repatriate billions of dollars in as yet untaxed overseas profits and pay only an 8.25% tax on all that money. Under her plan, these corporations can use these billions for anything that they want – hell! they could just take all of that money and pay it out to their top executives in “performance bonuses.” (Although, really . . . if you’re going to be paying that money out as “performance bonuses” it all really should be going to your lobbyists.)

A tax holiday like this was done before, in 2004, with disastrous results. Not only did large corporations who took advantage of this tax holiday fail to pump all that untaxed money back into the economy, they funneled it into their own pockets as bonuses, dividends and stock repurchases. And, having learned that it pays to do as much business as possible overseas, they then shed as many American jobs as they could, relocated operations to foreign countries, stockpiled cash there, and waited until the US economy was bad enough that they could once again persuade some dopey senator that they needed another “tax holiday” to give them an incentive to repatriate all that foreign lucre so as “to stimulate the economy.”

In North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, they have found that dopey senator.

So I took the time to compose what I (tried) to make a cogent but not combative or shrill letter asking that Sen. Hagan reconsider her position on this. I pointed out that establishing another tax holiday would do nothing to help the economy or Americans looking for work, but could instead only be considered a giveaway to the corporations and the 1%. I sent the letter to both her Raleigh and her Washington, DC office.

Well, today I finally got her response and – boy! – did it piss me off.

What she sent me reads like a form letter, something she would send out using her franking perk to let the good citizens of North Carolina know how great a job she is doing on our behalf. Sure, she discussed the proposed tax holiday, but only as someone who had never bothered to read what I had written beyond – maybe – its subject matter. She made wild claims about what a good idea a corporate tax holiday is without addressing any of the substantive issues that were my main points.

It was . . . insulting. More insulting even than if her office hadn’t responded at all. I didn’t expect to change her mind, but I did expect that – if I heard from her – it would be along the lines of: Thank you for raising these issues. I understand your concerns, but I have considered the matter carefully and I do think this is in the best interest of the country. Blah, blah, blah . . . At least, then, her office would have done me the courtesy of pretending to have at least considered the issues I raised.

But what she sent was something so completely unresponsive that it made clear what I had to say to her just was not even worth the time it would have taken for her staff to pretend to care. When I read her letter the message I took away from it was: I recognize you are a constituent, and one of my obligations when you actually take the time to write me is to acknowledge you. There. I’ve acknowledged you. You now have a piece of senate stationary with your name on it, citizen. Now let me get back to the real business of being a senator.

Like I said . . . insulting. And the first thing I thought after I read it and laughed my bitter little laugh is, “Well, she’s lost my vote.”

* * *

But the sad truth is that probably isn’t even the case.

Hagan won’t be up for re-election until 2014 and unless something changes drastically between now and then, if she is the Democratic nominee I’m gonna be voting for her. I’ll be voting for her even if I personally think the Republican’s policies are more in line with my own (fat chance of that happening, but I figured I’d acknowledge that anything’s possible). And that’s because the way our political system works now, a vote for a sane Republican (hypothetically speaking) is the same thing as a vote for Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor. If elected to office, sane Republicans won’t be able to set the agenda; that’ll be set by their insane leadership.

For the same reason, not voting for a Democrat is the same thing as voting for the crazy Republican leadership too. The GOP almost always gets its base out; the GOP runs on its base. The GOP has figured out that undecided voters are really low-information voters who are easily convinced to vote for people who sound “confident,” and that when the GOP is addressing its base it sounds all kinds of confident. (Also batshit insane, but low-information voters don’t know enough to recognize the insanity; they respond instead to body language and the timbre of the voice, like dogs.)

So I figure if I sit the vote out because I don’t like Hagan’s policies, or because I think she’s a lousy politician, or just because I feel personally insulted by her, then at the end of the day I am just going to end up feeling responsible for whatever complete reaming the resulting Republican majority pulls on the American public after her opponent takes that seat away from her.

Understand . . . it absolutely galls me that this is the case, but it is nevertheless true.

I’ll tell you what though. Between Hagan’s shameless toadying to the multinationals and to the 1% with this brazen tax holiday giveaway, and the sheer indifference exhibited by her staff’s treatment of her constituents . . . I’d primary the shit out of her.

Reading Marx – Part XI

2012-01-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 2, Subsection a

Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection a “The Metamorphosis of Commodities”

--commodities go from being owned by people who have no use for them to being owned by people who want to make use of them; at that point they fall out of the sphere of exchange and into that of consumption; we are concerned only w/the sphere of exchange here, and specifically the change of the form of commodities “which effectuates the social circulation of matter”;

--in the initial metamorphosis, a commodity is exchanged for money, which is then exchanged for another commodity; the weaver, say, brings 20 yards of linen to market (the linen has Value, but is not a use-value to the weaver); he then exchanges the linen for $2 of gold, which is the linen’s Value form; he then uses this $2 to purchase a Bible, which he will then take home and use (use-value);

--the whole process is no more than the exchange of the instantiation of his labor (the linen) for the instantiation of others’ labor (the Bible); there is no gain or loss, only a change in the fixed form in the same amount of socially necessary labor time;

--this exchange can be thought of as: commodity --> money --> commodity and, so far as affects the objects themselves, from the weaver’s point of view, as commodity --> commodity, the exchange of one commodity for another, or the circulation of materialized social labor;

--this seems pretty simple, so naturally Marx wants to break it down even further and examine first the commodity to money transaction, and then the money to commodity transaction;

Commodity --> Money; The First Metamorphosis, or Sale;

--before a commodity can be exchanged for money (sold), it must have a use-value – that is, it must be of some utility to the purchaser; presumably, commodities’ prices will reflect the socially necessary labor time required to produce those commodities;

--however, a “commodity” offered on the market must be considered as the totality of those commodities offered on the market; and the amount of socially necessary labor time is only the amount of socially necessary labor time to produce the use-value necessary to satisfy the market’s appetite;

--thus, if a weaver produces 20 yds of linen, but something has occurred that results in a surfeit of linen, i.e., more linen than the market can consume, then prices will fall; presumably this is because the original prices reflected the necessary labor time required to produce all the linen on the market at the time, which is more than the market as a whole wishes to purchase;

--Say the market as a whole only wishes to purchase 2,000 yds of linen, which sells for $2 every 20 yds; the total the market is going to spend is $200. But suppose there was – I dunno – a linen bonanza for some reason and 4,000 yds of linen flood the market; the market still only has a need for 2,000 yds of linen – or $200 worth of socially necessary labor time (Value); it is still willing to spend that much and no more (because the remaining linen has no use-value on the market – it is superfluous, unnecessary); so if weavers, competing against each other, wish to sell their linen, they must cut their price in half: $1 for every 20 yds; this still results in $200 being spent on the market; the effect is as if every individual weaver had expended more labor time on his own product than was socially necessary

LESSON: in the hypothetical, all the linen in the market counts collectively as only one article, of which each piece sold by a particular weaver is only a sub-part of the whole;

--once the sale has occurred, the commodity has been exchanged for its Value, instantiated by money, the universal equivalent; the money has been exchanged for a particular form of the money’s own potential use-value (i.e., the specific commodity purchased); this single transaction is at once, two: a sale (by the weaver) and a purchase (by the customer);

Money --> Commodity, or purchase; The Second and Concluding Metamorphosis of Commodity

--money is the metamorphosed shape of all commodities, a result of their general alienation; as a result, money itself is alienable w/out restriction; very often a single producer only has one commodity to sell (e.g., linen), but sells a great bulk of it and then splits up the resulting money to purchase many different other commodities in order to satisfy his very diverse wants; so one commodity may be transformed into many different types of commodities by the universal equivalent, money;

--in this cycle, the owner of a commodity has something of exchange value, but not use-value (to him); he exchanges it for money, by which he realizes that commodity’s exchange value (i.e., Value); armed now w/money – which potentially represents all commodities and instantiates no commodities – he can now purchase a different commodity that has use-value to him; at that point, we begin consumption of the newly purchased commodity;

--the total of all these exchanges, in the world, Marx terms “the circulation of commodities”

--Marx points out that while the weaver has exchanged his linen for a Bible, the seller of the Bible does not recognize that the Bible was exchanged for linen; he knows only that he has exchanged his Bible for whatever he wants (brandy); this is how the circulation of commodities (money-based markets) differ from mere barter;

--specifically, circulation does not stop, as it does in a direct barter system, once a particular transaction has been concluded; the linen drops out of circulation but is replaced by money, then the Bible drops out of circulation, and is replaced with money; the money remains in circulation;

--Marx now assails the idea that because every purchase is also a sale, the circulation of commodities implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases; not so, says Marx, because the seller of a commodity is by no means required to purchase some other commodity;

--such an equilibrium would exist in a direct barter system; however, “if the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity becomes too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase becomes too pronounced” then a crisis can be produced; but now we are getting ahead of ourselves; we are not yet at the point to discuss how the possibility of crisis converts to the reality of one;

NOTE: I don’t care what anybody says, for me this subsection ends like a cliffhanger; what I understand Marx to be saying is that if money ceases to circulate, then a systemic crisis can develop – presumably even though the supply of and demand for commodities remains the same; Of course, the first thing I think of when I consider the possibility that money may cease to circulate is the idea that a huge concentration of money in the hands of the few means that that few have little incentive to spend their money. There are only so many shirts, houses, boats, etc. that any one person can buy; when money is taken out of circulation (when it ceased to be recycled into either consumption or investment in further capital projects) but is instead hoarded, then Marx intimates we are looking at a breakdown in the system. That certainly hints at what we may be seeing these days, which is . . . intriguing.

