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anonymous

Post-Tea-Party Nation - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14FOB-idealab-t.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 10 - Cached
  • while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.
  • If Republicans are to act effectively and responsibly, we need to learn more positive and productive lessons from the crisis.
  • Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.
  • Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people.
  • Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets).
  • the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.
  • But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require.
  • Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget.
  • During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with the deficit. Today, the positions are reversed.
  • eading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.
  • Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad.
  • Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them.
  • Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did.
  • Lesson 5: Listen to the people — but beware of populism.
  • Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest.
  • But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education
  • The U.S. political system is not a parliamentary system. Power is usually divided. The system is sustained by habits of cooperation, accepted limits on the use of power, implicit restraints on the use of rhetoric.
  • anonymous on 15 Nov 10
     
    "Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 in large part because of the worst economic crisis since World War II. Republicans have now regained the House of Representatives for the same reason. In the interval, Republicans ferociously attacked the Obama administration's economic remedies, and there certainly was a lot to attack. But the impulse to attack, it must be recognized, was based on more than ideology; it also served important psychological imperatives." By David Frum at The New York Times Idea Lab on November 12, 2010.
anonymous

U.S.: What the Sequester Will Do to the Military - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...hat-sequester-will-do-military

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The current continuing resolution that Congress is using to fund the entire government until March 27 has already affected U.S. forces.
  • Although Stratfor typically does not examine domestic U.S. issues, this one is geopolitically significant.
  • The U.S. military, and particularly the Navy, is the most powerful force projection instrument in the world. When the sequester takes effect, it will immediately reduce military spending by 8 percent, with more than $500 billion in cuts to defense spending over 10 years divided equally among the military branches.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It is not the overall amount of the reductions that is damaging, necessarily; it is the way in which the cuts will be implemented. The across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration coupled with the limits set by the continuing resolution are constraining budget planners' options in how to absorb the spending reductions and thus are damaging all the military branches, programs, training, deployments and procurement.
  • Just the threat of continued budget reductions has had an immediate effect on the military's readiness. The Navy decided not to deploy a second carrier to the Persian Gulf, backing down from its standard of two carriers in the region. Instead, the second carrier will serve in a surge capacity for the immediate future. The other branches have extended the deployments of units already in theaters and delayed others from rotating in as replacements since it is relatively less expensive to have units stay in place than move them and their equipment intercontinentally.
  • Maintenance budgets across the forces have been reduced or suspended in anticipation of cuts. Training of all non-deploying forces who are not critical to the national strategic forces is also being heavily curtailed.
  • These options were chosen because they are immediate cost-saving measures that can be reversed quickly as opposed to the big-budget procurement programs, in which changes can cause delays for years.
  • Any given military platform, from a Stryker armored vehicle to an aircraft carrier, requires a lot of money in order to be ready for use at any time at its intended level of performance. These platforms require consistent use to maintain a certain readiness level because machines cannot sit idle for months to years and then operate effectively, if at all, especially if called on for immediate action.
  • Moreover, the people that operate this equipment need to maintain their working knowledge and operational skill through continued use. This use causes wear and tear on the platform and requires consistent maintenance. All of this is necessary just to maintain the status quo. In the end, there must be a balance between a platform's readiness level and the amount of funding required for operations and maintenance, but if the money is no longer available there is no choice but to reduce readiness.
  • For example, the Navy has said it is considering suspending operations of four of its nine carrier air wings while shutting down four of its carriers in various stages of the operations and maintenance process. This would essentially give the United States one carrier deployed with one on call for years. This will be sufficient if the world remains relatively quiet, but one large emergency or multiple small ones would leave the United States able to project limited force compared to previous levels.
  • Procurement cycles are very slow and take decades to implement; for instance, the Navy that the United States wants to have in 20 years is being planned now.
  • The U.S. military has a global presence, and sequestration would have appreciable effects on this in certain areas. Potentially, the hardest hit region will be the Pacific, which has been the focus of the United States' new strategy.
  • The single biggest capability gap that will develop will be the U.S. military's surge capacity. If the Syria-Iraq-Lebanon corridor were to become more unstable, the United States will not be able to respond with the same force structure it had in the past. The U.S. military can still shift its assets to different regions to attain its strategic goals, but those assets will come from a smaller resource pool, and shifting them will lessen the presence in some other region. The military's ability to use one of its softer political tools -- joint military exercises -- will also be at risk.
  • This is not to say that the U.S. military will be wrecked immediately or that its condition is anywhere near that of the Russian military in the 1990s. A military's effectiveness is measured against its potential opponents, and the United States has enjoyed a large gap for decades.
  • Funding cuts are not necessarily abnormal for the United States while winding down into a postwar stance. Historically, the pattern has been a reduction in spending and retrenchment of a large volume of forces from abroad. However, Pentagon planners typically go into a postwar period with the stated goal of not damaging the force through these cuts and reductions. 
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 13
     
    "Sequestration, the automatic spending reductions scheduled to take effect March 1, will affect the U.S. military's ability to project force around the world. The current continuing resolution that Congress is using to fund the entire government until March 27 has already affected U.S. forces. The longer these funding cuts continue, the more degradation the U.S. military will incur, with longer-lasting effects. "
anonymous

Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130304fa_fact_lizza

shared by anonymous on 27 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.
  • Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist.
  • “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”
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  • Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election.
  • Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.
  • The bet failed spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in on New Year’s Day.
  • Since the 2012 elections, the Republicans have been divided between those who believe their policies are the problem and those who believe they just need better marketing—between those who believe they need to make better pizza and those who think they just need a more attractive box. Cantor, who is known among his colleagues as someone with strategic intelligence and a knack for political positioning, argues that it’s the box.
  • As he gamed out G.O.P. strategy for the budgetary showdowns with Obama in January and February—including this week’s clash over the sequester—Cantor was happy to make himself available for several long interviews. He persistently struck a diplomatic note and mentioned again and again how much he looked forward to working with Obama, a position that he said he’s been articulating for a long time.
  • There are several ways to think of the divide in the Republican conference.
  • One is regional. The House has two hundred and thirty-two Republican members; nearly half of them—a hundred and ten—are from the South.
  • The rest are scattered across the Midwest (fifty-eight), the mid-Atlantic (twenty-five), the mountain West (eighteen), and the Pacific (twenty-one). There are no House Republicans from New England.
  • Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.” He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
  • The other divide in the House is generational.
  • If Democrats vote as a bloc, which they often do, it takes only sixteen dissenting Republicans for the leadership to lose a vote. There is a rump group of some forty or fifty restless Republicans. At its core are two dozen younger members, most of whom have been elected since 2010 and have what generously might be called a dismissive attitude toward their leaders, whom they see as holdovers from the big-spending era of George W. Bush.
  • Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, who is sixty-three and has served for a decade in the House, recently emerged as the leader of a large faction of House Republicans who believe that the Tea Party-inspired congressmen are dooming the Party.
  • Cole is no fan of Obama. “The President is so self-righteous and so smug,” he told me. But Cole is one of the few House Republicans who have worked closely with the White House. On one of his walls, which is decorated with Native American artifacts, were framed copies of two laws that Obama signed regarding tribal issues. “He’s the best President in modern American history on Native American issues,” Cole said.
  • anonymous on 27 Feb 13
     
