Cynicism

Via Kay, at Balloon-Juice, I see this:

When I was reporting out my New Yorker piece, I spoke with Akhil Reid Amar, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale, who thinks that a 5-4 party-line vote against the [Affordable Care Act’s] mandate would be shattering to the court’s reputation for being above politics.  “I’ve only mispredicted one big Supreme Court decision in the last 20 years,” he told me.  “That was Bush v. Gore.  And I was able to internalize that by saying they only had a few minutes to think about it and they leapt to the wrong conclusion.  If they decide this by 5-4, then, yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud.  Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t.  What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.”

(empasis added).

Uhhmmm . . . yeah.  It’s sad that Professor Amar is having to go through this, but it is only what I went through years ago.  If you devote yourself to a profession like the law for any reason other than money, then you are a fool and a naif and real people should kick you in the ribs and laugh at you.

OWS: Let’s Amend the Bankruptcy Laws

I recognize that the Occupy movement so far has eschewed participatory politics in favor of blanket protest and raising awareness in the public mind of severe societal problems like income and wealth inequality, the corporate control over our political system, and the crippling student debt so many have been saddled with over the past decade or so.

But if there is one specific piece of affirmative legislation it seems to me the movement could and should get behind, it would be amending the law to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy once more.  Indeed, this should be a no-brainer.  The elimination of this substantial debt overhang would benefit the individuals themselves, it would benefit the country by helping free up income to be spent in the actual economy, and it would be the moral thing to do.  I also think it would do a great deal to rein in the skyrocketing cost of higher education, but I’ll admit to a bit of speculation on that last point.

Oh! The Stupid Things I Hear! No. 3

Goddammit.

So I’m listening to the Diane Rehm “Friday News Roundup” (the BBC’s Katty Kay filling in for Diane) this morning and the initial topic is the new jobs report, which shows that 80,000 jobs were added last month:  104,000 new private sector jobs, offset by a loss of about 24,000 public sector jobs.

First I hear Ron Elving, senior Washington editor for NPR News, make the incredibly stupid claim “that’s not bad, but it’s not great either.”  No, that’s friggin terrible.  Look . . .  the United States needs to add about 150,000 new jobs every month just to stay even with population growth.  So a jobs report showing that we created about ½ that amount last month means that October was utterly horrible.  Telling the American public that “we added 80,000 jobs” without putting that figure into context is just journalistic malpractice.

But far, far worse was what Elving said next. 

The Banksters: Conspiracy or Confluence?

I have a very good friend, a guy I’ve known since Junior High School, which -- these days – means that we’ve been buddies much longer than half our lives.  (In fact – I just took the time to calculate this -- in only three years we’ll have been best friends for 2/3rds of our lives).  He is by far my oldest friend and most of our really funny, really weird stories involve things that happened when we were hanging out together and were both much younger and much, much stupider.  My buddy and I talk and debate politics and the economy often, and we agree about most things.  We are as close as brothers.

But we generally part ways when it comes to the perfidiousness of the 1%.  My buddy is convinced that the huge funneling of our nation’s massive resources to a smaller and smaller number of people over the past 30 years has been an intentional, meticulously planned scheme from the beginning:

“I’m telling you,” he recently told me, “when they look into this shit 100 years from now they’ll figure out this was planned from the start.  Cut taxes on the rich, cut government spending for the rest of us, and convince us it was for our own good while they whistle all the way to the bank.  There’s no way the last 30 years happened by accident.”

Me?  I have a higher disregard for people.  I distrust conspiracies and complicated plans.  I thrill to a good heist movie, same as anyone else, but I also know that any plan that involves more than 3 people and requires split-second choreography (“Adjust your watches on my mark . . . 3, 2, 1, Mark!”) never ever really works out in Real Life. 

People just aren’t that smart and – even if they were – they’re never that competent.  Generally speaking, Big Evil doesn’t result from well thought-out, complicated, secret conspiracies involving large numbers of people.  Big Evil more often results because a large number of small, greedy, grasping jackasses – working entirely autonomously – suddenly find a loophole to exploit, and subsequently use the leverage their initial exploitation gives them to twist and exploit the system even further until eventually they control that system completely.

But – sometimes – I get hit with something that makes me wonder if my buddy might not be right after all.  Maybe the past 30 years haven’t just been a confluence of events, driven at every step by nothing more than the blind grasping of the already overly privileged.  Certainly it isn’t too unreasonable to think that the public relations campaign they’ve launched over the past decade or so wasn’t just coincidence.

If that were the case then half the nation and all of our TeeVee pundits wouldn’t keep reflexively repeating that the 1% are the “producers,” the “achievers,” or the “job creators.” 

Instead, it’d still be the other way ‘round.

OWS: The First Official Statement

Well, the Occupy Wall Street protesters released their First Official Statement yesterday.

Before I go any further, let me just say that I am a big supporter of the protest.  If the protesters are doing nothing else, they are at least yelling at the correct villains – the big banks and the financial industry that, as a whole, are most responsible for ushering in the Age of Agony. 

And the OWS protesters are to be congratulated for realizing that in order to draw attention to a cause, to a protest, it is insufficient these days to simply organize a large march/rally and then go home.  That is a one-day event, and is quickly forgotten in the 24/7 news cycle in which we now live.  Occupy Wall Street is forcing the rest of the nation – gradually and unwillingly -- to pay attention to them because they do not intend to make a little noise and then go away, congratulating themselves on “having been heard.”  They plan to stay and be a thorn in the side of those who want the country’s financial elite to continue “business as usual.”

Unfortunately, upon review of OWS’s First Official Statement – and it pains me to say this – I am, ah . . . underwhelmed.  Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I’ve produced a copy of the Statement below the fold, and then a brief explication of what I find problematic about the Statement.  I finish with an example of the kind of announcement for which I had been hoping and why I think that type of announcement would have better served OWS’s purposes.

Of Lubricants and Epiphytes

Over at Digby’s, in a post titled Killing Credibility, David Atkins writes:

In the absence of any sort of political and economic reporting that actually makes sense, voters are left to trust pre-defined political narratives. . .  [T]he biggest problem with the narratives on both sides is that economics is treated as a religion in which hidden priests serving as economic doctors must be placated by appropriate policies to “gain confidence” and “heal the economy.”  There is a massive air of mystery and clandestine actors at whose mercy sovereign nations tremble.

Reality is far simpler:  the economy is like an engine.  Demand fuels it.  A strong middle class is the best way to ensure that the fuel level stays high.  Credit via lending is a lubricant, sort of like motor oil.  In exchange for providing the lubricant, financiers are allowed to skim off the top and make out like bandits even in times of relative equality.  Lately, however, the financiers have been playing radical games to suck economy-killing amounts out of the tank, while the economy sputters to a stop due to lack of demand.  In this situation, it would seem that government would be best suited to shunt the vampire financiers off to the side, provide a fuel injection of demand and oil up the engine itself on behalf of the people.  The only problem is that the vampire financiers have too tight a control on government policy through corruption, and aren’t about to be pushed aside. (emphasis added)

I’ve long described the relationship of the financial industry to the actual economy using the same metaphor:  the financial industry helps the engine of the economy run smoothly (by allocating surplus capital to where it is needed) but it isn’t the engine itself.  It is more like what Atkins describes – motor oil.