Monthly Archives: November 2008

Plain Facts

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If you’re an honest student of American history, there is nothing in Neal Gabler’s “The GOP McCarthy Gene” that you didn’t already know. Gabler explains why Joe McCarthy — not Barry Goldwater, and certainly not Saint Ronald — was the real father of modern movement conservatism.

In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon. …

… What he lacked in ideology — and he was no ideologue at all — he made up for in aggression. Establishment Republicans, even conservatives, were disdainful of his tactics, but when those same conservatives saw the support he elicited from the grass-roots and the press attention he got, many of them were impressed. Taft, no slouch himself when it came to Red-baiting, decided to encourage McCarthy, secretly, sealing a Faustian bargain that would change conservatism and the Republican Party. Henceforth, conservatism would be as much about electoral slash-and-burn as it would be about a policy agenda.

So much of the uglier side of the GOP ever since — Nixon, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove — is just warmed-over and updated McCarthyism. As Gabler says, the line runs “from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin.” One of the reasons historian Richard Hofstadter was able to see where the U.S. was heading in the 1950s and early 1960s is that McCarthy had already set the course.

It isn’t just the ranting about Communism. The myth of liberal elitism began with McCarthy. Certainly anti-intellectualism had existed in America before McCarthy, just as there had been Red Scares before McCarthy. But he’s the one who figured out how to turn anti-intellectualism into a political force in modern politics.

Steve M adds:

Gabler is right: the Republican Party is held together not by any real ideological coherence (it is a collection of incompatible constituencies with radically different interests) but by a shared devotion to aggression. Or, as innumerable bloggers have put it, to Pissing Off the Liberals.

In (rightly) putting McCarthy ahead of Goldwater, though, Gabler neglects the malignant role Goldwaterite ideology did play in this story: its inherent unsuitability to governing led directly to the nihilism of modern conservatism.

Wingnuts are in denial, of course. One says,

Gabler forgets how William F. Buckley kicked out the McCarthy’s heirs, The John Birch Society, from the conservative movement. Doing so doesn’t fit the theme of a paranoid political party.

This may be why Buckley co-authored a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies called by one reviewer “a bald, dedicated apologia for ‘McCarthyism‘” … oh, wait …

Reacting Versus Responding

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A wise person pointed out to me once that there’s a difference between reacting and responding. As it says here, reacting is a reflex, like a knee-jerk. Reacting is nearly always triggered by emotions — attraction or aversion — and is about making oneself feel better. Responding, on the other hand, is a thought-out and dispassionate action that is primarily about solving a problem.

By now it’s clear that the Bushies are a tribe of reactors, not responders. Their well-established pattern is not to acknowledge a problem until it bites their own ass somehow, and then they react, sometimes over-react, with “solutions” that (pick as many as apply) miss the mark, make the problem worse, and waste tons of money without really helping anybody but which somehow ends up in the pockets of corporations that happen to be big GOP donors.

We saw this happen with 9/11. Before 9/11, intelligence experts did everything but bash Condi Rice in the head with a 2 x 4 trying to get the Bush Administration to pay attention to a screaming terrorist threat. After, the Bushies reacted. The whole nation wanted to bash the President in the head with a 2 x 4 during Katrina week; the belated reactions to that disaster were wasteful and ineffectual, not to mention political.

I’m thinking also of the Christmas tsunami that devastated parts of Asia. Bush very nearly ignored it until Bill Clinton made headlines by talking about it. Then, pissed, Bush crawled out of Crawford and made a respectable pledge of money. But, apparently to snub the United Nations, the Bushies bypassed the established relief agencies that already were helping the survivors and instead created a temporary, on-the-fly coalition to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars appropriated for tsunami response. I’ve never seen any follow-up on that, and I’m willing to bet only a small part of those dollars made it to Asia.