    "Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup."
anonymous

Obama's Pyrrhic Defeat - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...obamas-pyrrhic-defeat.html

partisan politics budget ceiling

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Zoom out a little. Think of this latest skirmish, that ended tonight, as part of an endgame to a thirty years' fiscal war in American politics. Reagan began it, by betting that slashing taxes would spur growth; he was right and wrong. Growth really did happen in the 1980s; but he bequeathed a debt that is with us today, and that he tried only fitfully to fix on his watch. The early 1990s saw the country draw down that deficit, by continuing Reagan's tax hikes under Bush I and then Clinton, and thanks to a peace dividend. Clinton's eventual surplus was, alas, more mirage than reality, for it hadn't solved the long-term entitlement problem or the healthcare cost problem, and was inflated by the tech bubble. Bush II comes in and wreaks havoc. He doubles down on Reagan on taxes and declares that deficits don't matter, while adding one major new entitlement, two massively expensive wars and throws in a financial collapse as a goodbye present. The result of all this was a recession that helped metastasize the debt even further. This was what Obama inherited.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Aug 11
       
      This is actually a pretty excellent synopsis.
  • What then? I think the Grand Bargain is the final step
  • The Grand Bargain is a big entitlement-and-defense cut package balanced by higher taxes on those who have done so well during the last thirty years.
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  • What has just happened is, to my mind, therefore the following:
  • 1. The Republicans used the debt ceiling as blackmail for a big cut in discretionary spending.
  • 2. But the terms of surrender are to Obama's advantage. He has taken the nuclear weapon of the debt ceiling off the table till after the election
  • He has also made his preferred Grand Bargain more likely to happen with the terms for the super-committee.
  • He has won his own battle: he is perceived as more likely to compromise than the GOP in a country whose independent middle wants compromise.
  • If the battle of 2012 is between low taxes or high taxes, the GOP wins. But if it's fought on whether we should balance the budget solely by spending cuts, often for the elderly and needy, while asking nothing from the wealthy, then Obama wins. 
  • the drama of this deal is far greater than the actual substance
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more time without a real solution to the deepest problems. That's a huge defect in the current stop-gap deal. But it really is just a stop-gap deal. It points pretty quickly to a Grand Bargain in the super-committee, and for the first time has attached real incentives for both sides for it to work." An interesting look at this budget ceiling stuff from Andrew Sullivan. 
anonymous

Taking Responsibility on Welfare - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...responsibility-on-welfare.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • By the end of the first semester, I knew that my savings and work-study earnings wouldn’t be enough. My parents could help a little, but at that point they had big life problems of their own. If I dropped to a part-time schedule, I’d lose my work-study job and grants; if I dropped out, I’d be back to zero, with student-loan debt. That’s when a friend suggested food stamps and A.F.D.C. — Aid to Families With Dependent Children.
  • Me, a welfare mother? I’d been earning paychecks since the seventh grade. My parents were Great Depression children, both ex-Marines. They’d always taught self-reliance. And I had grown up hearing that anyone “on the dole” was scum. But my friend pointed out I was below the poverty line and sliding. I had a small child. Tuition was due.
  • We always ran out of food and supplies before we ran out of month. There were nights I was so blind from books and deadlines and worry that I put my head on my desk and wept while my boy slept his boy dreams. I hoped he didn’t hear me, but of course he did.
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  • In the years since, the programs that helped me have changed. In the ’80s, the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant became the Pell Grant (which Paul D. Ryan’s budget would cut). In the ’90s, A.F.D.C. was replaced by block grants to the states, a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. States can and do divert that money for other programs, and to plug holes in the state budget. And a single mother applying for aid today would face time limits and eligibility requirements that I did not. Thanks to budget cuts, she would also have a smaller base of the invaluable human resources — social workers, faculty members, university facilities — that were so important to me.
  • I was not an exception in that little Section 8 neighborhood. Among those welfare moms were future teachers, nurses, scientists, business owners, health and safety advocates. We never believed we were “victims” or felt “entitled”; if anything, we felt determined. Wouldn’t any decent person throw a rope to a drowning person? Wouldn’t any drowning person take it? Judge-and-punish-the-poor is not a demonstration of American values. It is, simply, mean. My parents saved me and then — on the dole, in the classroom or crying deep in the night, in love with a little boy who needed everything I could give him — I learned to save myself. I do not apologize. I was not ashamed then; I am not ashamed now. I was, and will always be, profoundly grateful.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Sep 12
       
      I would like to print this, wad it up into a ball, and shove it down Paul Ryan's throat.
  • anonymous on 25 Sep 12
     
    "I WAS a welfare mother, "dependent upon government," as Mitt Romney so bluntly put it in a video that has gone viral. "My job is not to worry about those people," he said. "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." But for me, applying for government benefits was exactly that - a way of taking responsibility for myself and my son during a difficult time in our lives. Those resources kept us going for four years. Anyone waiting for me to apologize shouldn't hold his breath."
anonymous

Myth of a spending surge. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...myth_of_a_spending_surge.html

shared by anonymous on 22 Jan 13 - Cached
  • People are very interested in partisan politics. Political partisans are very interested in the presidency. The president is an important player in federal budget debates. And thus people are very interested in questions about federal government spending "under Obama." But the national economy doesn't care about why money gets spent or which level of government spends it.
  • If you believe that restraining government spending should supercharge private sector economic activity, then you ought to know that since 2010 we've been living through a nearly unprecedented level of public sector spending restraint. Counterfactuals are, of course, hard. Perhaps private sector growth would have been even weaker had public sector spending risen at a more normal level. But an unusually low level of spending growth isn't a policy we might try in the future, it's a policy that we're trying right now and have been trying for the past few years.
  • anonymous on 22 Jan 13
     