Next Up: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection b “The Currency of Money” – another subsection coming up! No idea what “the currency of money” means, or how useful it may be in a fractional reserve system in which the money supply is only slightly related to the actual currency in circulation; of course, Marx might mean something entirely different by “currency”; we’ll find out!

Everybody in America Thinks They’re Middle Class

2012-01-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Over at Washington Monthly, Steve Benen expresses confusion about Mitt Romney’s claim yesterday morning on MSNBC that “Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.” Benen asks

I’m just not sure what Romney means when he defines “middle class.” As he sees it, even if someone falls into poverty, he or she is still middle class? In what universe does that make sense?

Actually, I think I understand perfectly what Romney is saying here, and it is the reason many Americans are still resistant to the straightforward complaints being made by the Occupy movement: in America everybody considers themselves to be “the middle class.”

The truth is, Americans don’t really think about class in a truly economic way, but in a social status, lifestyle kind of way. This is why, even though the median household income in the US is only around $50,000, professionals making several hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each year still consider themselves middle class – they’re not rich like the people they see on the TeeVee, who can charter private jets and take expensive vacations.

It is also the reason why the people who are increasingly falling behind economically probably enjoy hearing that – regardless of their actual economic standing – Romney still recognizes that they are “middle class at heart.” For these people, if they used to have a house and a nice paying job but were then laid off and lost the home in foreclosure . . . well, they still don’t consider themselves really poor. Not at heart. ‘Cause then they’d be losers.

Like I said, it is one of the reasons I think a lot of people hate to recognize the growing wealth disparity that exists in this county – because if they did then they would also have to recognize that they’re on the losing end of that growing gap.

Fraud Creates the Market

2012-01-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

In his latest post about Goldman Sachs, Matt Taibbi points out that the investment bank has developed a record now of recommending that its clients buy various financial products at the same time that Goldman Sachs – coincidentally – is selling those products from out of its own accounts. Inevitably, Goldman Sachs’s turns out to have been wrong and those financial products tank . . . but Goldman Sachs makes out like a bandit by moving those assets off of its own books before they tank.

Taibbi’s post reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, something that occurred to me when Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Big Money Boyz showed up a year or so ago to testify before Congress as to why their selling mortgage backed securities that they knew to be “shitty” wasn’t unethical. To a one, they all pointed out (i) that the people they were dealing with were “sophisticated investors” who “knew what they were doing,” (i) that these were “arm’s length transactions,” and therefore (iii) they had no responsibility to advise their customers that they personally considered these instruments to be “shitty.”

It always seemed to me that this defense rested on the investment banks’ fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the real role they played as the creators of those mortgage-backed instruments: the role of the “market gatekeeper.”

There is a somewhat obscure area of law – developed mostly by the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal – known as “fraud creates the market” that comes up sometimes in class action securities fraud cases. In order to understand how it works, you’ve got to know a bit of legal background.

Essentially, when a bunch of investors feel they’ve been ripped off because they were misled into purchasing a shitty financial product like a stock or a bond, they can bring a class action against the seller for fraud. However, class actions can only be maintained if there is sufficient “commonality” between the individual cases such that it makes sense to try them all as essentially one case; if the material facts of each case are fundamentally different, then each case needs to be tried separately and a class action cannot stand. When securities fraud class actions are brought, the defendant Bank usually begins by opposing class certification on the grounds that the claims are too dissimilar to be tried as one case.

Historically, the easiest way to do this was to assert that proving “fraud” means proving (i) a material misstatement or omission, (ii) upon which the purchaser of the security actually relied in purchasing the stock or bond. Banks would argue that each individual investor would have had different concerns or interests and would therefore have relied on different statements about the security to justify their individual investment decisions; because the reliance of each investor would always differ, banks argues, there would always be insufficient commonality between claims to justify any securities fraud class action.

In response, the courts articulated the concept of “fraud on the market” under which reliance could be presumed. For example, if the prospectus issued with a financial product contains a misstatement or omits certain information – and if the misstatement or the omission is objectively material to correctly evaluating the worth of the product – then under such circumstances the Bank is deemed to have committed a fraud on the entire market; in such a case, the courts will simply presume that any individual investor relied on that fraud when he or she chose to purchase the financial product. The burden is then on the Bank to demonstrate that in any particular instance there was no such reliance – for example, if the investor in question had never had an opportunity to review the prospectus before purchasing the stock or bond.

However, in certain limited circumstances the courts also have held that not even that will save the banks, because sometimes the fraud alleged is so endemic that only through fraud could a market for the financial product have been created in the first place. This is the “fraud creates the market” doctrine.

Now, it should be noted that this doctrine is of extremely limited application. For reasons too involved to get into here, it applies only to bonds purchased directly from the bond issuer (the bank) which are supposed to be redeemed from revenues generated by the specific project the bonds were issued to finance.

The basic idea is that if a bond issuer is selling bonds to raise money to finance a project like, say, a private nursing home and the bond issuer knows for a fact that there is not the slightest chance that the nursing home is going to generate sufficient revenue to ever pay the bonds back, then the bond issuer is engaging in fraud merely by offering the bonds for sale regardless of whether the underlying financial information in the bonds’ prospectus is sufficient to allow an investor independently to determine the bonds were worthless.

The reason for the doctrine is that the courts consider investment banks to be “market gatekeepers” – that is, they have an obligation not to issue worthless financial products. If I sell you a bond at a price of $1,000 and I know the revenue generated from the project financed by that bond will never be able to pay back more than $800, then I am selling you essentially a worthless security. And the courts have determined that – as market gatekeepers – investment banks have an obligation not to do that . . . not even if a reasonably prudent investor could discover the bond is worthless. Customers, even sophisticated customers, are entitled to rely upon the assumption that investment banks are not peddling worthless dross.

* * *

Like I said, it is an obscure area of securities law but it seems to me an interesting avenue to explore in pursuing claims against the Big Money Banks. Despite their protestations that their sale of mortgage-backed bonds were arms-length transactions involving sophisticated buyers, if someone could satisfy the (extremely high) burden of proof of demonstrating that the banks knew the bonds would never pay back their initial investment then the banks would be liable for failing to meet their duty as market gatekeepers.

Moreover, even if this burden of proof could not be satisfied I personally think it is time to re-inject the idea of banks as market gatekeepers back into our understanding of their role in the financial industry. Their customers trust them not to sell, metaphorically, a car without an engine; the banks should be reminded that even in the World of Wall Street there are still restrictions on the idea of caveat emptor.

Instant Iowa Analysis

2012-01-04T04:49:00.000-08:00

UPDATED BELOW:

I’ve been biting my tongue the past few weeks while being told repeatedly not only by the TeeVee Talking Heads (who do little but spew Conventional Wisdom) but also by most of the independent political bloggers whom I respect, that Newt Gingrich’s campaign to snag the Republican nomination is over and done with. Looking at the Iowa results, I still can’t see that.

Here’s my fast-n-loose assessment of what went down last night and yet more shameless speculation about "what it all means" going forward:

The Actual Results

Mitt Romney edged out Rick Santorum by a mere eight votes to take “First Place.” I suppose that might have meant something when Iowa was still a winner-take-all delegate state, but this no longer is the case. Basically, Mittens tied with L’il Ricky. In fact, with Ron Paul taking 21.4% of the vote last night was basically a three-way tie for “First Place.”

Newt took fourth (or second or third, depending on whether you consider first place to be a two- or a three-way tie) with 13.3% of the vote, followed by Rick Perry with 10.3% of the vote (actually, fairly close here too; I suppose one could say they tied for second).

The Girl With the Faraway Eyes came in a distant sixth (or, etc., etc.) with just 5.0% of the vote, and Jon Huntsman – who has ignored the state to concentrate instead on New Hampshire – barely showed with 0.6% of the vote.

Impact Going Forward

My theory as to why Newt ultimately wins the nomination is that he will eventually prove to be the candidate around whom all the Not-Mitt-Romney base voters rally. And I think it is pretty clear that Newt knows this.

Newt also knows that – no matter how much Rick “Frothy” Santorum is the flavor (eeewwwww!) of the week right now – L’il Ricky is not going to be the Republican nominee. Santorum spent nearly the entirety of 2011 campaigning in Iowa only, he has no base of support outside of the party’s Religious Right and will almost certainly do terrible in upcoming states New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. Santorum needed a win in Iowa to retain his personal credibility (he is, after all, a highly paid Faux News Talking Head), and he got that. I don’t see any kind of credible argument that he can go forward much beyond last night, although with the Iowa win his zombie campaign will lurch forward anyway.

And, as Jed Lewison puts it, “Gingrich’s survival speech boiled down to: ‘I’m going to tear down Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, but Rick Santorum is a pretty good guy.’” In other words, Newt already is campaigning to pick up Santorum’s supporters.

After last night, Rick Perry – whose claim to fame until now had been that he never had lost an election – already has announced that he is thinking of dropping out of the race. And why wouldn’t he? Rick Perry spent far and away more money last night (about $817 per vote) than any other candidate only to end up with a disappointing 10% of the turnout. The homophobic YouTube ad he released last month is the second-most “disliked” YouTube video in history and has spawned numerous parodies:

And Rick Perry has been revealed to the entire nation to be a bumbling fool. Why wouldn’t he want to go back home, where nobody bothers to pay attention to the actual words coming out of Governor Goodhair’s mouth?

And La Bachmann is just as doomed. Michele Bachmann pinned her entire strategy on doing well in the Iowa caucuses. She campaigned in Iowa relentlessly, never stopped identifying herself as a hometown girl, and even announced her candidacy in Iowa. Of course, it didn’t help when she also asserted that she – like John Wayne – was from Waterloo, Iowa and that “that’s the kind of spirit I have too!” . . . only to learn that it was notorious child rapist and serial killer John Wayne Gacy – and not the famous actor – who was from Waterloo.)