The pattern continues. The Bush Administration insisted the financial markets’ problems were under control, until it was obvious even to them that problems were not under control. And then their hair caught on fire. This is from an editorial in today’s New York Times:

This page has consistently held that the government must intervene in markets when failure to do so would cause even greater economic harm. The impending collapse of Citi or an unrelenting credit freeze demand intervention. But good crisis management also requires that the calamity of the moment not be allowed to overwhelm good governing. Unfortunately, that is not the case now.

Even, as the rescue tab rises, taxpayers are not being adequately informed or protected. There is as yet no effort to deal effectively with the underlying causes of the problem, especially mass mortgage defaults that feed bank losses. And officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications of the actions they take.

It was obvious during the campaign that John McCain is pure reaction; the sort of guy who rushes about putting out fires without ever stopping to consider how the fires are getting started. My hope is that the cool and intellectual Barack Obama is more of a responder than a reactor.

However, my understanding is that the real solutions to the crisis will require a big outlay of money also. My fear is that once we’ve gone through a cycle of reaction, there will be no support for response.

Take George Will. Please. He made an ass of himself on ABC’s “This Week” awhile back,

Having learned nothing, Will is still spreading revisionist history, as are other righties. Paul Krugman continues to respond with actual facts —

The main line of empirical argument seems to be that FDR didn’t succeed in ending the Great Depression. Since that’s also what my side of the debate says — fiscal expansion was too cautious, and disastrously abandoned in 1937 — I don’t see what this is supposed to prove.

In other words, Krugman says, yes, the New Deal didn’t revive the economy effectively, but that was because FDR was too conservative and cautious in his approach. But when the real government spending program of World War II got underway, the economy bounced back just fine.

See also The Keynesian Moment.





Death by Shopping

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I have some more thoughts on yesterday’s death at a Wal-Mart on the other site. Also I found an interesting site about crowd disasters and crowd dynamics. There are many, many examples of people being crushed to death in crowds, usually because too many people are trying to squeeze through too small a space. I learned it’s more common for people to be crushed to death against fences or walls than to be trampled. Sometimes when people are trying to go both ways through a small space they make a “human mincer” and crush each other.

And the moral is, dense crowds should always be regarded as potentially dangerous.

BTW — the racist comment I didn’t link to on the other site is here.

Never Use HighBeam Research

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A substantial amount of money was just wiped out of one of my bank accounts through bogus charge on a debit card. The charge was made by HighBeam Research. I reached the company on the phone and was told the money was for an annual subscription fee. I said I was unaware I was a subscriber, I’d received no notice I was going to be charged, and I wanted my money back. They said they’d get back to me.

It’s possible (I have no memory of it) that I tried out their free trial subscription at some point, but I don’t remember signing on for the regular subscription, and I can’t imagine I would have, given what they charge. However, make a note not to ever use them at all, even for free. It’s not an honest company.

And if you can send a donation, I could use it.







Gobble, Gobble

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While the world slides into a financial sinkhole, George W. Bush wants us to know he’s a good president.

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said in the interview. “I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values.”

“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor,” the president added.

He also called No Child Left Behind (Because We’re Setting Them All Back) one of the “significant achievements of my administration.”

Some things snark themselves. I think the line about “the political process” is particularly interesting, however. The “political process” is important. As in “due process of law.” As in “our form of government.” Governing is a process. Preserving the process is important. Chucking the process of government out the window in order to get the result you want is dangerous and foolish.

Matt Yglesias writes,

Part of the effort to pull the wagon of conservatism out of the ditch into which Bush piloted the country is going to be an effort to deny that George W. Bush was a real conservative.

Going to be? They’ve been reciting that line for at least a year.

In reality, Bushism should be understood as the highest form of conservatism. In particular, the High Bushist years of 2001-2006 represent the only time that the post-war conservative movement has had total control over the federal government. If the practical consequences of pre-Bush conservatism were less disastrous, that’s largely because conservative political power was more constrained in those earlier eras.

Meanwhile, it’s worth recalling that at the peak of his political power, when Bush was making his most disastrous decisions, conservatives not only thought he was a good president, but a great one.

