My oldest friend called me up over the weekend and said to me, “Hey, man.You know we can get married in New York now.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” I told him, “that deeply affects my life.”We were being ironic.Although we both support marriage equality, we’re also both heterosexual guys and New York’s decision to extend marriage rights to gay couples does not personally impact either of us.Still, I was extremely pleased to learn of New York’s decision because -- as an American – had New York affirmatively decided to deny secular marriage rights to homosexuals then that really would have had an effect on me.
Picking up on this story out of Kentucky, about two Iraqi refugees arrested for attempting to send arms back to Iraq and Mitch McConnell's call to have them sent to Gitmo -- as opposed to, y'know, just trying them in the normal course of justice -- because it is "the only way we can be certain there won't be retaliatory attacks in Kentucky." (H/t to Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
Let me go ahead and apologize right off the bat: I'm sorry for using offensive language. But I cannot think of another word that carries the same level of disdain, contempt and visceral impact. Probably because I am not well-read enough.
But . . . seriously, when did America become a nation of pussies? Jesus H. Christ! We looked Hitler in the eye and said, "No." We went through decades of a steely-eyed staring contest with the USSR when the stakes were nuclear war. We lifted ourselves out of the Great Depression, we revolutionized food production and computer engineering, we gave rise to the indomitable idea of the Great Middle Class.
And now we're just a bunch of pussies. 'Cause some brown guy with a beard might look at us squintily.
Screw the GOP. I don't like them mostly because all of their ideas are wrong, but God in Heaven! How the hell people can look at that party and consider it anything other than a bunch of pantie-clutching schoolgirls is beyond me.
Something we’ve been hearing for decades now is that America needs to achieve “energy independence.”However, while both Conservatives and Liberals deploy this phrase routinely, they usually intend it to function as shorthand for two very different policy prescriptions.For Conservatives, “energy independence” generally means independence from foreign sources of oil.For Liberals, “energy independence” usually means the creation of sustainable and renewable energy sources.
The two concepts are not the same, and it is a shame that a single phrase has been used to signal both.Although it is probably too late now, our national dialogue would be much improved by using different phrases to distinguish these two positions.What Conservatives are really seeking is “Oil Independence” – the ability to have as much oil as is wanted without being subject to the whims of other nations.What Liberals are really seeking is true “Energy Independence” – the ability to have as much energy as is needed without relying on finite energy sources.
A few recent news stories clearly demonstrate that not only is Energy Independence a more idealistic concept than is simply seeking Oil Independence, it is also much more practical.
The New York Timeshad a story yesterday about how American students know less about U.S. history than any other subject. This seems to be old news. I remember reading a story a year or so ago that reported a significant portion of American adults were unable to correctly identify two of the three countries America fought in World War II.
I remember marveling when I read that. Even if no one surveyed ever attended a history class in his or her life, World War II is part of our national culture -- had none of those people ever seen a WWII movie? Sure, Italy tends to get short shrift in these films, but I just don't understand how one can grow to be an adult in our country and not at least know that WWII involved us fighting Germany and Japan.
I was reminded of that when I read the New York Times story and saw that one example of our country's high school seniors' ignorance of American history is that few were "able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War." Was this really supposed to be surprising?
Korea is often referred to as "the forgotten war," and with good reason. WWII basically supports an entire entertainment industry, as does the Vietnam War. But you just don't see a lot of documentaries or films being made about the Korean War. And I don't recall ever learning anything about that war when I was in high school, or even during the history classes I took in college. In fact, the only reason I learned that China was a North Korean ally is because - like a lot of people my age - I grew up watching M.A.S.H. Pathetically, the sum total of my knowledge of the Korean War comes from that television show.
Which makes me wonder why the New York Times's Sam Dillon picked this factoid to put in the first paragraph of his article. Is it really the case that most people think the Korean War was a central conflict about which all U.S. high school students should know? Or is it more the case that - like me - Dillon absorbed a few basic facts about the Korean War from watching one of the most popular television shows of all time and now can't comprehend how other people don't know what the both of us unthinkingly imbibed through our popular culture?