Like Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann just does not have a game outside of Iowa and her humiliating 5% vote result basically dooms her campaign going forward. Whether she recognizes this or not – last night she vowed to remain in the race – the professionals she has hired to run her campaign know it. Shortly before Bachmann made that vow her campaign manager admitted to the Associated Press that he just didn’t know whether Bachmann would stay in the race after Iowa.

Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were early anti-Romneys who held the spotlight for a while – what are the odds their supporters decide that, with their favorite candidates out of the race, they should just hold their noses and vote for Romney anyway?

So that’s where things stand. Perry is almost certainly out of the race, and my sense is that most of his supporters will in turn flock to Newt Gingrich. Bachmann and Santorum will be out of the race, and my sense is that their supporters will do the same – as mentioned, Newt already is wooing Santorum’s people.

Misc.: Ron Paul is not going to snag the nomination either, but this is his last race and I don’t envision him ever pulling out; his voters seem so devoted to him, personally, that I doubt they’ll vote for anybody else on the ballot even after it becomes clear that Paul has absolutely no chance of winning the nomination. Perhaps they’ll be hoping for a brokered convention that will turn Paul into the “kingmaker.”

Jon Huntsman has been a non-entity all along, who has staked his entire campaign on grinding out a better-than-expected finish in New Hampshire – Mitt’s home state (kinda) and where Romney has been campaigning continuously for five years. If Huntsman had any supporters, I would expect them to swing over to Mittens.

And I think the 58 people last night who voted for Herman Cain will continue to vote for Herman Cain because they are clearly crazy.

Prognostications

I simply do not see how Newt Gingrich doesn’t pick up and consolidate almost all the Not-Mitt-Romney votes available in the Republican primary. My guess is that we’re going to go through the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada primaries/caucuses (the last on February 4^th) and after that we’ll basically just be looking at March 6^th’s “Super Tuesday.” I’ll go ahead and guess that Rick Perry basically announces he’s withdrawing from the race this week or, at the least, immediately after New Hampshire, that Santorum – buoyed by his Iowa victory – will wait until after Nevada to drop out, and that Bachmann – buoyed by her insanity – will also wait until after Nevada to drop out.

I stand by my earlier prediction that – for their own political interests – if Santorum and Bachmann endorse anybody they will endorse Gingrich. (Rick Perry is more of a stretch; I think he may be interested enough in rehabilitating his image in front of the GOP machine as a useful tool to keep the Republican rubes in Texas under control, and thus might endorse Romney).

All of which means that going into Super Tuesday the race still pretty much shapes up the way I originally thought it would: Mitt Romney is the Establishment, heavily monied candidate waging a battle against Newt Gingrich, who excites the Republican Crazies. This is still a battle to see who controls the Republican Asylum: the Crazies, or the Orderlies.

ADDENDUM. One final thing. It will be interesting to see how effective money continues to be in this contest. Although David Weigel suggests that Romney actually spent far less than Newt in the weeks leading up to last night's caucus votes, that calculation does not include the millions of dollars in negative ads launched against Gingrich by Romney-supporting anonymous Super PACs, freed after the Citizens United decision to spend as much money as they want.

The conventional wisdom is that it was this relentless negative onslaught that drove Gingrich into the ground. Romney certainly is the Big Money Boyz candidate, but I think the Republican base views him with a sheer loathing that our political pundits just cannot grasp. If Romney’s Super PACs can continue to do to Newt what they did to him last night, the 1% will know that it finally has in the Republican Party exactly what they’ve always wanted: a political party that they can just flat-out buy.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like Bachmann has already flipped and has suspended her campaign; so much for my prediction that she would continue through Nevada running on sheer craziness alone. Still no official word from Perry about what he is doing.

Reading Marx – Part X

2012-01-04T03:01:00.000-08:00

Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 1

Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 1 “The Measure of Values” – I think I’m going to start listing the chapter/section titles; Harvey suggested in the lecture that Chapter III is easier to understand if the reader keeps a firm grip on where he is in Marx’s argument;

--Marx is going to assume gold as the commodity-value; he points out that it is not money that renders commodities measurable against each other; rather, it is the fact that the Value of commodities is always socially useful labor time, which makes it possible for one commodity to become the universal equivalent commodity and thus assume the function of money;

--the expression of the value of a commodity in gold is its “money-form, or price”; money itself has no price, because it would then equate to itself as its own equivalent;

--the Value of any commodity is inherent within the commodity and has actual existence, and furthermore is made perceptible by its equality with an amount of gold; this relationship is non-material, and must be expressed by the owner of the commodity assigning a price to it in the market; at the time of doing so, the owner is stating the money equivalent of the commodity in an idealized sense, i.e., he doesn’t have to compare the commodity to any actual piece of gold, but to his “idea” of gold and of the Value of his commodity; however, its actual Value will always be the same expression of socially useful labor time as is required to produce that price amount of gold;

--because the Value of all commodities may be expressed in the form of some quantity of gold, their Values become magnitudes of the same denomination, gold-magnitudes; this is why, Marx claims, the names given to all standards of money (pound, peso) were originally taken from pre-existing names for the standards of weight/quantities;

--As always, Marx breaks money down into possessing two distinct functions: (i) a measure of Value, and (ii) a standard of price. As the measure of Value it converts the values of all commodities into imaginary quantities of gold, as the standard of price it measures those quantities of gold; the establishment of an unvarying unit of measure is “all-important” so the less the unit of measure (a pound?) is subject to variation the better

--gold (or, really, any money-commodity) always renders the same service as an invariable standard of price no matter how much its Value may rise or fall, because 12 oz of gold is always going to be worth exactly 12 times as much as 1 oz of gold; so a change in the Value of gold does not interfere with its function as a standard of price;

--Similarly, a change in the Value of gold does not interfere w/its function as a measure of value; since gold is the universal equivalent any change in its Value will be reflected in commensurate changes in the relative values of all commodities, leaving their relative values unaltered although expressed in higher or lower prices (so if inflation, all prices go up but ratio of gallon of milk to loaf of bread remains the same; if deflation, all prices go down but milk/bread ratio remains the same);

--by the way . . . if the Value of money goes up or down, that only affects the prices of commodities if their Value remains unchanged; it is possible their Value goes up or down commensurate with the Value of gold, in which case the prices remain the same;

--Marx then discusses how discrepancies arise b/w the money names of the weights of precious metal used by money, and the actual weights those names represent; he present three ways these discrepancies arise: (i) bringing in foreign money into an emerging economy; Marx claims this occurred in the early days of Rome, in which gold and silver coins circulated as foreign commodities whose names did not coincide with “indigenous weights” (maybe, for example, the difference b/w the troy pound and the avoirdupois pound?); (ii) as wealth increases the less precious metals are replaced by more precious metals, but the money names remain the same; so the money name “pound” originally meant a pound of silver, but as gold replaced silver “pound” was retained to refer to about 1/15^th of a pound of gold; (iii) the debasing (“clipping” or “alloying”) of money by kings and princes such that “of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but the names.”

--this separates the “money name” from the “weight name” in a community; in the end, by law a given weight of gold is officially divided into subdivisions with different names (pound, shilling, penny, etc.); the prices (or quantities of gold) into which commodities are now changed are henceforth expressed in the names of coins; money thus serves as “money of account” whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an article in its money-form;

--now, Marx seems to indicate, is where we begin to lose our way; just as the name of a thing is different than the thing itself (i.e., I know nothing of a man by knowing only that his name is Jacob), every trace of a value relation disappears in the money-names used to price commodities;

--Thus, “price” is the money-name of the (socially necessary) labor realized in a commodity; Marx goes on to state that although price is supposed to be the realization of both the Commodity’s Value and its exchange-ratio with money, that does not mean that the exchange-ratio with money is necessarily the arbiter of the commodity’s Value; supply and demand may change or lower the price of a commodity, even though the socially necessary labor required to produce that commodity (its Value) has not changed; LESSON – stated price, even market value price at equilibrium, may not necessarily be an accurate measure of the commodity’s Value as defined by Marx;

--just because things have a price does not mean that they have Value; things that are in themselves not commodities (conscience, honor, etc.) are capable of being sold and thus of acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities although they are not commodities; thus an object may have a price without having Value; “On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect real value-relation (??); for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without Value, because no human labor has been incorporated into it;

(NOTE: I understand that the worth of uncultivated land is one of the trickier things to incorporate into Marxian theory; here he appears to be eliding over the subject; it’ll be interesting to see whether he comes back to this;)

(NOTE 2: I think here we see an example of the limited nature of what we have been looking at so far, maybe even the circular nature of the argument; Marx started by considering “commodities” which he defined as an article produced by human labor that has value to others and that is offered for sale on the market . . . more or less; this, by definition, cannot include uncultivated land, which is clearly not a commodity under this definition; but we then spent a great deal of time considering how to Value commodities; uncultivated land by Marx’s definition cannot have a Value as he has defined it, but that obviously is not the same as saying it has no worth; definitely a limitation)

(NOTE 3: Maybe this is the beginning of the way uncultivated land was legally apportioned by the gov’t and recognized at law; I seem to remember that settlers in the west could not simply claim an expanse of land, but had to work on it and cultivate it for a certain period of time; perhaps this is the only way in which raw land becomes not just a commodity but an object of private ownership)

--So, to recap: price expresses the Value of a commodity by stating that a given quantity of the money commodity (gold) is directly exchangeable for it, but that doesn’t mean that the commodity is exchangeable for gold; I think, here, that Marx is saying the money that is used – say, a dollar – is the quantity of gold that is exchangeable for the commodity (say, iron) but just because you can get a dollar measurement of gold does not necessarily mean you can get gold for your commodity; it just means you can get the dollar; to fix the price of the commodity, it must be equated to gold in the imagination, but to become a universal equivalent, it must actually be changeable into gold.

