via MoveOn.org

And

from The Gothamist

Here are two things I see: history and causality. The debt graph reaches beyond the last news cycle to put recent contributions to the national debt in a 30+ year perspective. Cornel West goes back even further, reminding us of a heady debate during the LBJAdmin.

Ha ha, silly Cornel! No one cares about poverty anymore! The Reagan years saw to that. All that debt the old man racked up had nothing to do with fighting poverty — though he certainly demonized the poor like they were the enemy and not, say, fellow citizens. As Cornel’s sign implies, all that money was put into turning the U.S. military industrial complex into a ridiculously and unnecessarily huge force in the world economy and geopolitics. Meanwhile, the gap between the richers and the poors widened to banana republic levels, the middle class shrank in size and economic power, real wages stagnated, domestic manufacturing skipped town; while schools and prisons became much more alike, although I think prisons may have the edge in educational resources.

So, hey, for all you kids totally maxed on bitchin’ 80s nostalgia: try to remember they were not totally tubular, but totally grody. The shit we presently stand in flowed directly for that toilet decade. Enjoy that mental image!

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I am all for citizens engaging in civil disobedience to gain notice for their causes and to protest injustice. But I fail to see why protesting against health inspector licenses to operate a food vending business — which is what a lemonade stand is — is not an even greater waste of time. I don’t see the injustice. I guess it’s inconvenient, but then, so is noro virus.

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Setting aside arguments about “too much” or “not enough” regulation, shouldn’t part of that lesson be about how to navigate the regulatory environment of your business? It would be unrealistic for anyone to establish a business without regard to the necessary permits and laws pertaining to that business. Just because they are kids doesn’t excuse them. When you teach a kid how to drive, part of that lesson is obeying rules of the road; the other part is preparing for the driver’s test and earning a license to drive a car. If you think the regulatory environment is too stringent, then you can always provide a valuable civics lesson by showing them how to advocate for changes in the law. That would be much more instructive than whining with extremist rhetoric about “government education camps.”

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Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.

Not bad, Tom, not bad. We have heard you beat this drum before, but it’s a beat we can all dance to. From here you should elaborate on steps we should take to remedy these areas of neglect, argue why they are important, and suggest even a specific policy or two. It’s a lot for a single column, so maybe a series of columns on this topic. It’s huge, Tom. I hope you did your research.

What follows instead is bloviating on squandered opportunities following the end of the Cold War, and much hand-wringing over the public debt, with requisite wordy quotations from a Harvard economics prof Tom talked to. To be fair, it’s not all poppycock: “Until we find ways to restructure and forgive some of these debts from consumers, firms, banks and governments, spending to drive growth is not going to come back at the scale we need,” Tom concludes. This begs a lot of questions, the biggie being, Who will do the debt forgiveness? Almost a third of U.S. debt is owned by China, Japan, the U.K., and Brazil (thanks, Wikipedia!), and I doubt any of them are in a forgiving mood while our government keeps playing chicken with the global economy.

Yet what’s really strange is just as he pooh-poohs spending, Friedman throws together a few repetitive paragraphs collecting his vague policy prescriptions, among them being “to invest in the pillars of our growth, with special emphasis on infrastructure, research and incentives for risk-taking and start-ups.” Er, that requires spending, Tom. I’m glad you’re on board with the raising of revenues, it shows you’re not insane; the money we spend has to come from somewhere. But not all the growth is going to come overnight; it’s going to require contributions from more than just the high-IQ crowd; and the consumers caught in their own liquidity trap require the very social services and job programs and education programs that are on the chopping block of deficit hawks whose rhetorical traffic you play in.

Meanwhile, Tom completely fails to mention the enormous costs of our two failed wars — three, if Libya counts as a war that we are failing — and the bloated Department of War Defense budget. He doesn’t have to flog himself for supporting those ventures in the past, it’s just that we can’t have a coherent discussion of our fiscal problems without acknowledging thirty years of military spending at hundreds of billions annually or the trillions spent on wars that are still ongoing. Sadly, in this Tom is not alone. He’s got company in the White House.

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But it’s still myopic to believe in a past glory of responsibility and shared interest motivating policy makers at the highest levels of government. Yes, they were certainly more competent in the old days; they had ways of balancing elite interests with the popular that did the poor and middle classes much more good than was we experience now. Yet our dire straits did not happen overnight. Wage stagnation, job insecurity, the debt-incurring costs of higher education, the terrible state of the rest of public education, attacks on the social safety net — all of these and so much more have been in the works since I was in elementary school in the 70s.

Blame the teabaggers all you want — they surely deserve much of it for accelerating our trip on the road to ruin — but they wouldn’t be so effective were not their rhetoric and policy preferences enabled by the elite business classes, the consensus ideology of corporate-funded centrists, and the pundits who routinely fellate them.

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The very first sentence starts off with a bang: “Fears that the global economy could be slipping back toward recession….” Slipping back? Did it ever leave? Look, I know there are strict definitions about “recession” that economists favor; but two consecutive periods of negative growth does not begin to describe the persistently high levels of unemployment, mortgage default, deflation, homelessness, etc. the world has been suffering.