Matt is pulling conservative testimonials to the greatness of Bush out of the memory hole. If you have any tidbits to nominate, let Matt know.

Safety Tips

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Big crowds can be dangerous. When people are densely packed, there’s always a danger that someone will accidentally be injured or even killed. As population on our planet is tending to both increase and concentrate in urban areas, we could use some public education aimed at people explaining why pushing and shoving and stampeding generally are not to be tolerated. I think young, large and male people in particular don’t appreciate how much injury they can do to others.

Anyway, as a safety rule, try not to be in large, dense crowds, and if you find yourself in one, work your way to the edge of it as quickly as possible. Whatever it is you are trying to get to can’t be as important as your life.

Also, if you are ever taken hostage, don’t be in India. I understand the SWAT teams there don’t negotiate or attempt to save hostages. They just shoot everybody.

I also suspect martyr complexes are bad for your health. At the very least, they make you seem way pathetic.

Update: I want to say a little more about the trampling death in the Wal-Mart. There’s been a lot of criticism about the crowds who broke through the glass doors and trampled right over the employee. And I am not saying they are blameless, but … having been in some frighteningly dense crowds a few times myself, I suspect that many of those people were being helplessly carried along in the rush and were terrified for their lives themselves. I suspect the people near the glass doors did not deliberately break the glass, but were pushed through the glass by the force of the surging crowd behind them. It’s entirely possible that much of the force was coming from people in the back of the crowd who couldn’t see what damage they were doing.

This may be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in a crowd so thick that you were helpless to move except with the crowd, but I have. The physics of the energy of the crowd can be very dangerous, and individuals within the crowd may be helpless to stop whatever is going on. It’s like being caught in a tide.

Big, thick crowds can be dangerous even when most of the people in the crowds have no intention to do harm. It’s the nature of big, thick crowds. Companies like Wal-Mart who encourage a big crowd to show up and expect them to move through one or two doors are asking for trouble.

This is the same thing that happened in the Who concert stampede in Cincinnati, in 1979. I wasn’t in that crowd but I was living in Cincinnati at the time and was familiar with the stadium. I agree with this Time magazine article that said the cause of the stampede was the ticketing system at the stadium.

Fewer than 20% of the Cincinnati tickets were for reserved seats. The rest were for so-called festival seating, a sort of first-come-best-seated system that many of the country’s major rock venues have long since given up as unworkable. Says Tony Tavares, director of the New Haven Coliseum where The Who will play this week: “When you sell a general admission ticket, you’re challenging your crowd to get to the best seats in the house first. You’re creating a system of pandemonium.” New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which brings its 20,000-capacity crowds in through four separate towers and a series of separate entrances, has never permitted festival seating. The Garden had 200 security people, 100 ushers and 20 supervisors at their Who concerts in September. “I paid $7,800 for security and staffing fees,” says Curbishley. “Where was that security Monday night?” Riverfront Coliseum concerts by Elton John in 1976 and Led Zeppelin in 1977 had resulted in serious crowd incidents.

As I remember, the Riverfront Coliseum kept the crowd waiting until less than an hour or so before the concert, then had only two doors open to take tickets. The crowd pushed forward to get the best seats, and people in the crowd had the breath squeezed out of them. I remember hearing people say they knew they were stepping on people but they were helpless to stop. They were being pushed along by such force they had no choice but to keep moving with the crowd.

Let’s Start a War on Nonsense

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The dreadful events in Mumbai are a reminder that during the time the U.S. has waged a “war on terror,” incidents of terrorism around the world have increased dramatically. Copious hard data back up this assertion.

The Status of George Bush's War on Terrorism

Look at the “fatalities” line on the graph above. I’m assuming the big spike after 2000 is 9/11. See what happens after. Which makes me wonder where peoples’ brains are when they write —

America has been going after Al-Qaeda and the nations that harbor and fund terrorists for 7 years now. To blame the attacks in Mumbai on American policy in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever is just wrong.