--in other words, if you have a ton of iron worth $20 in gold, you cannot go to the owner of a $20 DVD and tell him that your iron is money; you’ve got to give him the $20 in gold and that means you’ve first got to convert the iron into money, i.e., sell it;

--“A price therefore implies both that a commodity is exchangeable for money, and also that it must be so exchanged.”

Next Up: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection a “The Metamorphosis of Commodites” – yeah, look like I’m only getting through one subsection next time out. Stay tuned!

Liberalism vs. Libertarianism

2012-01-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

Over at Digby's, David Atkins has a great post up titled "No, Stoller and Sullivan: There Is No Liberal Conflict Over Ron Paul."

One of the things I like about it is that he doesn't shy away from the fact that - at its heart - Liberalism is paternalistic: that the liberal philosophy is one that recognizes that the proper role of the government is to prevent the rich, the powerful, and the ruthless from simply running roughshod over those less rich, less powerful and more mild-mannered. Here is the nut of the thing, but do click over to read it in its entirety:

Liberalism is and has always been about intervention. It is the opposite of libertarianism, and always has been. Liberals understand that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Left to their own devices, people with weapons and money will always try to exploit and dominate people without weapons and money unless they are stopped from doing so. It is not because we are taught to do so. It's just innate human nature. If this were not the case, libertarianism would work as an ideology. It does not, and never has at any point in history.

When the government steps in to stop a corporation from dumping noxious chemicals into a stream, that is intervention at the point of a gun, by a superior force against a lesser force attempting to exploit the weak and powerless. When the government steps in to enforce desegretation in schools, that is intervention at the point of a gun, by a superior force against a lesser force attempting to exploit the weak and powerless.

[snip ]

This is what liberalism is. It is unavoidably, inescapably paternalistic in nature. It is so because it understands the inevitable tendency of human beings to be truly awful to one another unless social and legal rules are put in place--yes, by force--to prevent them from doing otherwise.

Conservatives use force of government as well, of course, but not in defense of the weak and oppressed, but rather to maintain the power of money, of patriarchy and of the established social pecking order. Where the oppressive hand of government helps them achieve that, they utilize it. Where libertarian ideology helps them keep power in the hands of the local good old boys, they use that instead.

But a liberal--a progressive, if you will--is always an interventionist, because a liberal understands that society is constantly on a path of self-perfection, in an effort to use reason and good moral judgment to prevent insofar as possible the exploitation of one person by another.

The division between liberals lies in how far to intervene . . . .

Toward a Woldview-Centric Assessment of Politicians

2012-01-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

A few days ago Taryn Hart over at Plutocracy Files had an excellent piece up titled “Glenn Greenwald on Ron Paul: Why Worldview Matters.” Essentially, Hart critiqued Greenwald’s reductionist evaluation of Ron Paul in which he looked only at Paul’s asserted positions on isolated issues, and argued that a better means of evaluating political candidates is to try and suss out their overall worldview:

[I]t’s not just a candidate’s positions on individual issues that are important, what’s also important (in most instances more important) is the candidate’s worldview. A President’s worldview will determine the outcome of thousands of decisions the President will make, almost all of which will not be campaign issues and many of which are unforeseeable.

Thus, it matters to me that Ron Paul doesn’t believe in evolution, not because I think teaching evolution in schools should be prioritized above the lives of Muslim children, but because it’s proof that Paul rejects science, evidence and rationality, which tells us a good deal about how Paul could be expected to approach the thousands of decisions he would have to make as President. Similarly, it matters to me that Ron Paul is anti-choice and claims to be a libertarian, as it suggests to me his defense of freedom is disingenuous and that his positions are likely motivated by a defense of hierarchy and patriarchy. (footnote deleted).

I think this assessment of Ron Paul is spot-on. For too long Paul has gotten a pass for on his “libertarianism” because he opposes current practices that he feels violates individual rights. For example, he opposes the federal government’s War on Drugs. But it is important to understand exactly why Paul opposes the War on Drugs – because it is federal in nature.

On every single issue in which Ron Paul claims the government has overstepped its bounds he always devolves to the same position: the federal government has no right to proscribe personal conduct, but the states do. This is why Paul can justify attacking the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – not necessarily because he is a bigot, but because they are (in his mind) examples of federal government overreach.

According to Paul, each of the 50 states has the authority to define the rights and freedoms of its citizens. He isn’t angry that Texans now have to treat black people equally, he’s angry that Texans have to treat black people equally because a majority of US citizens from outside of Texas told them they had to – Paul thinks Texans should still be free to discriminate against black people if that’s what they want to do. His overriding belief is not in the sanctity of personal freedom but in the supremacy of state law.

But this, of course, is insane and is in no way reflective of actual Libertarian principles. A Libertarian, for example, holds that “adults have the right to put whatever they want into their own bodies, and therefore criminalizing drug use is wrong.” Ron Paul holds that “adults have the right to put whatever they want into their own bodies, unless their state government tells them otherwise.” As many others have pointed out elsewhere, Ron Paul isn’t fighting for the Constitution, he’s fighting for the Articles of Confederation.

Of course, devolving authority downward – away from the federal level and onto more local levels – is exactly the “defense of hierarchy and patriarchy” that Hart argues one should expect to see from a man who rejects science in favor of ideology and who claims at once to be for freedom but not for the freedom of a woman to control her own reproduction.

The utility of a “worldview-centric” assessment of candidates is that it allows you to think about and predict what a candidate’s position is likely to be on issues about which he or she hasn’t been asked. I don’t know, for example, whether Ron Paul believes that wives are supposed to be subordinate to their husbands because I don’t know that he’s ever been asked that question. But in light of Paul’s belief in local authority and his general policy of strict non-interference, I suspect he still adheres to the old phrase “every man is a king in his own home” – and that’s the kind of thinking that stripped women of their individual rights once they got married.

It seems to me that these are the kinds of things people should be thinking about when they consider political candidates, and the “worldview-centric” way of considering candidates is really the only way to do so.

The Witch Doctor Understanding of Language

2012-01-03T05:19:00.000-08:00

As you probably already know, Eric Cantor appeared on 60 Minutes over the weekend. Here is the full interview, which clocks in at about 12:30 minutes:

Of course, it is the bit at about 10:50 that has drawn the most attention. At that point Leslie Stahl asked about Cantor’s assertion that no one should ever compromise their principles in politics, and pointed out that Cantor’s hero – Ronald Reagan – did in fact compromise his own principles by raising taxes numerous times during his two-term presidency.

STAHL: And at that point, Cantor’s press secretary interrupted, yelling from off camera that what I was saying wasn’t true.

[Plays videotape of Ronald Reagan announcing a tax increase.]

STAHL: There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.

Over at DKos yesterday, Hunter pointed out that this shouldn’t be a “difficulty” at all. We have videotape, like the one Stahl ran, showing Ronald Reagan sitting in the Oval Office and announcing a tax increase – which he explicitly described as “a compromise.” Hunter speculatively explains what happens as follows:

Conservatives vowed they would not raise any tax by any amount of money, ever, because it would make Reagan and the Conservative Baby Jesus cry. Democrats and others began to rightly point out that this was, historically, simply an untenable position to have, and that even the most conservative conservative who ever conservatived, Ronald Reagan, raised some taxes on some things in order to not have government auger itself into the ground. This caused a bout of cognitive dissonance within the conservative hive mind, first manifesting itself as profound irritation that anyone would ever bring up such a thing, then transforming into a full-fledged demand that anyone saying such things shut up already, and finally morphing into the rather impressive psychological feat of simply denying that any such thing ever happened. History itself, apparently, had to be changed to accommodate the grand conservative need to believe unambiguously in the absolute truth of their own ideological pronouncements.

That sounds about right, but I would go even further. I’ve been watching Movement Conservatism for a while now, and the True Believers exhibit what I’ve come to think of as the “Witch Doctor Understanding of Language.”

We’re all familiar with this kind of thinking, we’ve seen it dozens of times in any of a dozen or so schlock movies featuring Voodoo dolls. Voodoo doll magic works by crafting an image of the person you wish to curse (usually including something from that person, like a lock of hair, fingernail clippings, or blood), performing the proper ritual to link the image to the Real Thing, and then torturing the image to produce the same effect on the Real Thing (i.e., the person). Essentially, the belief is that the representation (the doll) becomes the reality (the person).

This is the thinking behind all sympathetic magic. In some cultures knowing a person’s “true name” give you power over them, again because the representation (the name) is the reality (the person). Representative magic is one of the fundamental tenets of Hermeticism and, indeed, most magic, occult and religious circles: “As above, so below.” The idea is that by understanding the representation (the microcosm, or oneself) you can understand the macrocosm (the universe, or God).

(Which, as an aside, I have always found delightfully narcissistic. You mean I can know God if I know myself? I am created in God’s image? Cool. Yay me.)

But, of course, what all of this represents is nothing more than humankind’s ever-present willingness to easily confuse the map for the territory, the symbol for the real thing, the word for the World.

Ultimately, it manifests as a belief – sometimes consciously recognized but more often than not merely implicit – that what one says and firmly believes is the ultimate arbiter of Reality. And especially if enough people say and believe the same thing, then that belief provides the proper definition of Reality.