The same complaint can be lodged against the phrase “while the chance of another U.S. recession” thrown in a couple paragraphs later, the implication being the chance exists, it hasn’t happened yet. No, it has not stopped happening. It is ongoing.

Granted, I think the word “recession” itself is a euphemism of denial. I have already lived through several of them in my 41 years — an average rate of two a decade seems about right — and while a few might sit happily within the textbook definition, others seemed awfully closer to mini-depressions. Perhaps my view on this is skewed by having grown up in a Rust Belt town like Buffalo, NY, which lost good-paying industrial jobs that never came back, forcing workers to either pack up and leave town or to find work in the low-wage service sector. Either way, my hometown suffered decades of “negative growth” as a result. And it has not been alone: witness Detroit, parts of which look more like post-Taliban Kabul than a bummed out American city.

Anyway, here’s another marker of denial or delusion: “The United States’ recovery is stalling” appears in the second paragraph of this story. Again, what recovery? Who has recovered? Let’s jump over to Paul “Shrill” Krugman for a little perspective:

Yes, officially the recession ended two years ago, and the economy did indeed pull out of a terrifying tailspin. But at no point has growth looked remotely adequate given the depth of the initial plunge. In particular, when employment falls as much as it did from 2007 to 2009, you need a lot of job growth to make up the lost ground. And that just hasn’t happened.

Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2.

These may sound like dry statistics, but they reflect a truly terrible reality. Not only are vast numbers of Americans unemployed or underemployed, for the first time since the Great Depression many American workers are facing the prospect of very-long-term — maybe permanent — unemployment. Among other things, the rise in long-term unemployment will reduce future government revenues, so we’re not even acting sensibly in purely fiscal terms. But, more important, it’s a human catastrophe.

When you read phrases like “for the first time since the Great Depression” — and you can find those just about anywhere in economics reporting — that should be a signal to stop thinking in terms of quaint concepts like “recession” and more urgent realities that the D-word suggests. Yet it is this kind of denial/deluded thinking that pervades policy making around the globe, in particular in Warshingtun, where libertarians and flat-earthers have taken over the debates, while winning both legislative and ideological concessions from more sober minded folks who should know better. Or maybe they shouldn’t — maybe they, too, are incapable of seeing how bad things are, because they long ago drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid that a few policy tweaks here and there will bring things around, no need for fundamental changes or — heavens! — risking a rise in the deficit.

All of which brings us to the next phrase, again taken from the first sentence of this article (such a good sentence, so packed with meaning, intended and otherwise): “…economic and financial problems around the world fueling a vicious cycle that risks spiraling beyond the control of governments.” Let’s pair this one with a paragraph key to this whole terrible story:

Investors are increasingly afraid that the world’s leading governments, weighed down by debt and wounded by the last economic downturn, might not have the wherewithal to keep the emerging crisis in check.

Investors caught up with the rest of us: our governments are failing us. Ironically, it’s the very teabagger movement so happily endorsed by the Rick Sentellis of the investor class not so long ago that has made this failure a reality.

Edited to Add: Quoted later in this same article, here is a guy clued into reality. His breakdown of our problems should be put in bullet points in a memo sent to the White House and Congress, including that SuperCommittee that will be tasked with slashing gubmint spending.

“The whole debate over the debt ceiling sent four negative messages to the markets,” said Ethan Harris, chief North American economist for Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. “That we have a big debt problem, that we can’t fix it because we have a dysfunctional political system, that it’s okay to use the threat of default to achieve political ends, and that there’s no safety net if the economy goes into recession because we’re not going to have any more fiscal stimulus.”

Solving our debt problems without a safety net and a fiscal stimulus = dumb.

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Having said that, some other GOPer will prove me wrong and will seek to top that level of callousness. I can’t predict it, though. My brain doesn’t point in that direction, no amoral compass, as it were. Basic instinct for me is: see human suffering, seek to alleviate it. Not trying to be self-righteous — I think this is fairly common, despite evidence that certain segments of the electorate have lost their minds.

Sure, few political leaders will have the brazen stupidity of a Cantor, but his cost-benefit analysis is much more common among policy makers, despite their vague talk of doing the people’s work. Following the Democratic victory in NY-26, considered a litmus test of voter tolerance for Paul Ryan’s Medicare destruction plan, President Bill Clinton immediately warned his party against complacency. Something must be done! Medicare is in peril! We must not let this issue get away from us! His audience, it should be noted, were a choir what loves them some austerity preachin’ — so I don’t expect Clinton’s prescriptions for solving the Medicare “crisis” would be to raise taxes and give it more money. Sure, he will probably recommend a return to tax levels of his Presidency, but he will also urge some restructuring plan; raising the age of recipients or limits on benefits. It’s “welfare reform” all over again! And that’s the “playbook” Obama should work from, so says the chorus.