    "People are very interested in partisan politics. Political partisans are very interested in the presidency. The president is an important player in federal budget debates. And thus people are very interested in questions about federal government spending "under Obama." But the national economy doesn't care about why money gets spent or which level of government spends it."
anonymous

Two Obvious Questions About Republican Strategy - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...ions-about-republican-strategy

shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • There are two peculiar things about all this.
  • The first is the obvious one: Republicans are quite plainly scared to death of entitlement reform. They're happy to vote unanimously for symbolic bills like the Ryan budget because they know no one really takes them seriously. But if you ask them to put real, concrete cuts to Medicare and Social Security on the table, they tentatively suggest a couple of smallish items (raising the retirement age, adopting chained CPI) and then back off. The reason for this is pretty obvious: they know that long-term cuts won't affect the current deficit, while short-term cuts will provoke an angry backlash among seniors. And they can't afford that backlash since seniors make up a big chunk of their base.
  • The second peculiar thing about all this is also pretty obvious: why the obsession with the debt ceiling? It's an unusually reckless bit of extortion that opens up Republicans to legitimate scorn, but it's not really necessary. If Republicans want to fight over spending, they can instead fight over the budget. That would lead to a government shutdown a la 1995, followed by a deal of some kind. The pressure this puts on Obama is similar, but it's far more defensible. Republicans aren't refusing to pay their own bills and they aren't recklessly putting the creditworthiness of the United States at risk. So why not have this fight over the budget rather than the debt ceiling?
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 12
     
    "Mitch McConnell says Republicans really, really want to cut entitlement spending:"
anonymous

China's Geopolitical Fallout - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-geopolitical-fallout

shared by anonymous on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • China's leaders will likely survive this trial. But what if they don't? What if China faces a severe socio-economic crisis and attendant political one of an unforeseen magnitude? What would be the second-order geopolitical effects? If Syria explodes, it does so regionally. If China explodes, it does so globally.
  • Such a crisis could lead to an upsurge in nationalism, an emotion that can be easily dialed upwards by Communist party leaders as a means of clinging to power.
  • China's defense budget has already increased eight-fold since 2001, and might continue to do so under a more nationalist-style regime (even amid slowing growth), enabling China to further implement an anti-access area-denial strategy in the East and South China seas, emphasizing submarine, ballistic missile, and cyber warfare capabilities.
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  • The aim would not be to go to war with the U.S. Navy and Air Force (quite the opposite, in fact), but to establish a force ratio more favorable to the continued, perceived growth of Chinese maritime power. But none of this would alter the current state of play in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans -- defined by a slowly diminishing unipolar American air and naval environment.
  • But what if the opposite occurred? What if an economic and political crisis ignited a downward trend in Chinese military procurements, or at least a less steep growth curve?
  • This is also quite possible: to assuage public anger at poverty and lack of jobs, China's leaders might, for political reasons, ask the military to make sacrifices of its own. After all, a Chinese Spring might be all about demanding more freedom and not about nationalism. Over time, this could affect the foundations of the Eurasian maritime order, albeit to a lesser extent than the collapse of the Berlin Wall shook the foundations of the European continental order.
  • Stalled Chinese defense budgets would reinvigorate a Pax Americana from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf, despite the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and despite the U.S. military budget crunch.
  • Remember that Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the hostility between Japan and Korea is thus much greater than the hostility between Korea and China.
  • With more than 1,500 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland and 270 commercial flights per week between the two Chinas, U.S. military aid to Taipei is designed to defend Taiwan against a sudden Chinese attack, but not necessarily to postpone an inevitable unification of sorts.
  • India, like Vietnam and Taiwan, gains most from a profound economic and political crisis inside China. Suddenly China would be more vulnerable to ethnic unrest on the Tibetan plateau abutting the Indian subcontinent.
  • This would not necessarily alleviate the Chinese threat on India's northern borderlands (given the possibility of heightened ethnic unrest inside an economically weakened China), but it would give India greater diplomatic leverage in its bilateral relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, all of which have been venues for the quiet great game India has been playing with China.
  • If India were among the biggest winners in the event of severe Chinese internal turmoil, Pakistan would be the biggest loser. China has been Pakistan's greatest and surest patron in recent decades, and has given Pakistan stores of infrastructure aid -- highways in the north and a port in the south -- without lectures about human rights and terrorism, or threats about withdrawing aid.
  • Such a bleak scenario for China overall would leave the United States and its allies -- both de facto like India and Vietnam, and de jure like Japan and Australia -- in a commanding position around Eurasia's navigable southern rimland.
  • But such a scenario is unlikely, even if the Chinese economy significantly slows and domestic unrest follows. More likely will be a tumultuous period of consolidation and readjustment within China, with China's strategic and military planners able to weather the storm with adjustments of their own for the long term.
  • But there is a larger point: geopolitics, while ostensibly about the geographically-constrained interactions of states, rests also on the internal conditions of states themselves, in which the actions of individuals are crucial and so much hangs on a thread.
  • While both the United States and China face epochal budgetary and economic crises -- which in both countries bleed over into the political realm -- the crisis in China is far more profound than in the United States. After all, the system of governance in Washington simply enjoys so much more legitimacy than the one in Beijing, with the American public institutionally better equipped to vent its frustrations than the Chinese one. Such internal realities will remain the overriding geopolitical facts in Asia.
  • anonymous on 24 Jul 13
     
    "The biggest question in international affairs has nothing to do with Syria or Iran going nuclear. It is has to do with the state of the Chinese economy, and the ability of China's one-party system to navigate through an economic slowdown to a different growth model."
anonymous

The history of inequality (by Peter Turchin) - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...peter-turchin-wealth-poverty