(As another aside, this has always seemed to me to be the only practical delineation between a cult and a religion. A cult involves a few people believing in some things that seem nutty to a lot of people; a religion involves a lot of people believing in some things that seem nutty to a few people.)

As a result of the Witch Doctor Understanding of Language, we get conservative policies like the Healthy Forests initiative, which grants gives away logging rights on public land to a few private contractors, we get the Clear Skies initiative, which eases restrictions on air pollution, and we get Paul Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare . . . and are told that pointing out the fact that the plan destroys Medicare is The Biggest Lie of the Year because, after all, the plan with which Paul Ryan would replace Medicare is still going to be called “Medicare” – and that, ultimately, is the only thing that really matters. The Label.

That last example points out how pernicious is the effect of our political press not calling Conservatives (and others too, of course, but these days magical language mostly seems to be a tool of the Conservatives) when they invoke magical language to change facts – in lay parlance, when they are “lying.” When our political press insists on judging everything as if it were a theatrical production, when the first question they ask after the president gives a speech justifying a war on Iraq is “Do you think he persuaded the American people?” and not “Do you think what he said makes sense?” then the political world really can be defined by words and not Reality.

That is what the unnamed Bush administration official [Karl Rove] meant when he told Ron Suskind that the “reality-based community” was behind the times and that America “creates its own reality.” This is how Mitt Romney truly cannot understand why he should apologize or feel any shame about a political ad last month that took President Obama’s words out of context in order to deliberately mislead the public. Instead, he responded by effectively "arguing that the basics of a healthy discourse – truths, facts, fairness, honor – are now irrelevant."

And this ultimately is why Conservative are so anti-science, anti-fact, anti-knowledge, anti-history. All too often, Reality just does not conform to their sincerely held beliefs. When that happens the truly conservative thinker does not respond by changing their beliefs, but by asserting that Reality must be wrong because their mindset decrees that the World is ultimately defined as nothing more nor less than what they believe it to be.

P.S. One more thing I just cannot let pass without commenting on, because it is a pet peeve that absolutely bugs the crap out of me. About a minute or so before the 60 Minutes interview ends, Stahl asks Cantor whether he respects President Obama. Cantor sidesteps the question by asserting that Obama is his "Commander in Chief."

No, Goddammit, no he is not. The President is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces -- not of the American people. While the President can command the military, he cannot command the society . . . at least, he is not supposed to be able to do that. He is supposed to be first among equals -- that is all. This, again, is another example of the magical use of language, conferring upon the office through mere repetition a power it just does not have.

Americans Elect: Using “Bipartisanship” to Advance the 1%

2012-01-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

If you’re not familiar with “Americans Elect,” this post by Dante Atkins at DKos yesterday will help bring you up to speed. Essentially, AE is an online group that intends to field its own presidential candidate in this year’s election. Supposedly, its nominee will be selected by successive online votes by everybody who joins AE, culminating with a final “election” in June. That nominee would then select a running mate who must be from a political party other than the nominee’s own.

The more I find out about this organization, the more it sounds like nothing so much as a front group working to advance the interests of the 1%.

Fetishizing Political Bipartisanship

To begin with, there is the goofy notion that requiring a presidential nominee to select someone from outside his or her own party is so transparently a good idea that it should be accepted without question. But it is important to note that the simple requirement that the presidential ticket contain members of different political parties in no way indicates that those candidates actually would differ in any meaningful way from each other with respect to policy, and so this little trick really does nothing more than provide the appearance of bipartisan compromise without any of its substance.

Let’s be real clear here: the Republican imposed gridlock in the federal government right now is about nothing more than the Republicans doing whatever they can to regain all the levers of power, full stop. Not necessarily because Republicans want to enact legislative policies radically different than those pursued by Democrats (although in many instances they do), but simply because they want to be in charge.

Now it is true that if both parties would just decide to work together to reach the same policy goals then gridlock would vanish and things would get accomplished. But what things? The execrable recommendations of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles? The fact those recommendations were made by both a Republican and a Democrat didn’t thereby render them any less odious. To the contrary, it just revealed that a broad bipartisan consensus exists among The Powers That Be for screwing over the working class, the middle class and our seniors in favor of the 1% that already is in charge.

AE’s little “bipartisan ticket” trick doesn’t require that its candidates differ in ideology, only in party labels. Imagine a “centrist ticket” composed of John McCain and Joe Lieberman and you start to get an idea of what “bipartisanship” looks like in this context.

Which means that even if one assumes AE’s sincerity, the best one can say about the group is that it is fighting the wrong battle. As Matt Taibbi has explained, what the Occupy movement and the 99 Percenters have been pointing out all these months is that America is not in crisis because of disputes between the Left and the Right, but because there is an actual war is being waged by the teeny tiny but extremely powerful Up (as in upper class, upper crust, upwardly mobile) against the vast but largely powerless Down (as in downsized, downtrodden, down and out).

Fetishizing political bipartisanship by presenting a Right-Left joint ticket won’t do a damned thing about the real Up-Down conflict that is screwing over so many people and leading so many to despair of our political process, but it may very well confuse a lot of voters about the real conflict underlying much of America’s problems.

Perhaps not coincidentally, that confusion would also provide additional cover for that conflict to continue and for the 1% to continue winning it.

AE’s Lack of Transparency

It is also noteworthy that AE has a real problem with transparency: AE simply refuses to disclose the identity of the donors who are underwriting its “nonpartisan” efforts. For example, here you can read a partial transcript of AE Chief Operating Officer Elliot Ackerman’s appearance on Hardball.

As the link makes clear, AE simply is refusing to identify who is underwriting its operation. Ackerman (AE’s chief flack, apparently) seems to be arguing that AE doesn’t have to identify its donors – as regular political parties do – because “[AE’s] not a political party, Chris.” But in fact Americans Elect is officially registered as a political party in states like Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. Expect more states to be added.

In a political age dominated by ordinary voters’ concern that their voices might be drowned out by Citizens United and completely opaque Super PACs wielding millions and millions of dollars in corporate donations, it certainly seems strange that a new political party devoted to giving voters “a nonpartisan choice” is so skittish about disclosing who is funding what is supposed to be a deeply popular operation. You’d think such philanthropy would be something the donors would want to tout. After all, when Andrew Carnegie decided he wanted to give a little something back to the system that had made him so wealthy he created the Carnegie Corporation of New York – he wanted the credit, you see.

But then, AE isn’t about today’s 1% sacrificing anything for the common good. Consider this statement on its website, apparently intended to assuage people who might be worried that Americans Elect is in the pocket of big money donors: “we intend to repay our initial financing so that no single individual will have contributed more than $10K.” Think about that statement carefully, and see if it doesn’t give you a chuckle.

To begin with, AE isn’t announcing that they are not going to accept donations over $10,000, only that they intend to do something later; its good intentions about “paying the money back” sometime in the indefinite future are supposed to be sufficient assurances that the people paying the piper at AE right now don’t also get to call the tune. Moreover, I note that AE is completely silent about repaying donors who contribute money other than AE’s initial financing. Ignore the worthless language at the end of the quote, the statement itself makes quite clear that now that AE is up and running if a rich donor were to kick in a couple million dollars this group has no intention of paying that money back (although, they implicitly ask us to believe, they will turn a deaf ear to suggestions that rich donor might have about who the party’s ultimate nominee should be).

And, finally, wonder whether AE might have some reason other than a pursuit of autonomy for repaying its “initial financing” and think about this: AE’s initial financing was $5 million in funding provided by Elliot Ackerman’s billionaire investment banker father – Peter Ackerman – who serves as AE’s Chairman.

So a billionaire investment banker spent $5 million creating a third political party that supposedly will more accurately reflect the will of the American people, and part of that new party’s official policy is that at least $4,990,000 of the donations it receives will be used to pay that billionaire investment banker back. You know, I might be a little more willing to believe that Peter Ackerman is underwriting this outfit because he really, really believes it is the right thing to do for America if he weren’t also so upfront about the fact that he doesn’t expect this new “people oriented” political party to actually cost him anything.

But even more significant than the fact AE’s donor list is non-transparent is the fact that its candidate selection process is completely opaque as well.

Sure, AE claims its candidate will be selected by a series of online votes. But, of course, there is no way for anybody to check the results of those votes. AE participants will just have to accept the final result that AE spits out. Hell, for that matter, there is no way of even knowing how many AE participants there actually are or how many votes are being cast. AE can claim that, say, 10 million people nationwide voted in its online poll, but for all any outside observer can know it was really only 100 people – or less. After all, it’s not like we will be seeing any actual voters turning out the way we do when states hold their primaries.

Do you remember all those concerns about electronic voting machines that didn’t produce paper records? Well, multiple those concerns by about a billion (dollars) and that’s where we stand with AE.

Moreover, even if you assume that a significant number of people are participating in this process and you assume the good faith of AE in tallying those votes, AE still has virtually a free hand to decide who ultimately will be on its ticket. AE has created a “candidate-certification committee” and these people will decide in some as yet undisclosed way which candidates the AE participants will actually be allowed to vote for. Similarly, this committee will also decide in some as yet undisclosed way whether the winning candidate’s choice of running mate is sufficiently “bipartisan.”

So that’s AE’s premise. A completely non-transparent online organization – funded by a billionaire investment banker (who has made clear he is not doing this for any philanthropic purpose) and paid for by donors who are unwilling to disclose their identities – is finally giving the American people a chance to elect a truly nonpartisan candidate. You’ve just got to accept on blind faith that they’re not rigging the election results, you’ve got to trust that their selection committee is working on behalf of you and not the wealthy donors paying for this entire undertaking, and you’ve got to believe that these people don’t have an undisclosed agenda.