Righties can’t see how phenomena interconnect. It’s something like a learning disability. As far as this guy is concerned, because the U.S. “has been going after Al-Qaeda and the nations that harbor and fund terrorists for 7 years now,” then the increase in incidents of terrorism can’t possibly have been caused, directly or indirectly, by U.S. policy. That our “policy,” whatever its intentions, is failing, and in fact is making the problem of global terrorism worse, because it is a stupid policy being carried out by twisted people, is too subtle an idea for some brains to handle.

The rightie linked above was objecting to something Deepak Chopra (who, as a rule, annoys the hell out of me) said —

Ultimately the message is always toward Washington because it’s also the perception that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror. They fund our side, then our petrol dollars going to Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and ultimately these terrorist groups, which are very organized. You know Jonathan, it takes a lot of money to do this. It takes a lot of organization to do this. Where’s the money coming from, you know? The money is coming from the vested interests.

I don’t know that the attacks in Mumbai took all that much money, but his larger point is right. We can declare wars on terror and send troops all over the place to fight jihadists, and the fact remains that our support of people like Musharraf of Pakistan, who appeared to be using our tax dollars to play both sides of the fence, fuels “the perception that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror.” The ham-handed way the occupation of Iraq was carried out, and the obscene amounts of money shoveled to Dick Cheney’s private contractors for which there is no accounting, also creates “perceptions.”

Later in the same interview Chopra says the terrorist attacks in Mumbai are “not Washington’s fault,” a bit that the rightie blogger linked above missed.

A few basic points —

  1. Not everything is about America. There are all manner of feuds and enmities in foreign places that don’t involve us (except in a “six degrees of separation” kind of way), don’t directly affect us and of which most of us are ignorant. However,
  2. Item #1 is a big reason why sending troops into hot spots to make people behave isn’t always a good idea. Generally it just pisses people off more and sometimes forces our troops to take sides in conflicts they shouldn’t be involved in to begin with, because they weren’t about us until we poked out noses into them. This is pretty much what got 241 marines killed in Lebanon in 1983.
  3. Not everything bad that happens in the Middle East happened because the U.S. did something evil. First, see item #1 — not everything is about us. I doubt anything in the Middle East is entirely about us. U.S. policy is often a factor, but there are always myriad other factors. However, when we act in ignorance of those other factors, as if everything is just about us, we can make things worse.
  4. Sometimes stuff is in part about us, but saying that is not always “blaming America.” Bin Laden got pissed off at America because U.S. troops were stationed on Saudi soil, but that was not a “bad” thing. Bin Laden is a whackjob. Whackjobs get set off by just about anything. I remember reading about a guy in Europe who became a serial killer after watching Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.” To say that our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia was a factor in bringing about 9/11 is not “blaming America.” It’s just a statement of fact.
  5. Whenever we do something in a foreign country, we ought to stop and consider how we’d feel if some foreign power came along and did that same thing in our country. However that might make us feel, we should assume that’s how people in that other foreign country feel about us. Sometimes we have to take action in foreign countries, in our own self-defense, but there will always be messy repercussions.
  6. Because there will always be messy repercussions, messing around in foreign countries needs to be kept to a minimum. Sincere people will disagree on where that “minimum” line might be drawn. But military action requires a sense of reluctance. When people are fired up and eager to go to war, beware. This is a sure indication that emotions are overruling intellect.
  7. As far as righties are concerned, I propose an “automatic tax increase” amendment. Whenever we send troops to foreign soil, taxes (especially on capital gains) must be raised to pay for it. If the thought of a tax increase causes people to think twice about sending troops, we probably don’t need to be sending troops.

Fantasy and Lies

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Reuters is reporting a possible al Qaeda threat to the New York City transit system. DHS seems a bit ho-hum about it, but I can’t think of any political reason the Bush Administration would have for hyping imaginary threats now, unless they just wanted to do it one more time.

Dan Froomkin wrote last week,

When and if the curtain is fully pulled back on President Bush’s “war on terror,” how much of what he said will turn out to be true, and how much of it will turn out to be fantasy and lies?