Sacrifices will not come from the top. They will come from you and me. The banking and finance officers who oversaw the destruction of our economy and gambled mortgages and robbed pension funds still enjoy their jobs or their golden parachutes. Meanwhile, librarians in L.A. are being interrogated by court-appointed lawyers to justify their work or else they lose their jobs — at least one having her blog used against her — as armed guards stand in the room. Public employees are losing the right to union representation. Social programs for the elderly, the poor, the mentally ill, the hungry, the homeless — the ranks of whom only grow as the economy continues to stagnate (or in the case of the elderly, time moves demographics along) — are all on the chopping block. Right wingers like Cantor expose the raw side of this ideology, but it’s one shared to varying degrees of harshness by his centrist colleagues. A democracy ruled by corporations does not give a shit about us; it protects its own.

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The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.

Perhaps we should take some cues from not only the Egyptians, but the British — demand corporations pay their taxes:

nstead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.

This may sound like a fantasy—but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain. As recently as this past fall, people here were asking the same questions liberal Americans have been glumly contemplating: Why is everyone being so passive? Why are we letting ourselves be ripped off? Why are people staying in their homes watching their flat-screens while our politicians strip away services so they can fatten the superrich even more?

Well, it’s a start. I might go a step further and begin seizing corporate assets and breaking up monopolies and reducing the global imprint of corporations altogether. These things take time.

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“As we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation.”

So. How did that go over? Are America’s business leaders suddenly awakened to the civic virtues of an employed and stable working class? Let’s see what this capitalist bastard says:

“Bottom line, the most patriotic thing a company can do is ensure it is in business and take steps to stay in business; otherwise everyone loses and more people lose their jobs,” [Bruce Josten, the Chamber's chief lobbyist] said.

Read: We’ll look after our profits. Screw you.

Shocking. I am shocked. I can’t believe rich people don’t give a fuck about the working class. I mean, who knew? They’ve been so generous in the past. Why, if it weren’t for capitalism, we’d have no middle class at all to worry about as it’s bled slowly to death by globalization, the demonization of unions, the raiding of pension funds, the predations of credit card companies, the gutting of social services, the abandonment of education, the extortionist costs of secondary education, the hundreds of billions spent on resource wars, deficit hawkism, privatization of every public good….

I could go on, but what a downer. There is a silver lining, after all — Arianna Huffington might be hiring. I hear she pays nothing.

Anyway, here’s a cartoon I once did on Obama’s relationships with capitalists and workers. Enjoy.

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Nearly 15 million people are out of work and actively looking, and the unemployment rate, which remained steady at 9.6 percent, has been relatively flat since May.

A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs and people who have given up looking for work, ticked down slightly to 17 percent from 17.1 percent in September.

To get a little personal here (on my blog? The nerve!), I think I am in the latter group. I chose to be a stay-at-home dad, mostly because I could not find full-time or part-time librarian positions that would either accommodate my child-rearing responsibilities or afford before-and-after school daycare. And I am in one of the few parts of the country where libraries are eagerly supported by public levies or by educational institutions. There are still hiring freezes and maintaining productivity with less — “less” being either fewer workers or fewer hours to employ those workers. Perhaps these are special circumstances — especially for creative types like me — that would hold no matter the state of the economy; but I have met more parents in similar situations over the past couple years. I am a lucky ducky to the extent that I am on the on-call lists at two library systems, so I get to pull in some extra bucks at about one shift a week. Rollin’ in the green!

So speaking as one of the under-employed, I get the frustration the rest of the electorate has expressed (if we read the tea leaves correctly) in the mid-term elections. But that only takes me so far. The argument goes that if the Obama White House had done more to create jobs and had done a better job advertising this fact, the demise of Blue Dog Democrats and the rise of Teabag Republicans could have been avoided. There is truth there, but what I don’t understand is why the electorate would put in place people even less likely to solve the country’s economic problems. If the GOP or the Tea Party had actually advanced real ideas about creating jobs and strengthening the economy’s fundamentals, their victories on Tuesday would make more sense. But they didn’t. They espoused only a more extreme version of the same tax-cut-and-small-government rhetoric we heard ad nauseum during the Bush years — an eight-year reign that ended only two years ago, mind you, with disastrous results. They should have been “shellacked” at the polls just as harshly as the Blue Dogs.

But by what? This is a two-party system. If you punish one party, you can only do it with the other. The only virtues of the Tea Party has been their espoused distrust of both parties and their tactical infiltration of GOP. A more reasonable and more productive response by voters would have been to form a strong third party to propose policies and solutions that the other two parties are incapable (by virtue of their corporate backing) of formulating. So far, this has not happened. I won’t rehearse the history of third party failures over the past 20 years (Perot, Nader, etc.), but they have direct bearing on what happened on Tuesday.

If we have no party to articulate alternative solutions and policies, then the only ones we will hear and become enacted are the same old formulas that corporate and political elites are capable of cobbling together. (To wit, Obama’s “infrastructure spending and tax breaks for businesses.”) If no political movement bothers to organize and maintain the involvement of youth and minorities, then those groups will not show up to vote, because they see no positive expression of their interests among the choices available. “Lesser of two evils” is not a sustainable motivation for most people to get involved in the process. Not when one side is bat shit crazy and the other side is corrupt. Or both.

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