But hey, why wouldn’t you? Hasn’t the 1% proven over the years that they have only the good of the country and the American people in their hearts?

Tipping the Election

The more one considers AE – its funding, its lack of transparency, its fetishizing of political, Left-Right bipartisanship and its complete disregard of the actual Top-Down conflict that has gotten America to where it is today – the more suspicious it all seems. Take a quick gander at those first states where AE got on the ballot – every single one of them is a swing state. Two of them – Ohio and Florida – are really, really important swing states. And AE is also on the ballot in California right now – a reliably blue state in presidential elections. It will be very interesting to see if AE ever actually does get itself on “all 50 states” as it claims it wants to do, or whether it continues to play triage and pick up the swing and blue states first.

The reason that will be so interesting is because although “Ackerman and his colleagues argue that the moment is ripe for a third-party candidate – not merely to tip the election a la Ralph Nader 2000, but to win it,” I think Ackerman’s claim is patent nonsense.

After all, Ackerman’s announced plan is to spend the first half of 2012 selecting a presidential ticket in a way calculated to provide little or no actual media coverage . . . while the rest of the country is kept continually informed of both President Obama’s doings and the race to secure the Republican nomination. Then – only five months before the general election – AE is going to unveil its nominee to the American public for the first time and it claims to reasonably expect that the public will . . . what? Rally ‘round the AE ticket based on nothing but its sheer bipartisany goodness?

The American people already know who Barack Obama is and they’re going to be learning all about the eventual Republican nominee during the next six months. But – somehow – the sheer soul-crushing happiness of a Bloomberg/Bayh or a Ben Nelson/Marco Rubio or a Chris Christie/Harold Ford or – I know! – a Jon Corzine/Paul Ryan ticket is going to so dazzle the American public that they elect a third-party candidate to the White House?

No sane person could seriously believe such twaddle.

As Dante Atkins's excellent post from last night makes clear, the real impact of the AE ticket is going to depend on the final names appearing on its and the Republican Party’s ballot lines. Simply stated, AE’s presence could have the ability to siphon votes away from either the Democratic or the Republican Party depending on whom the Republicans nominate and whom AE selects.

So my cynical, black little heart guesses that once the Republican nominee has been made clear, AE is going to select a presidential ticket designed to divide the Democratic base and suck up as many disaffected Democrats as possible. (As Atkins points out, Ron Paul is a strong contender for that role.)

The bottom line is that I think AE has intended from the very beginning to wait and see who is going to be the Republican nominee and then select whatever “centrist” candidate is most likely to appeal to Democrats disappointed by President Obama. I think AE is really only interested in running its hand-selected candidates in swing states and blue states, and I think AE’s entire goal is simply to help tip the election away from the not-quite-completely-in-the-pocket of the 1% Democrats and toward the wholly-owned-and-controlled by the 1% Republicans. This whole bit about “nonpartisanship” and “online voting” is just the attractive magician’s assistant, gussied up for the 21^st century, whose job is to distract the audience from what is otherwise the same tired trick of splitting the opposing party’s vote.

It’d be nice to get a little disconfirming evidence to suggest that I’m wrong, of course, but then that would require a belief that wealthy Americans still understood that we are all invested in this country together, and the kind of transparency in the political process that we are not likely to see until either Citizens United is overturned or the Constitution is amended.

Unfortunately, until then the smart thing to do is just to assume the worst.

Reading Marx – Intermezzo

2012-01-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

That’s right . . . first post of 2012 is about Marx, homies. ‘Cause that’s just how I roll, yo!

(Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. It probably has something to do with the fact that I got the first three seasons of Breaking Bad as a Christmas present.)

So I’m getting ready to plunge back into Capitalism, having taken a week or so off to gird my loins before doing battle with The Dread Chapter Three, but I did watch – as I always do before I plunge into the actual reading – David Harvey’s lecture on the reading material.

Maybe it is just that Harvey is a very good professor, but despite all of his warnings that this is the point at which most adventurers turn back I think Chapter Three sounds kind of interesting. Marx apparently is going to begin expounding upon the fundamental changes that money works in what heretofore had been strictly conceptualized as a commodity-based system, how those changes are necessary for the new money-based system to function, and what those changes portend in terms of the value of commodities and the power of participants in that system. I am especially intrigued to see how Marx ends up arguing that debt is functionally necessary to a capitalist system.

But over the weekend I went back and found the original London Review of Books article I read months ago that first got me on this kick – as well as my original post about that article – and a possibility occurred to me that I had not considered before: Marx may in fact be entirely correct and yet wholly irrelevant in his critique of capitalism. It all has to do with temporal considerations.

For example, like many, many people I’ve never found it difficult to predict what the stock market or the economy ultimately is going to do. To this day my sister thinks I’m a genius because about a year and a half before the housing market collapsed I told her that it was going to do so. I gave her some advice that she did not heed, and in the ensuing years she has told me several times that she wished she had listened to me.

Now . . . I’m not claiming to be particularly bright or insightful about this stuff. A lot of people saw exactly what I saw back then, and a lot of people predicted the housing bubble collapse – the only thing is, a whole lot more people were calling it the other way, and then the herd instinct kicked in and those other people tended to get all the attention. Which is why my sister thinks I’m a genius today – because (as she remembers it) “everybody” was saying that there was no problem in the housing market, and only her brother was warning her that things were about to go pear-shaped.

But the real point is that it is insufficient to know what the real estate market or the stock market or, really, any market, is ultimately going to do; in order to take advantage of that insight you also have to know when that market shift is going to take place. This is a whole lot trickier.

(Back when the tech stock/NASDAQ boom was going on it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that we were looking at a stock bubble. I was just a puppy when the bubble started inflating, and by the time I had money to invest I was convinced the bubble was going to pop at any minute . . . so I refused to put any money in the market. I sat out 2 years’ worth of insane capital gains just because I couldn’t know when the bubble would finally burst and I didn’t want to risk my investment.

(That turned out to have been the correct call, but I would have loved to have been able to take advantage of the stock price run-ups that my prudence during those 2 years made me forego. And I would have done so, too, if only I could have known exactly when the inevitable tech-stock collapse would finally happen. Such foresight, alas, was beyond me.)

Anyway . . . back to Marx. It strikes me that Marx’s critique of the capitalist system is not of capitalism as it is actually exists, but is of the “capitalist system finally realized.” That is, Marx’s critique (I think) finally is going to be that capitalism cannot continue indefinitely, but that once it has engulfed the world and all the world’s peoples then its own inherent structure dooms it to failure. The thing is . . . that might technically be true and yet it may also be a practically pointless statement.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier postings in this whole Reading Marx series, in one of the prefaces to the book Engels makes the comment that Britain was at that time trapped in a “permanent and chronic” economic depression. Well, it may have looked so to Engels back when he was writing, but of course we know now that this most certainly was not the case and that – as I found out with a quick Wikipedia search – Britain got out of its “permanent” depression by attempting to annex Africa.

That’s the thing about the capitalist system: even assuming that Marx’s critiques are correct (and I’m still just reading, so I haven’t yet formed an opinion about that) it is very difficult to know when the capitalist system will finally run out of tricks in order to keep the whole damned thing chugging along just a little bit longer. Sure, you can say that the system is ultimately doomed, but that is very much like scientists saying that our sun will ultimately turn into a red giant and engulf the earth:

“When is that going to happen?” you might well ask.

“Oh, in about 5 billion years,” they’ll tell you.

“Hhmmmm . . .” you might then ask, “so this is something you needn’t have bothered me with, isn’t it?”

“It’s still true,” they’ll claim.

“Yes,” you could then reply. “Still true and utterly meaningless to me personally.”

Don’t get me wrong. I have to admit to a sheer intellectual frisson reading this stuff. It is challenging and it is different and it may turn out to be – as I indicated above – completely correct. It may also be entirely pointless, at least for anyone living in the early part of the 21^st century.

But I am enjoying the opportunity to engage and grapple with a way of thinking about things entirely new to me, so I’m even looking forward to The Dread Chapter Three. Ever forward!

Happy New Year’s Everybody!

2011-12-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

So barring some unforeseen event, this marks the last post of 2011. I hope everybody has a great time celebrating and bringing in the New Year. Despite my oft floated bits of cynicism, pessimism and general black humor, I am - as always - looking forward to finding out what happens next.

I know it may not always be fun, but I'm sure it’s gonna be great anyway.

Happy New Year's, one and all!

See everybody in 2012!!

Republicans Playing Calvinball

2011-12-30T22:16:00.000-08:00

One of the maddening things about being a rational person following today's politics is that sane people just aren't prepared to grapple 24/7 with the weird Calvinball that the modern-day GOP plays.

Just yesterday I suggested that the Democrats could make hay at Romney's expense by hammering him about his refusal to produce his tax records. However, I also suggested that Obama should not personally be the one calling for their production because he shouldn't open himself up to the possibility of getting pwned if Romney suddenly decided to release the records, the way that Donald Trump got pwned when Obama released his long-form birth certificate right before the Washington Correspondents' Dinner.

And today I see that Craig Romney is suggesting that his dad will release his tax records when Obama releases his birth certificate. Huh? Haven't we already covered this?

Apparently not. Apparently for the Crazies now running the GOP asylum the very Structure of the Universe means that it is impossible for Obama ever to have released his birth certificate, even though he now has done so on multiple occassions (including his very public humiliation of Donald Trump with it at that Correspondents' Dinner).

This is what I mean by Calvinball. Today's Republicans really will tell you that the sky is green if they think saying so will get them an extra political point. They really will change the rules two seconds after telling you what the rules are, if they think they can get away with it.