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth.
  • As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: ‘the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood’.
  • In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of wealth inequality in the US.
  • ...67 more annotations...
  • He looked at the net wealth of the nation’s median household and compared it with the size of the largest fortune in the US. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and that’s what he tracked, touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present.
  • We found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures
  • From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold.
  • Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century.
  • From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      I'd like to pull this citation and superimpose another period-chart onto my timeline.
  • when looked at over a long period, the development of wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. And if it’s cyclical, we can predict what happens next.
  • Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t.
  • In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome.
  • And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.
  • Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.
  • Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      Cliodynamics - Another thing to learn a bit more about.
  • First, we need to think about jobs.
  • One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration
  • it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality.
  • Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.
  • This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust generalisations in history.
  • The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.
  • causing the population of London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000.
  • fourfold increase in food prices and a halving of real wages.
  • when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348, carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse.
  • The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but in practice it often is
  • Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate.
  • Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important new element was globalisation
  • an oversupply of labour tends to depress wages for the poorer section of the population. And just as in Roman Egypt, the poor in the US today eat more energy-dense foods — bread, pasta, and potatoes — while the wealthy eat more fruit and drink wine.
  • Falling wages isn’t the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up.
  • And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden Age for the aristocrats.
  • the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300.
  • Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000.
  • In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.
  • And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the population to 19 per million.
  • In our current cycle, the proportion of decamillionaires (those whose net worth exceeds 10 million in 1995 dollars) grew tenfold between 1992 and 2007 — from 0.04 to 0.4 per cent of the US population.
  • On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Don’t forget that most people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the social pyramid to become top-heavy.
  • As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.
  • The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.
  • So far I have been talking about the elites as if they are all the same. But they aren’t: the differences within the wealthiest one per cent are almost as stark as the difference between the top one per cent and the remaining 99.
  • very intense status rivalry
  • Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic shift towards luxury.
  • Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand (who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age.
  • Twilight of the Elites (2012): ‘defenders of the status quo invoke a kind of neo-Calvinist logic by saying that those at the top, by virtue of their placement there, must be the most deserving’. By the same reasoning, those at the bottom are not deserving. As such social norms spread, it becomes increasingly easy for CEOs to justify giving themselves huge bonuses while cutting the wages of workers.
  • Labour markets are especially sensitive to cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences.
  • the US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor.
  • Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).
  • In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980.
  • The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent.
  • In one era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.
  • How, though, can we account for the much more broadly inclusive policies of the Great Compression era? And what caused the reversal that ended the Gilded Age and ushered in the Great Compression? Or the second switch, which took place around 1980?
  • Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability.
  • We see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history — towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century.
  • Put simply, it is fear of revolution that restores equality. And my analysis of US history in a forthcoming book suggests that this is precisely what happened in the US around 1920.
  • The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920—21, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
  • Although it started as a workers’ dispute, the Mine War eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies.
  • Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.
  • The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it.
  • The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution).
  • The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.
  • while making such ‘categorical inequalities’ worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall economic inequality.
  • The co-operating group was mainly native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated against.
  • When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential elections, he couldn’t win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for their triumph.
  • But by the late 1970s, a new generation of political and business leaders had come to power. To them the revolutionary situation of 1919-21 was just history. In this they were similar to the French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution, who did not see that their actions could bring down the Ancien Régime — the last great social breakdown, the Fronde, being so far in the past.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      This heavily mirrors many aspects of Strauss & Howe's observations. Namely that generational cohorts roughly conform to archetypes precisely *because* memory of prior situations moves from accessible-memory (in those who have it) to history/myth once those who remember it have died.
  • It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era.
  • when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. It’s true that the Soviet economy could not compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity.
  • Yet the fall of the Soviet Union was interpreted as a vindication of free markets, period. The triumphalist, heady atmosphere of the 1990s was highly conducive to the spread of Ayn Randism and other individualist ideologies. The unwritten social contract that had emerged during the New Deal and braved the challenges of the Second World War had faded from memory.
  • all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous.
  • Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change.
  • Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.
  • Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      2020-2025 is a date-range that continues to pop up in my forecasting readings - and from quite a variety of sources.
  • In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.
  • anonymous on 21 Nov 13
     
    "After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we don't. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: 'the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood'. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism."
anonymous

Drew Westen's Nonsense - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...drew-westens-nonsense

politics u.s. geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Westen locates Obama's inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda.
  • Yes, even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan infuriated their supporters by routinely watering down their agenda or supporting legislation utterly betraying them, and making rhetorical concessions to the opposition.
  • First, Roosevelt did not take office "in similar circumstances." He took office three years into the Great Depression, after the economy had bottom out, and immediately presided over rapid economic growth (unemployment plunged from a high of 24.9% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937.)
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • As you can see, Roosevelt generally enjoyed broad public support despite having no success at persuading Americans to share his Keynesian view.
  • Roosevelt's fortunes are a testament to the degree to which political conditions are shaped by the state of the economy.
  • Obama took office at the cusp of a massive worldwide financial crisis that was bound to inflict severe damage on himself and his party. That he faced such difficult circumstances does not absolve him of blame for any failures. It sets the bar lower, but the bar still exists. How should we judge Obama against it?
  • I would argue that both the legislative record of 2009-2010 and Obama's personal popularity level exceed the expectation level -- facing worse economic conditions than the last two Democratic presidents at a similar juncture, Obama is far more popular than Jimmy Carter and nearly as popular as Bill Clinton, and vastly more accomplished than both put together.
  • He blames Obama for the insufficiently large stimulus without even mentioning the role of Senate moderate Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass it, in weakening the stimulus.
  • A foreign reader unfamiliar with our political system would come away from Westen's op-ed believing Obama writes laws by fiat.
  • In fact, the budget agreement does not include any entitlement cuts. It consists of cuts to domestic discretionary (i.e., non-entitlement spending.)
  • Likewise, he implies that Obama supported the undermining of the coverage expansion in his health care reform by cutting Medicaid
  • This is also totally false. The budget agreement contains no cuts to Medicaid or to state budgets. The automatic cuts that would go in effect should Congress fail to agree on a second round of deficit reduction exempt Medicaid.
  • Westen is apparently unaware, to take one example, that Obama repeatedly and passionately argued for universal coverage.
  • If even a professional follower of political rhetoric like Westen never realized basic, repeated themes of Obama's speeches and remarks, how could presidential rhetoric -- sorry, "storytelling" -- be anywhere near as important as he claims? The clear reality is that Americans pay hardly any attention to what presidents say, and what little they take in, they forget almost immediately. Even Drew Westen.
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 11
     
    "Westen's op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science."
anonymous

David Stockman's Dystopia - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...david_stockman_s_dystopia