The more we learn, the more it seems the appeals to fear that Bush used to rally the nation behind him were unfounded.

The latest example came yesterday in a federal courtroom in Washington, where a Bush-appointed judge ordered the release of five Algerian men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for almost seven years.

As we now know — well, as we’ve pretty much known for some time — the Bushies were not terribly discriminating about the men they scooped up and held at Guantanamo as “enemy combatants.” Our country has been holding innocent men in prison as showcase prisoners, so that the Bushies could point to something resembling progress in the war on terror.

Last night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, Jonathan Turley said that Bush was refusing to pardon officials involved in torture because he figures the Dems are too spineless to indict anyone. Probably, yes. I hope I’m wrong.

More Stupid Than Corrupt

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No doubt Thomas Friedman’s own financial losses are partly behind his recent focus on the financial crisis, but however it happened, the man has seen the light. His entire column today is worth reading, but I’m going to zero in on just one point he made — that a lot of the people running the financial industry had no clue what they were doing.

Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it. …

… Also check out Michael Lewis’s superb essay, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” on Portfolio.com. Lewis, who first chronicled Wall Street’s excesses in “Liar’s Poker,” profiles some of the decent people on Wall Street who tried to expose the credit binge — including Meredith Whitney, a little known banking analyst who declared, over a year ago, that “Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust,” wrote Lewis.

“This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt,” he added. “She was saying they were stupid. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale… For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.”

A little further down, another hint:

Lewis continued: Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. “What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism… ‘We always asked the same question,’ says Eisman. ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.”

‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.” If you live long enough, you really do begin to relive the same old stuff, over and over. I remember conversations I had during the Reagan housing boom in the 1980s, in which people gushed that their homes would be worth a kazillion dollars in a few years, and I’d say, no, home prices will fall again eventually. And I’d get shocked reactions, and the gushers would say that can’t possibly happen. And within a few months, their homes were worth less than the mortgages they were carrying on them.

What in the world makes people think their home prices won’t fluctuate down as well as up? They always do. We go through at least one house price surge and drop every decade, sometimes two.

But the other part, about the stupid CEOs, deserves more comment. In the 1980s and 1990s we went through a phase in which big corporate executives were worshiped. My own experience with the godlike CEOs was that they were usually more aggressive and intimidating than they were smart or competent. They remain at the top even when their performance isn’t that great because people want to believe Daddy is in charge of things.

Which brings me to what Hilzoy wrote today.

But the people who either ran Citi into the ground or were asleep at the wheel need to go. That should be the condition of a bailout: if you turn out to need public assistance, you lose your job. No golden parachutes either.

As I’ve said before: we absolutely need to make sure that the people who run these banks do not conclude from our unwillingness to let them take down the entire financial system that it’s OK to run these risks. The best way I can think of to do that is to make sure that they, personally, pay.

I don’t think I’m saying this out of vengeance. At least, I’m trying not to. I just do not want a system in which private individuals get the rewards of excessive risk-taking and taxpayers pay the price when it all goes wrong; and I do not know how else to avoid one.

I said something similar last week. The Bush Administration’s no-strings bailouts are an outrage. Compare/contrast that to money appropriated by Congress to rebuild New Orleans and the Louisiana coast after Katrina, which had so many strings attached much of it was still sitting unused more than a year later. I’ll bet some of it is still not being used.

Now what? Righties don’t want to pay for the bailouts. Well, nobody wants to pay for the bailouts. Friedman again:

That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins.

Righties don’t see the interconnectedness of things. We may not want to “reward” the auto industry, but we’ll all feel the shock waves if they fall. And with credit so tight, bankruptcy would probably not allow them to retool, as it were, and grow back.

On the whole, the Right still is in denial about what their cockamamie economic theories hath wrought. Grover Norquist claims the economy is failing because Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. The only solutions being offered by the Right are the same solutions they always offer — tax cuts, especially capital gains tax cuts (although whose got capital gains these days?), and of course blaming labor.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.