Its ability to round out my knowledge of recent events is one of the reasons I am a big fan of popular culture, at least that part of it we have easy access to. Watching movies and television shows, listening to music, and reading popular books produced in the 50's, 60's and 70's catches me up on a lot of stuff I missed simply because I wasn't around for it. Pop culture can't supplant studying actual history, of course, but it can supplement it to a great degree. Especially with the Internet, recent pop culture is more accessible now than ever before.
Which is one of the reasons I get so incensed when I see people opine on things about which they do not know, and then when called on it reply: "Well, that was before my time." As if because it was before their time is sufficient reason not only for them not to know about it, but for them to dismiss it as irrelevant.
The most egregious example of which I am aware occurred about two years ago, back when President Obama had been in office for about 5 months and was struggling (as supposedly he still is) to get the economy back on track. Meghan McCain had been invited to appear on Real Time With Bill Maher, ostensibly for what she had to contribute on presidential politics.
At one point, McCain claimed that it was inappropriate for President Obama to blame the country's economic problems on George W. Bush -- I mean, sure Bush had been in charge for 8 years but by the time this show rolled around he already had been gone 5 months. When Paul Begala pointed out that after taking office Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for the nation's economic slump for years, McCain attempted to dismiss this fact with the non sequitor "I wasn't even born yet so I don't know," and Begala - rightly - schooled her for it:
What rankles is not that Meghan McCain did not know recent presidential history -- though this appears to be what she was invited on the show to discuss -- but that she so obviously didn't think she should be expected to know anything that occurred prior to her own birth. Even more, she seemed to think that her own ignorance somehow rebutted actual facts presented by someone who disagreed with her.
Translating this attitude into rational sentences, you end up with something like this:
Advocate: I assert Proposition A.
Opponent: History shows that Proposition A is incorrect.
Advocate: Well, I don't know about that because that happened before I was
born. Since I don't know about that, I don't have to accept it.
Therefore, you haven't proven me wrong.
In the end, it comes down to a very basic misunderstanding that seems to prevail in our modern discourse: that all views, so long as they are sincerely held, are equally valid.
It doesn't make any sense, of course, but given that we seem increasingly to be turning into a "now oriented" society, given our media's refusal to present facts to their audiences instead of simply reporting competing claims, and given that literally everything (does smoking cause cancer? do carbon dioxide emissions lead to climate change? does life actually evolve?) is unsettled and up for debate so long as even one person sincerely claims it is, what more can we expect?
In fact, given that this is how policy debates increasingly are conducted in our country, aren't we simply fostering ignorance? It used to be that if you wanted to prevail in an argument, you had to be able to marshal facts. Now you just have to be able to marshal sound bites. And if you can maintain ignorance about what you are talking about, you never run the risk of being forced to accept a fact you don't like.
It isn’t often that I read an article about the political battles being fought over financial regulation and get reminded of an old girlfriend, but that is exactly what happened yesterday when I read James Suroweicki’s piece in The New Yorker about how banks are flexing their political muscle to derail the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is charged with bringing more transparency to consumer financial markets so that people looking to borrow money -- whether by accepting a credit card, taking out a home loan or otherwise -- have a very clear understanding of what the real cost of that new debt will be.
In his article, Suroweicki points out that the creation of the CFPB actually will benefit the banking industry, and argues that the banks are therefore acting counter to their own interests by opposing the creation of this agency.
Unfortunately, I think Suroweicki is missing something important here. I am sure that the banks fighting so ferociously against the CFPB understand quite well that its creation really will benefit the banking industry, but they also are profoundly aware that it will do so at the expense of the banks themselves. These two interests are not identical, and Suroweicki misses part of the story by assuming that they are.
Following up a bit on yesterday's deconstruction of David Brooks and his disingenuous attempt to frame the Democratic and Republican approach to Medicare as a philosophical choice between "bottom-up" engineering and "top-down" central planning . . .
It occurred to me that the right wing in this county has a sort of schizophrenic take on how to address economic problems. On the one hand, they are filled with rhetoric about how "small businesses" and "entrepreneurs" are the heart and soul of our economy, and that if we only unleash the forces of the Free Market then those forces will solve any problem we might have cleanly and efficiently, without involving the government or any kind of central planning.