Canada: The Northernmost State

2011-12-30T21:01:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I penned a little rant about "independent voters," arguing as I always do that "independent" is just a functional euphemism for "low-information" (i.e., "bog stupid"). The cause of that rant was a poll asking Mississippi voters for whom they would vote today if they had the choice: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? Lincoln was the clear winner among both Democrats and Republicans, but self-identified "Independents" were split evenly at 44% each.

I suggested that this was only further evidence that people who self-identify as "independent" are really just so damned ignorant that they don't even know who either Lincoln or Davis were. In an attempt to bolster my claim that there are Americans alive today who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was, I pointed out that "[t]hese are people who think Canada is the northernmost state."

Well . . . lest anybody think I exaggerate the depth of ignorance that exists in the simple American electorate, let's just take a gander at how the Iowa Republican caucuses are wrapping up. Here is Texas Governor Rick Perry explaining to Iowans why we should be eager to get our hands on Canada's tar sands oil:

"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don't have to buy from a foreign source," Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a round of enthusiastic applause.

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry's assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is "not good policy, it's not good politics and frankly it's un-American." (emphasis added)

And you thought I was exaggerating last month about how bog stupid Americans can be? What cracks me up about all this is not just that Perry just naturally considers Canada's oil to be part of the United States' domestic production, but that when he made these ridiculous statements his Republican audience burst into "enthusiastic applause." Apparently, the sheer ridiculousness of claiming Canada's oil as our own escaped them all.

Lord, Lord . . . give me the strength tomorrow night to drink enough to expunge all of 2011 from my head, and to steel me to endure the year to come.

UPDATE REDUX: Turning Out America’s Lights

2011-12-30T16:29:00.000-08:00

I’ve written here and here about something I feel is emblematic of a deep rot in modern America’s understanding of what it means to be a community: the turning out of public lights in towns all across the country. For a people that consider themselves to be the “first” of the First World nations, we have become so absolutely opposed to reinvesting any taxpayer money in the commons that now many communities can no longer afford to maintain streetlights. In 21^st century America, our towns are going dark because we refuse to pay enough in private taxes to keep the public lights shining.

Today The New York Times published another story about this phenomenon. Although the story mostly focused on Highland Park, Michigan, the article pointed out that “similar [cost-cutting] efforts have played out in dozens of towns and cities” across the country.

Chalk it up as just one more piece of evidence that we have stopped caring about maintaining our nation as a going concern; we no longer seem to think of the United States as something in which to invest, but simply as something to exploit until it is completely hollowed out and then . . . what? Phase three: profit?

The turning out of America’s lights in towns and cities, one by one, is only the most stark example of what appears to be a long-term trend that eschews investment of any sort (education? infrastructure? health care?) in the future of the country. Via Kevin Drum, Mike Mandel provides this chart:

Mandel explains that net business investment is well below historical levels, household and institutional investment is at a 40-year low, and

Government net investment as a share of net national product is at a 40-year low. . . . This is a true failure of economic policy. Government is punking out, just at the time when a public investment surge is needed to make up for the private investment drought. As a country, we should be investing more, not less. (emphasis in the original)

Everybody keeps telling me that we “should run the government like a business.” Well, businesses these days don’t think much beyond the next quarter’s profitability and/or stock price, and so now apparently neither do our governments.

No one is going to have to remind us to turn off the lights as the US exits the world stage. Turns out we’re just gonna refuse to pay the electric bill and let the lights go out all on their own.

Playing With the Pundits – Why We Keep Making Mistakes

2011-12-30T11:27:00.000-08:00

Today Paul Krugman returns to his oft-repeated mantra that recent badly chosen economic policies have vindicated Keynesian economics both in the US and in Europe. Specifically, Keynes argued that government spending should be cut during economic booms, not during economic slumps – that it should be countercyclical to the economy. Krugman asserts that the disastrous results of Europe’s new commitment to “economic austerity” (and, to a lesser extent, our failure to enact a sufficiently large economic stimulus package back in 2009), validate this basic Keynesian principle.

I read Krugman’s column as yet another reminder that human evolution did not gift us with a brain designed to be very good at either (i) dealing with very complicated situations, or (ii) events that take place on something other than the human scale. To be sure, our brains can learn to handle complicated situations and events on macro and micro scales, but learning how to do something is not the same as instinctively knowing how to do something.

For example, after sufficient time, almost all human babies will instinctively learn to walk upright; almost none of them will instinctively start creating and then solving quadratic equations. Most of us can instinctively understand the Newtonian physics behind two billiard balls colliding on a pool table – we can, after all, play pool without having to solve vector equations in our head. But trying to understand how light can be both a wave and a particle, how time itself slows down the faster one moves through space . . . these truths are very much not the things that come naturally to humans – we have a hard time even visualizing such things.

And this can be a problem, because it means that very often our big brains can actually figure out the solution to a complicated problem but that this solution will be met with distrust because it doesn’t feel right to most people. For example, when money is tight because the economy is in the toilet a lot – probably even most – of us will instinctively argue that the appropriate thing for the government to do is spend less money . . . even though that is actually the worst thing the government could do.

And so we find ourselves trapped. Economically, we know that in the midst of a recession the correct policy is for the government to spend more money. But politically we find ourselves incapable of persuading all those people for whom it “just doesn’t make sense” that increasing government spending is the right thing to do. (It doesn’t help, of course, that in the US we have a political party committed to simply opposing whatever President Obama suggests; so when Obama proposes doing the right thing – like enacting an economic stimulus – the GOP can simply talk about how Obama is wasting more of the taxpayers’ money and that will actually make sense to a lot of people).

Let me share one of my favorite (and very timely) examples of how truly difficult it is for us humans to think on a scale outside of our own.

I’ve become something a fan of that last video I found and posted on Christmas Eve, the one that presents winter images set to the music of The Carol of the Bells. I think it’s quite pretty, but I also enjoy its sort of no-nonsense, extremely factual statement that “the axial tilt is the reason for the season.” This is very strictly speaking true; as the earth orbits the sun, its axial tilt means that during about half of its orbit the northern hemisphere is pointed toward the sun, and during the other half of its orbit the southern hemisphere is pointed toward the sun. This is the main reason the seasons change from summer to winter and back again.

Here’s what I find fascinating. I must’ve run into dozens of people in the course of my life who have asserted quite confidently that the reason it gets cold during winter is because “the earth is farther away from the sun.” This, of course, is wrong. If it were correct, then the entire earth would get colder at the same time. But we know that isn’t the case; when it is winter in the northern hemisphere it is summer in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. But what is truly remarkable is that in every instance I’ve had such an encounter the person speaking to me knows that fact too.

Consider how weird this phenomenon really is. For a long, long time almost all people believed that the sun went around the earth. That is, after all, what it looks like is going on. We have to be taught that the earth goes around the sun. Also, until they ventured very far from their own locales, people had no idea that the seasons were reversed once you crossed the equator. We have to be taught that too.

So now a lot of people have two facts in their heads that – having passed elementary school – they accept completely: the earth orbits the sun, and the seasons are reversed on the different sides of the equator. And yet, when asked why it gets colder in the winter, what do a lot of people do? They fabricate an answer based on what feels right (the earth must be farther away from the sun) that directly contradicts what they know to be true (the earth isn’t getting colder everywhere.)

When I’ve had the time and the inclination, I’ve explained to many of these people the idea behind the axial tilt (yeah . . . I’m one of those annoying people, I guess). And it isn’t really a difficult concept to grasp – everybody I’ve spoken to gets it easily. And I’m certainly not calling anybody to whom this had to be pointed out stupid. I’m just saying that this is another great example of how effortlessly we humans can come to believe things that are not true – things that even a moment’s reflection would make it clear to us cannot be true – simply because those things “make sense” to us on a visceral level.

And that’s fine when you’re playing a game of pool, or driving a car. It’s much less helpful when you’re trying to get a handle on the global or national economy, or you’re contemplating something like climate change.

Playing With the Pundits – The Worst WaPo Column Ever?

2011-12-30T11:21:00.000-08:00

Certain columnists just lend themselves to abuse, especially those wealthy pundits who presume to speak on behalf of “the American people.” David Brooks wrote an entire book ten years ago (Bobos in Paradise) that attempted to fob off Brooks’s own celebration of the upper class’s conspicuous consumption as self-evidently an American virtue; eight years later he confirmed just how much his finger is on the pulse of the American public by declaiming that Americans thought that Barack Obama “just would not fit in at the Applebee’s salad bar.” Of course, none of the Applebee’s restaurants even have salad bars – something Brooks might have known but for the fact he obviously never condescends to eat in chain restaurants.

Thomas Friedman is another easily mockable pundit. The multi-millionaire Mustache of Understanding’s penchant for extrapolating global truths about humanity’s future from random comments made by taxi cab drivers in the middle of conversations that almost certainly took place only in Friedman’s fevered imaginings is the impetus for an irregular series of postings (the “Friedman Files”) on this very blog. And of course there’s Friedman’s infamous Charlie Rose appearance in which he argued that after 9/11 America had no choice but to attack a large Muslim country – any large Muslim country would do, apparently, except Saudi Arabia – so that our military could tell that country’s people: Suck. On. This.

But someone who doesn’t get mocked enough – no matter what silly thing comes out of his pie hole – is The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. But no matter. Today’s column, “The Year of the Befuddled Leader,” provides more than enough mock-fodder.

Good Lord, I’ve rarely seen such a hack piece of writing – especially from somebody who commands one of the foremost plots of opinion real estate in the US. Ignatius’s piece, which he claims to be “a year-end review,” obviously was tossed off in about 20 minutes so that he could clear his social calendar for whatever New Year celebrations he plans to attend.