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 13 - Cached
  • What's more, his perps would have to be held in separate cells, because they're of remarkably different stripes. Milton Friedman is implicated (his sin: advocating managing the money supply), but so is Paul Krugman (and of course his spiritual mentor John Maynard Keynes).  Franklin Roosevelt is on the list of "policy villains," but so is Richard Nixon, who dealt the final blow to the gold standard. Former Reagan economic advisor Art Laffer (Mr. Supply Side) is there, a few names away from Larry Summers (these days, Mr. Demand Side), who served, most recently, as Barack Obama's top economic advisor.
  • So what's the connection? I'll give you a hint: They all advocated economic interventions. They thought they could help boost growth, lower unemployment, raise revenues, stimulate investment, smooth out volatility, and so on. And, as Stockman sees it, the problem is not simply that they all failed miserably. It's that their failure has doomed America.
  • It's easy to poke fun at a rant like this, and most of it is just plain wrong (more on that in a moment). But what's more interesting is to figure out where Stockman is on target.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • There are, unquestionably, aspects of American capitalism that have been corrupted -- in no small part through money in politics, something Stockman vividly rails against. He's also right that the U.S. economy is seriously underperforming and bad policy is implicated. One of his hobbyhorses, crony capitalism -- a frequent target of the very progressive economist Dean Baker -- is surely holding back growth, skewing the distribution of income and wealth, and steering investment not toward its most productive uses, but to those most favored by the tax code.
  • Unfortunately, those points are not central to his argument.
  • What Stockman is most worked up about is that for almost a century, economic policymakers have ... um ... made policy, and that's led to cheap money, high indebtedness, and econo-moral turpitude.
  • Stockman insists that the market should work out its failures without all these meddlers trying to fix them (there must be "a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy"); no government investments in industry; central banks shouldn't mess with the money supply, and so on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Apr 13
       
      Sigh... standard LP refrain.
  • The reader gets tons of invective against interventionists from FDR to Obama, but never a compelling explanation as to why America would have been better off if we did nothing to lessen the economic pain caused by the Great Depression or the Great Recession by applying Keynesian stimulus. Nor is there any analysis of why mainstream economics is wrong to believe, based on decades of empirical evidence from economies across the globe, that such stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, actually works.
  • Similarly, not only is there absolutely no benefit assigned to any of the Federal Reserve's actions over the years to push back on inflation and joblessness (and no question, they've made mistakes), but Stockman, with apparent ignorance of the historical record, atavistically pines for the gold standard.
  • If you want to get rid of central banks, you'd better come up with some other stabilizing mechanism a whole lot better than gold buggery. And I'm quite certain that would lead you right back to independent central banks.
  • Moreover, sovereign debt is neither bad nor good -- its assessment must be situational. Even a cursory analysis should stress that debt that's paying for inefficient health care is a serious problem. Debt that's financing productivity-enhancing public goods or temporarily offsetting a large demand contraction is a very different story.
  • Stockman never explains how a market failure such as underinvestment in such sectors would be overcome by simply not having the government help directly by subsidizing research and development or backstopping credit to offset the high risk premiums investors would otherwise demand.
  • Instead, we get a "revisionist history of our era," as he puts it, where Keynes and FDR are villains, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge heroes, gold is king, central bankers are legal counterfeiters, and debt is always evil.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 13
     
    "Why Reagan's former budget chief is like a crazy person howling in the wind. Let's ignore him."
anonymous

Penalties for politicians - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...2363901

shared by anonymous on 28 May 13 - Cached
  • This reminds me of something writer Robert Heinlein once said: "Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not ensure 'good' government, it simply ensures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the 'backseat driver' syndrome."
  • Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well ... they're willing to accept the responsibility, but they're not willing to take the blame. What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.
  • The problem is that they don't have, in President Obama's words, "skin in the game." When it comes to actual wrongdoing, they're shielded by doctrines of "absolute immunity" (for the president) and "qualified immunity" (for lesser officials). This means that the president can't be sued for anything he does as president, while lower-ranking officials can't be sued so long as they can show that they were acting in a "good faith" belief that they were following the law.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Then, of course, there's the unfortunate fact that the worse the economy does, the more important the government becomes. As Tim Noah pointed out back when the financial crisis was new, "On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details."
  • I'd favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I'd get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones). I'd also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven't passed a budget. If they can't take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I'd ban presidential travel when there's not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.
  • I'm willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there's a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.
  • But the real lesson is this: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down. The best solution of all is to take a lot of that power back. When the power is in your hands, it's in the hands of someone who feels it when you fall down. When it's in their hands, it's your pain, their gain. That's no way to run a country.
  • anonymous on 28 May 13
     
    "We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down."
anonymous

United Kingdom Moves Away from the European Project - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...om-moves-away-european-project

shared by anonymous on 22 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Cameron has pledged to hold a referendum after 2015 on the United Kingdom's role in Europe. He has also said he would reclaim powers London surrendered to the European Union. While they no doubt reflect similar anxieties across the Continent, such statements are anathema to the European project, and by making them, Cameron could be setting a precedent that could further undermine the European Union.
  • According to various opinion polls, roughly 8-14 percent of the country supports the United Kingdom Independence Party, even though it received only 3.1 percent of the popular vote in the 2010 elections. These levels of support make the party a serious contender with the Liberal Democrats as the United Kingdom's third-largest party (after the Labour Party and the Conservative Party). Some polls show that the United Kingdom Independence Party already is the third-most popular party, while others suggest it has poached members from the Conservative Party, a worrying trend ahead of elections for the European Parliament in 2014 and general elections in 2015.
  • Despite his criticisms of the bloc, Cameron has said he does not want to leave the European Union outright; rather, he wants to repatriate from Brussels as many powers as possible.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • London also believes that the United Kingdom has surrendered too much of its national sovereignty to supranational EU institutions.
  • Yet the United Kingdom is a strong defender of the single market. Roughly half of its exports end up in the European Union, and half of its imports come from the European Union.
  • Some critics suggest that the United Kingdom could leave the European Union but remain a part of the European Economic Area, the trade agreement that includes non-EU members, such as Iceland and Norway. However, the country would still be required to make financial contributions to continental Europe and adapt its legal order to EU standards, but it would not have a vote in EU decisions. According to Cameron, the United Kingdom must be part of the common market and have a say in policymaking.
  • The issue points to the United Kingdom's grand strategy. Despite an alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom is essentially a European power, and it cannot afford to be excluded from Continental affairs.
  • However, this is the first time that London has openly demanded the return to a previous stage in the process of European integration. At no other time has a country tried to dissociate itself from the bloc in this way. The decision not only challenges the Franco-German view of the European Union but also makes a compromise extremely difficult and risky between France and Germany and the United Kingdom.
  • Cameron's rhetoric suggests that he is positioning the United Kingdom to be the leader of a counternarrative that opposes Germany's view of the crisis.
  • In recent years, the country's veto power in the European Union has been reduced substantially. With each reform of the European treaties, unanimous decisions were replaced by the use of qualified majority
  • London could try to become the leader of the non-eurozone countries, but these countries often have competing agendas, as evidenced by recent negotiations over the EU budget. In those negotiations, the United Kingdom was pushing for a smaller EU budget to ease its financial burden, but countries like Poland and Romania were interested in maintaining high agricultural subsidies and strong development aid.
  • The dilemma is best understood in the context of the United Kingdom's grand strategy. Unnecessary political isolation on the Continent is a real threat to London. The more the European Union focuses on the eurozone, the less influence the United Kingdom has on continental Europe
  • As long as London is the main military ally and a major economic partner of the world's only superpower, continental Europe cannot afford to ignore the United Kingdom.
  • anonymous on 22 Jan 13
     