On the other hand, despite this rhetoric it seems pretty clear that they don't really believe in bottom-up solutions to anything when it comes to the economy. No matter the economic situation, whether boom or bust, whether the government runs a surplus or a deficit, their prescription is always the same: more and more tax cuts for the wealthy, large corporations and financiers, less and less corporate and financial regulation. And the justification is always the same too: these are the people and entities who create jobs and drive the economy. Not the people at the bottom, not the working class or the hard-working middle class -- nope, true wealth is generated by the wealthy at the top. Especially the banksters.
Sadly, the Democratic party leadership has bought into this idea nearly as much as the Repubicans have. Matt Taibbi warned us long ago to keep in mind that Wall Street financiers provided the largest part of Obama's presidential campaign donations, and despite Wall Street's public wailing whenever Obama says something that hurts their delicate feelings, Wall Street has made out pretty well under Obama. After nearly crashing the global financial system the banksters received what amounted to a strings-free bailout, and profits are now higher than ever on Wall Street, as are salaries and bonuses -- all at the same time the rest of America is still suffering through the worst economy since the Great Depression. And it doesn't strike me that this is entirely the result of political payback for campaign contributions. I get the sense that Obama really has bought into the idea -- as has pretty much everybody in the leadership of both parties -- that it is the Titans of Wall Street who are the fundamental drivers of our economy.
I think this is exactly wrong. America's FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) economy is now the largest sector of our national GDP, but that doesn't mean it produces any actual wealth. Money is shifted around and interest is paid on debt, but no actual goods or services get produced by the FIRE economy. Nor does it employ a lot of people. Back when GM was the largest company in America that meant a lot of actual people were employed, both because automobile manufacturing was a (relatively) labor-intensive industry -- someone had to work the assembly lines -- and because all the suppliers to GM were also labor-intensive. But you don't need a 40,000 member workforce to shift money between electronic accounts. So while the vast amount of money that GM generated back in the 50's and 60's necessarily was spread out among many employees, all of whom then spent it themselves and thereby kept tons of other people employed, we don't have that with the FIRE economy. Now vast amounts of money are concentrated in the hands of relatively few people.
But the real wealth of any society resides in its natural resources and the goods and services that society can produce; while this wealth may end up concentrated in a few hands at the top level of society, actual wealth always -- always -- is created from the bottom up.
Whenever I think about this subject I am always reminded of feudal Japan. The Samurai class may have had all the wealth and the power in that society, but it didn't generate that wealth. The wealth was generated by the rice farmers at the bottom of society -- a circumstance recognized in Japan by the fact that up until the mid-19th century taxes were paid, not in money, but in actual bushels of rice. That -- the basic ability to feed its people -- was recognized as the nation's real wealth.
But I watch the fiscal and monetary decisions being made by our government today, and I don't get the feeling that anyone in charge really believes any longer that it is the great mass of people, toiling day in and day out, that actually created the wealth our society now has.
When the Fed is less concerned about doing something to bring down unemployment than it is about making sure inflation doesn't hurt the creditor class, when Republicans insist on shifting taxes away from the already wealthy because "they create the jobs" (a patent lie), when the salvation of the bond market is obviously more important to both parties than is our educational system, our infrastructure, our health care or -- as near as I can tell -- pretty much anything at all . . . .
Well, I get the sense that the people we put in charge really think that their job consists in making sure that the other elites in our society are basically free to do what they please because they are the only ones who "really matter." The rest of us -- the non-wealthy -- seem to be regarded more or less as livestock that can be herded, occasionally put to use (when the "real people" need consumers, debtors, or cannon fodder) but can also generally be safely ignored. The reasoning seems to be that if the richest of us are taken care of, then the rest of us will somehow naturally be taken care too.
How do they think that works? I dunno, but they seem to believe it. Maybe they think it's magic, or just a natural law of some sort. In any event, it is the epitome of a top-down approach to the economy and it seems to have infected everyone with a grip on any of the levers of power in this country.
UPDATE: In his column today Krugman hits on many of the same points I made here, albeit in a more erudite and slightly less despairing way. Representative quote: "Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers -- those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone's expense." But do click over and read the rest of what he has to say about how policy makers are protecting the creditor class by, i.e. choosing to curb (nonexistent) inflation over doing something to end unemployment, etc.