Structurally, it’s just a mess. All of thirteen paragraphs long, this “year-end review” wastes the first three paragraphs talking about all the things Ignatius does not want to discuss, and the concluding paragraph merely tells us that we can’t know what the future will bring. (Yeah, David – I realized you were pretty clueless about half-way through this thing.) And even though Ignatius explains that he thinks the “befuddled leader” is the appropriate unifying image of 2011, he nevertheless devotes three additional paragraphs to discussing Egypt and “radical Islam” without mentioning a leader of any kind at all.

Substantively, well . . . let’s clear up some basic terminology. MicroSoft Word suggests the following synonyms for “befuddled”: puzzled, perplexed, baffled, mystified, bewildered, or bemused. That list certainly accords with my understanding of the word’s definition. So what examples of “befuddlement” by national leaders does Ignatius provide us to support his argument that 2011 was the year of the “befuddled leader?” Uhhhmmmm . . . none.

For example, Ignatius describes how “the Pakistani military rolled over the hapless President Asif Ali Zardari as if he were no more than a gaudy piece of cardboard.” I can’t tell who Ignatius supposes is “befuddled” here, but certainly it can’t be the decisive Pakistani military that always has been the real leader in Pakistan – a fact that Ignatius, as the Post’s foreign affairs columnist, really should have known.

And for some reason, Ignatius asserts that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi spent 2011 “befuddled.” About what, precisely? Gaddafi appeared to be insane, but he never appeared to be confused; he believed passionately in his right to continue his autocratic rule over Libya right up until the moment the Libyans shot him in the head. Mubarak believed the same, right up until the time the Egyptian military switched sides on him; hell, after the American state department leaked word that Mubarak would shortly be resigning his office, Mubarak called a press conference just to tell the world that he intended to stay right the hell where he was. He was wrong, ultimately, but he never appeared “befuddled.”

These leaders weren’t “perplexed” about anything, they weren’t puzzled about what was going on in their countries or in the world; they were just swept from power. The same thing is true of the embattled Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Neither ruler has done anything to reflect any sort of puzzlement or bafflement about events – to the contrary, I’m pretty sure they understand exactly what is happening to them.

And this true as well of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Hu Jintao, whom Ignatius describes as “looking over their shoulders at technology-empowered citizens.” Huh? What import do these words even have, except to suggest a lazy columnist’s way of asserting in this year’s end wankfest that “technology is changing everything, maaaannn!”

Shit. Given that Ignatius apparently understands the term “befuddled” to mean “out of or in danger of losing office” I’m just surprised he didn’t lump Kim Jong-Il in with everybody else as an example of 2011’s “befuddled leaders.” Kim Jong-Il died! How much more befuddled can you get? Death is the ultimate fuddlement!

But by far, the thing that set me off most about this dreck is Ignatius’s attempts to claim that European and American leaders are confused about how they should react to world events.

As for Europe, Ignatius claims that France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel “spent the year muffing their economic crisis.” How? Well, he doesn’t really explain that one. On the one hand, he asserts as self-evident that “[c]oordinated fiscal policy and austerity will certainly be necessary for the euro zone’s future.” (Psst! David! Austerity is a really bad idea right now! It isn’t working!) On the other hand, he argues that the European Central Bank needs to act as a lender of last resort – apparently so the perimeter nations in trouble can continue borrowing money they don’t have. Jesus! I think Sarkozy and Merkel’s austerity prescriptions are wrong, but at least they’re consistent. If anyone appears “befuddled” about what to do to fix Europe it seems to be Ignatius – not these two leaders.

And, finally, with respect to President Obama:

Given the uncertainties facing the world, the United States was probably lucky to have a “no drama” president who sought to avoid mistakes. Still, there’s no disguising the fact that 2011 was a lesson in the diminished power of the United States. One great debate for the 2012 campaign will be whether an American restoration is possible and, if so, within what limits.

Ignatius could have simply written Ph’nglui mgiw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn! for all the sense this paragraph makes. (Although presumably what Ignatius did write is slightly less dangerous.)

So . . . it was a good thing we had President Obama in office – presumably because he was not “befuddled.” But, I guess, the world was befuddled by all the uncertainties facing it. Uhmmmm . . . okay. Oh yeah, and also – the United States’ power has been diminished in some way. Militarily? Economically? Politically? Diminished how? Absolutely diminished, or diminished in comparison to other nations? Ignatius doesn’t bother to answer any of these questions or to otherwise explain what he means, he merely asserts the diminishment and hopes that our mythical lost power can be “restored within limits.” Again, WTF?

What a great big piece of piffle. This may be the single most useless Post column I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot.

Yeah . . . I’ve decided to keep an eye on this guy. Anybody this influential and yet so friggin’ dumb that he can write for a living and not know what “befuddled” means is too dangerous to be left to his own devices.

I can’t believe people like this get paid for such scribblings.

Playing With the Pundits – How a Bad Economy Might Help Obama

2011-12-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

Heading into Election Year 2012, I expect we’re going to start seeing even more attempts to extrapolate from past elections in order to predict what will happen next November. Such is Susan Milligan’s U.S. News and World Report column, “2012 Republicans Risk Repeating John Kerry’s 2004 Mistakes.”

I certainly don’t have any problem with such columns. I’m fond of political speculation myself, and whenever I think I’ve come up with something worthwhile I make sure to post it here so we can all go back and laugh at it when I am proved to be terribly, terribly wrong. But there are two things about Milligan’s column – one bad, one good – to which I want to draw attention.

The bad thing is minor, and it is simply an example of writers’ natural tendency when attempting to draw parallels between events to massage facts in order to better fit the point they wish to make. Specifically, in arguing that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney may end up mirroring John Kerry’s failed bid to oust George Dubya in 2004 Milligan asserts that “[l]ike Kerry, Romney has a solid resume in government.”

Uhhmmm . . . no. John Kerry was Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts from 1983 to 1985, when he became a U.S. Senator. When he ran for the presidency in 2004, he had been a U.S. Senator for nearly 20 years. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is the one-term Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2005 who did not seek re-election because his tenure was so unpopular that he was dead certain to lose that bid. Claiming that Romney’s background in politics is “solid” like Kerry’s is just silly.

The good thing I want to discuss isn’t a criticism of the Milligan’s column, but mere something she points out that I think bodes well for Barack Obama’s chances in next year’s election: the fact that, generally speaking, it is insufficient to rely on an incumbent’s unpopularity in order to unseat that incumbent. A political challenger must also present a clear contrasting message that resonates with voters.

This is very probably due to most people’s aversion to loss. Kevin Drum made this point in an interesting way a week or so ago in a post he wrote about the Affordable Care Act:

I just finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which naturally got me thinking about Prospect Theory, one of my favorite socio-econo-behavioral theories of the past few decades. There’s a lot to Prospect Theory, but its most famous aspect is its focus on loss aversion. Most people, it turns out, aren’t so much risk averse as they are loss averse: they prefer a sure gain over a gamble for a bigger gain, but they prefer a gamble when the alternative is a sure loss. Bottom line, people really, really hate to lose things that they already have. (emphasis added)

This matches up fairly closely with my own understanding of how people chose their candidates when times are tough. I remember trying to persuade people in 2004 that Bush had done enough damage to the country and that it was time to throw the bum out, and the conversation usually went like this:

ME: Look, Iraq is a disaster, the economy isn’t doing great, we’re spending all this money, losing lives with no end in sight . . . we gotta get somebody else in there who can fix this mess.

OTHER: Like who, Kerry? I don’t know, man, I just don’t know where he stands on things.

ME: Well, I think I do but what does Kerry’s position really matter when we do know what Dubya stands for?

OTHER: Well, Kerry could be worse, you know.

ME: How? How could Kerry be worse? No, you know what? It doesn’t even matter. Let’s assume that Kerry could be worse than what we’ve got, but we can’t even tell. Are you with me so far?

OTHER: Yeah.

ME: Okay, now let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose you are holding in your right hand a big pile of dog shit. A huge, steaming, stinky pile of dog shit. And suppose you are holding in your left hand a Mystery Box. You don’t know what’s inside the Mystery Box, it could be anything. It could be the Ebola virus, or CancerAids. But it could be a thousand dollar bill. Or keys to a new car. Hell, it could be Denny’s coupon. It could be whatever. You understand?

OTHER: Yeah.

ME: Okay, now here’s the thing. You have to choose between keeping the big, steaming pile of dog shit you have in your right hand – you’ve got to keep holding it for four more years – or throwing that dog shit away and keeping instead whatever is in the Mystery Box. What do you want to do?

OTHER: Is there really such a thing as CancerAids?

ME: . . . . . Never mind.

Even better is this classic 2004 article by Chris Hayes, in which Hayes describes how difficult he found it to reach out to undecided voters when he was actually working for Kerry’s 2004 campaign:

Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the [Dubya’s] undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. . . . Yeah, but what’s Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naive. C’mon, they’d say, you don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea – after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation – but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. . . . [T]he staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrable poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.

As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed – thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

A lot of people – including Susan Milligan – keep saying that if the economy doesn’t improve that will severely weaken Obama going into next year’s election. But I tend to think that Milligan is also right that the GOP nominee – no matter who that turns out to be – is only going to be able to capitalize on that weakness if he can present a clear and believable vision of a way forward. And – perversely – the worse things get, the less likely undecided voters are going to feel that any vision of the way forward is believable.

As Kevin Drum points out, people aren’t risk averse they are loss averse. People already know what they have with Obama. If they don’t know what they have with Romney – and, really, who can? – I think they are going to be much less inclined to vote Obama out of office no matter how bad things get.

So, y’know . . . Yay, Obama, I suppose.