    "British Prime Minister David Cameron will deliver a speech in London on Jan. 23, during which he will discuss the future of the United Kingdom's relationship with the European Union. Excerpts leaked to the media suggest that harsh EU criticism will figure prominently in the speech, a suggestion in keeping with Cameron's recent statements about the bloc. But more important, the excerpts signal an unprecedented policy departure: renegotiating the United Kingdom's role in the European Union. London has negotiated exemptions from some EU policies in the past, even gaining some concessions from Brussels in the process; this time, it is trying to become less integrated with the bloc altogether."
anonymous

Thirty More Years of Hell - 1 views

exiledonline.com/thirty-more-years-of-hell

generations

shared by anonymous on 12 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • A Pew poll from a few weeks back asked Americans how they felt about capitalism versus socialism. The results said all you need to know about how much longer we’re going to have to wade through this misery. You guessed it: until the Boomers finally croak.
  • For maybe the first time in modern history, we now have a generation that actually has warmer feelings about socialism than it does capitalism: 49% to 46%.
  • And a few days later, amid a multi-billion dollar war on public sector workers, another poll was released demonstrating that a whopping 69% of Millennials think teachers are underpaid (compared to 56% for Americans of all ages).
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I first heard the “s”-word from by my sixth grade history teacher—this was in the early days of Yeltsin. She said socialism is when you have to wait in line for hours just for a Happy Meal.
  • Read the fine print: it’s 5% of wages, income from “investments” is excluded. Tax the poor wage-slave, spare the wealthy rentier. Americans still can’t see the play even with Buffett rubbing his secretary’s tax return in our faces.
  • And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.
  • Mike Konczal sees this as just another sign of a “submerged state”—the unholy fertilizer that keeps the American libertarian discourse in full bloom. None of the “welfare,” but all of the “state.”
  • “After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”
  • While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.”
  • Unlike the nations of Western Europe, American workers failed to get a good deal of the social democratic compact written into law, which means it was all the easier to dismantle over here.
  • There are the wars, of course—now pretty much the only way for a good many of us to get a debt-free education.
  • Then there’s the ever-popular Drug War, always trolling for some fresh blood. The Millennials are, after all, the least white generation in U.S. history, making us perfect fodder for the country’s ongoing race war.
  • As The Wire’s David Simon has pointed out, it was Clinton—the first Boomer president—that passed some of the most draconian “anti-crime” laws. Even business in the for-profit juvenile prisons sector is a-boomin’. Same goes for our expanding network of privatized immigration detention centers—a direct beneficiary of the Tea Party campaign for a brutal crackdown on “illegals.”
  • Much of the Patriot Act itself was comprised of legislation creeping around the halls of powers well before 9/11, much of it written with the burgeoning “anti-globalization” movement
  • The fact is that being arrested is pretty much a rite of passage today—or the end-of-the-line for your hopes and dreams if you happen to be a darker shade of pale.
  • Which is why I love the Tea Party so much. They don’t dick around about any of this. It’s a full-scale generational war they’re after.
  • The Ryan Budget—and the GOP campaign around it—divides the American populace into “those who are 55 or older now, and those who are younger.” Meaning Boomers will receive Medicare and Social Security checks unchanged, whereas Millennials get the axe—despite the fact that many of us have been paying into these programs for the past 15 years. Let the record show that it was they who fired the first shot.
  • All of the hippies who skulked off into the world of children’s programming to ride out the counterrevolution have cursed us with both our potential salvation (respect for the commons) and our ultimate weakness (pacifist nonsense).
  • But mostly our decency stems from the fact that we’ve all been muzzled and defanged by student debt, slave wages and mass unemployment. Unlike our parents, we’ll never even get the chance to gobble up our own children and leave them with the tab.
  • Which is why, psychologically, this Great Depression of ours can never hurt us like it hurts them. I see it all the time: the unemployed Boomer thinks himself a loser. He’s spent his life watching his peers accumulate wealth and power. Now he feels like the rug has been pulled from under him. Something has gone terribly wrong. When he files for food-stamps, he feels exactly what the Ruling Class wants him to feel: shame and personal failing.
  • Whereas a Millennial shrugs and swipes the SNAP card at the farmer’s market for a quart of fresh cider and a pomegranate muffin. Why should she feel guilty?
  • We Millennials have all the same ludicrous delusions of grandeur as our parents, but now, we’re ready to shuck capitalist gospel out the window. The Boomers call us spoiled, and ask us to do more with less, telling us to tamper our dreams. But the best thing we Americans have going for us is our entitlement, sans the free-market faith.
  • Way back in 1892, Friedrich Engels knew that success was the real curse of the USA. And that a powerful, anti-capitalist left could never take off in this country until the game stopped paying out: “Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.” Sound familiar? That’s what Occupy is for most of us—a guttural roar that capitalism will not do.
  • The Boomers are right that it all smacks of entitlement. We are entitled. The world, and this country in particular, is awash in capital. With the billions floating in and out of this city every day, it’s amazing that you can walk around Manhattan and not end up with at least a grand worth of cash sifting around in your shoes like beach sand. The big lie is that the coffers are empty and budgets must be balanced. What a fucking joke. American workers have spent hundreds of years building this country and amassing this wealth, and it’s about time we claimed the vast majority of it.
  • Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.
  • Boomers know what they’ve wrought. Climate change? Don’t believe the polls. They know it’s happening. Yeah, if you confront one of them, he might put up a denialist front for a couple of minutes. But keep pelting him and it all crumbles, giving way to “well, it’s too late.” Translated: “I’ll be on, or near, my deathbed when the shit really hits the fan. You, youngster, will be hauling your family across the country George Romero style, scavenging for orphans to sell off as catamites to the warlord chieftains.”
  • Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has spent the past few years chronicling this ghastly mutation step-by-step—unraveling the seemingly incongruous strands and the hideous parentage of Boomer ideology. Their embrace of American libertarianism—with all of its absurdities, vulgarities and utopianism—was the final cry for help.
  • anonymous on 12 Feb 12
     
    "Generational analysis is bullshit. Or so I'm told. Fit for netroots liberals and horoscope clippers, maybe. And to be fair, it's mostly thinktank types who've been profiting off that whole Millennials Rising genre. One of the authors of that book is a former writing partner of Pete G. Peterson's, the octogenarian billionaire who has spent the last couple of decades trying to kick over the Social Security ladder before us young'ns can scamper up and collect. Most of it reads like a debriefing after a recon mission-you can feel them sizing us up, drawing up blueprints for the generational counterrevolution that we're living through right now."
anonymous

Wonkbook: Five reasons Republicans lost - and one reason they won - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-lost-and-one-reason-they-won

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • 1) Republicans got nothing.
  • Typically, the law that passes at the end of these standoffs could never have passed at the beginning.
  • Not this time. The bill, which cleanly funds the government, suspends the debt ceiling, and creates a bicameral budget committee, passed with mostly Democratic votes.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 2) The GOP's Obamacare boomerang.
  • The shutdown was meant to stop Obamacare. Instead, it provided crucial aid to the struggling law. If not for the drama in Washington, HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch would've been the top news story in the country. Instead, it was knocked off the front pages. Many assumed, reasonably but wrongly, that the flaws were attributable to the GOP's shutdown. And Obamacare actually gained in the polls. Rarely has a strategy failed so completely.
  • 3) The Republican Party is horribly unpopular.
  • Multiple polls found that the Republican Party is less popular than it's been since pollsters began asking the question. Gallup found their favorability at 28 percent. The NBC/Wall Street Journal disagreed: The GOP's favorability was actually 24 percent, they reported.
  • 4) The Republican Party devalued hostage taking.
  • Republicans took the wrong lesson from 2011. They thought they won major policy concessions because they were willing to take the debt ceiling hostage. In fact, they won major policy concessions because they'd won the 2010 election. The hostage taking was perhaps a necessary strategy to effectuate their mandate, but it wasn't sufficient without the electoral win.
  • By unwisely deploying the same strategy this year, after they lost an election, they proved its weakness -- and they let Democrats establish a principle that they won't negotiate policy under these terms. Going forward, Republicans will be more afraid of this kind of brinksmanship and Democrats will be far less afraid of it.
  • 5) They split their party.
  • The shutdown began with a schism. Republican leaders thought Sen. Ted Cruz's defund-and-shutdown strategy was lunacy. They tried everything they could think of to get out of it. They failed.
  • But there's one silver lining for Republicans:
  • They held their spending number. Even though Democrats won the 2012 election, Republicans have managed to keep sequestration's spending levels.
  • By making this about Obamacare and the legitimacy of hostage taking as a routine political strategy, the GOP lost terribly. But in terms of what fights over bills to fund the government are supposed to be about -- spending -- Republicans didn't give an inch. Sequestration is still there, and it still gives Republicans real leverage in the coming budget negotiations with Democrats.
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 13
     
    "Our not-that-long national nightmare is finally over. Last night, the House and Senate passed, and President Obama signed, a bill ending the shutdown. And for Republicans, this has been an utter disaster -- although there's one bright spot."
anonymous

GMO Labeling is Bad Science and Good Politics - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...-bad-science-and-good-politics

shared by anonymous on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • when we’ve reached the point of marketing salt crystals as non-GMO, it may be time to take a deep breath, relax, and re-evaluate fears of genetic engineering.
  • Within the environmental movement, there are signs that genetically modified foods are beginning to receive a more balanced appraisal.
  • Mark Lynas’ public reversal at the Oxford Farming Conference this past winter.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The case challenges knee-jerk opposition to GMOs. Is it better to risk letting orange cultivation become more costly and pesticide-intensive, or to embrace genetically tweaked orange trees?
  • At The New York Times, reporter Amy Harmon wrote a much-lauded feature this summer on the struggle to save Florida’s orange crop
  • The environmental magazine Grist has lately featured an excellent series by Nathanael Johnson deeply exploring the costs and benefits of GMOs.
  • The longer answer is that an individual GMO could conceivably cause unforeseen harms. Reasonable people may disagree about whether existing pre-market testing should be more stringent, or how the risks of relatively precise genetic engineering compare to those of creating new crops through conventional breeding or mutagenesis, the process of inducing random mutations with chemicals or radiation and hoping they turn out to be beneficial.
  • But it’s extremely implausible that GMOs in general, all expressing different genes, are uniformly dangerous for consumers. The scientific consensus has landed squarely on the conclusion that consumption of approved GMOs is safe.
  • Unfortunately, this balanced approach to GMOs has not much spread to the culinary community, in which opposition remains a fashionable stance.
  • Titled “Transparency and GMOs: The More You Know, The Better,” the panel’s guests were Delana Jones from the Washington-based pro-labeling group Yes on 522, Robyn O’Brien from Allergy Kids Foundation; Errol Schweizer from Whole Foods, and Arran Stephens from Nature’s Path. EarthFix journalist David Steves moderated. As one might guess from the line-up, there was no one to offer a pro-GMO voice, allowing the panelists to veer into one-sided alarmism without fear of rebuttal.
  • I would have lost an over/under bet on how long it took the panelists to float the idea that genetically modified crops may be to blame for increased diagnosis of autism. Robyn O’Brien presented this as a possibility in her opening remarks, along with suggestions that GMOs may be to blame for cancer, insulin dependence, and allergies.
  • Her claims were based almost entirely on rough correlation with rising consumption of GMOs since their debut in the 1990s. By such a flimsy standard of evidence, one might cheekily suggest that the real culprit is organic food, sales of which have also boomed over the same period—but good luck persuading Whole Foods to sponsor a panel about that.
  • None of this criticism made it into initial press about the paper due to a very unusual embargo policy imposed on journalists by the scientific team. Reporters were required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them from seeking comment from other scientists, ensuring that initial coverage would be uncritical. In response to later questions, Seralini’s team refused to make their raw data available for analysis. Editors at the journal Nature condemned the tactics as a “public-relations offensive” that denied journalists and scientists alike the opportunity to evaluate the research.
  • The contradiction of defending this paper at an event dedicated to the virtues of transparency was seemingly lost on the panel.
  • Jones works for Yes on 522 campaign, supporting a ballot initiative that would require labeling of many foods containing GMOs in Washington state. She smartly stresses that labeling is not about the science, but about consumers’ right to know what they are eating. In a best case scenario, labels would perform a purely informative function.
  • I would be more sympathetic to the cause of GMO labeling if its advocates were not so intent on stigmatizing genetic engineering.
  • Instead, whether for reasons of political expediency, profit, or simply poor judgment, they too often associate with any idea that could bolster their cause, regardless of its scientific merits. Thus we end up with labeling advocates on stage in front of a Whole Foods banner, sowing fear among foodies that exposure to genetically modified crops may cause autism in their children.
  • as Mark Lynas put it in a recent post, mandatory labeling “may be bad science, but it is good politics.” The cause is not yet a fait accompli, but it’s very close. Labeling laws in Maine and Connecticut will go into effect if more states follow suit, as seems likely. Once a few states pass these laws, larger companies may come to prefer a uniform national standard over of patchwork ordinances, increasing pressure for a federal rule.
  • anonymous on 31 Oct 13
     
    "A few weeks ago I was at New Seasons Market, a competitor to Whole Foods here in Portland, Oregon, buying salt for my kitchen. Though my city is home to a self-described "selmelier"-that's a sommelier for salt-my tastes and budget for everyday cooking run a little more pedestrian. So I picked a jar from the bottom shelf labeled "No Additives, Unrefined, Unbleached, Kosher Certified." Bonus: It was certified non-GMO."
anonymous

Domestic Hurdles to European Integration - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...c_hurdles_european_integration

geopolitics europe

shared by anonymous on 08 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Three developments from Europe brought a degree of optimism to the economically beleaguered Continent on Wednesday
  • First, Germany showed leadership in Europe’s ongoing efforts to reduce government budget deficits when Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet approved an 81.6 billion euro ($101 billion), four-year austerity package. Second, the EU Commission proposed synchronizing its rules on retirement age with life expectancy across the 27-member bloc: A legal mechanism would automatically increase retirement age as life expectancy increases. Third, the EU Commission said that Greece was “broadly on track” with its Herculean task of cutting its enormous budget deficit.
  • Europe’s recent history does not point to an optimistic answer. The euro — itself a product of European integration — arose from the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War’s end. Unified Germany needed to be restrained and committed to the EU, so its fellow member states decided to hand it the keys to European monetary policy while giving up their ability to undercut Germany’s exports with currency depreciation.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But nobody — starting with Germany and France — stuck to the rules laid out by the Stability and Growth Pact
  • even at the height of the economic crisis, Europeans are thinking of a future when they will want to go back to less rigid interpretations of fiscal rules.
  • recent elections across the Continent have illustrated how politics — specifically getting elected — are still the most important motivating facto
  • If even one member state faces a domestic political calculus arrayed against integration, the entire effort could be thrown off course.
  • anonymous on 08 Jul 10
     
    "Three developments from Europe brought a degree of optimism to the economically beleaguered Continent on Wednesday." By StratFor on July 8, 2010.
anonymous

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01stockman.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
  • Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.
  • In fact, since chronic current-account deficits result from a nation spending more than it earns, stringent domestic belt-tightening is the only cure. When the dollar was tied to fixed exchange rates, politicians were willing to administer the needed castor oil, because the alternative was to make up for the trade shortfall by paying out reserves, and this would cause immediate economic pain — from high interest rates, for example. But now there is no discipline, only global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve.
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  • The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world.
  • The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt.
  • The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector.
  • The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore.
  • It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 10
     
    "David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is working on a book about the financial crisis." Basically, he's saying 'sorry'. By David Stockman at The New York Times on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

Thinking Too Long-term? - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...thinking-too-long-term

longnow layscience

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This week President Obama laid out his plan for the future of NASA.  It includes a large budget increase, a push to hand off orbital space flight to private companies, the design of new propulsion systems, and included the long-term goals of landing on an asteroid, going to Mars, and even pushing beyond that.  The national press and political reaction has been interesting to watch from a perspective of long-term thinking.  While there has always been a general agreement that we want to achieve these goals, the administration is taking heat from the press and both sides of the isle for looking “too far out.”
  • I think this is one of the first cases I have seen a political figure chastised explicitly for thinking too long-term.
  • n asteroid or comet impact on earth is the only serious threat to human (and nearly all lifes) existence, yet we spend basically no part of NASA’s budget trying figure out how we might avert such a disaster
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even if some of the plans for making our own fuel, water and oxygen play out, the bare bones infrastructure and ability to prep a spacecraft for flight on another planet is astoundingly difficult. 
  • This is, by definition a long-term plan, and continuing to spend money on the same technology that barely gets us to orbit will not get us there.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    Obama's NASA plan is enduring criticism that it's *too* long-term. Of course, among long-term thinking circles, it's definitely short-term. It's a testimony to our general lack of long-term thinking. From The Long Now Blog (Alexander Rose) on April 18, 2010.
anonymous

Taxpayers Get Bilked For Sarah Palin's Diva Bus Tour Perks - 0 views

www.politicususa.com/...sarah-palin-taxpayers

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 11
     
    "Rep. Blumenauer wondered if the same perks that the Palins got were available to an average American family. More importantly, he wondered how much Sarah Palin's traveling road show cost federal taxpayers. He requested that the National Park Service provide an explanation of their policies towards the use of taxpayer funds for publicity events. He also wants an accounting of how much was spent giving Sarah Palin the celebrity treatment. As a private citizen Sarah Palin is allowed to visit any public place that she wants, but the taxpayers should not be responsible for her escort and security any more than they would be for any other citizen. Why are taxpayers footing the bill for Palin to get the VIP treatment? After all, she was supposed to be on a "family vacation." In these tough economic times America can't afford to make the transplanted Cactus Queen feel like a VIP. Sarah Palin is a millionaire many times over. She can afford her own escorts and security. I know that she believes that because she is a celebrity she doesn't have to stand in line like the rest of us, but taxpayers should not be picking up the tab for her decision to use historic locations as a backdrop for her publicity tour. What kind of fiscal conservative makes the federal government spend more tax payer money to pamper her? Sarah Palin's record of huge spending in Alaska blows the notion that she is a fiscal conservative to smithereens, so the idea that Sarah Palin even knows what a budget is, much less how to adhere to one is laughable. If Palin wants to reduce the size of government, she could start by not requiring our tax dollars pay for her diva act. Sarah Palin mooched off of the people of Alaska, and now she is taken her act national. Sarah Palin's brand of fiscal conservatism makes George W. Bush look like Ron Paul. Sarah Palin is a big spending publicity generating machine, and every American taxpayer is getting stuck with the bill."
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