Who’s Paranoid Now?

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News reports say that the shooter who killed three Pittsburgh policemen today was panicked over the “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way.” We don’t want to jump to conclusions until we get more information. We may find out the shooter was psychotic, for example. But see Dave Neiwert.

Charles Blow wrote this morning,

As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)

At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.

Even without the right-wing hate rhetoric, more guns plus more unemployment equals, um, really bad things. There will be blood and more blood, I fear.

Of course, some on the Right dismissed Blow as a paranoid loon. Um, who’s paranoid now?

Who’s Sorry Now?

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Joe Conason has written some good articles at Salon lately, but Conason’s most recent article actually made me cry.

Like most of their continental neighbors, the nations of the north [i.e., north Europe, esp. Scandinavia] provide free or highly subsidized, high-quality child care that begins as soon as new mothers return to work. Nearly every child between the ages of three and six is enrolled in the public child care system, because it is staffed by well-paid and well-trained workers overseen by the national ministry of education. The results include not only better socialization and education of young children, but far lower poverty rates, especially among single mothers. And the security of European families is enhanced as well by the universal provision of decent old-age pensions and health care, which relieves the financial burden of supporting elderly parents while trying to raise children. So does free or low-cost university education.

Having raised two kids by myself, I remember the juggling act I did for years as a long, grueling ordeal of exhaustion, work and worry. For example, what do you do when a child is too sick to go to school and you’re out of work sick days? What do you do when the boss wants you to work late and the day care arrangement absolutely positively ends at 6 pm? I also remember that an upcoming school holiday meant I was spending hours on the phone (while at work, of course) trying to find babysitting. The cost of my son’s day care before he was old enough for first grade (I couldn’t send him to public kindergarten because it was only half day) cost thousands of dollars at a time I could barely afford to keep the electricity turned on.

Extreme example: I remember many years ago there were news stories about a mother whose child care arrangements had evaporated, so she kept her child in her car while she was at work. Her employer noticed she kept going out to her car, and checked it out and found the child. So there was a big scandal and much clucking about what a bad mother she was. But her perspective was that if she didn’t go to work she wouldn’t be paid and could lose her job altogether, and then what was she supposed to do? Our culture says that single mothers who don’t show up for work are bad people who just want to be on welfare. What were her alternatives? Frankly, she didn’t have any alternatives other than put her child at risk or lose her job, and none of the news stories picked up on that.

I’m not saying that keeping one’s kids stashed in a car is a good choice. It’s very dangerous. But parents are perpetually being put into these no-win situations in which they have to choose between job and children. Two-parent households may be more resourceful about it, but it’s still a problem. For single-parent households, really bad compromises are a constant reality. So sick kids get left home alone or left with babysitters of dubious character, and parents steal time from employers to take care of parent duties. It’s not so much how will I best take care of this, but who’s going to get the short end of the stick this time?

Well, I’ve ranted about that. Let’s go on.

Right wingers always get things backward. They see statistics that show unmarried people, especially mothers, are more likely to live in poverty, and their solution is to encourage people to get married. Like just about any struggling single mother wouldn’t be thrilled if a decent man she could care about popped into her life and wanted to marry her.

But my understanding of the sociology of thing is the other way around — people are not poor because they are not married; they are not married because they are poor. People hanging on to the edge of the economy by their fingernails live exhausting, chaotic lives that do not support stable relationships. And there is copious data showing that good marriages can come apart when a couple’s financial support collapses.

The Bush Administration sank $750 million into a “healthy marriage initiative” that did nothing whatsoever to relieve anyone’s financial burdens. Typical.

Jordan Stancil writes at The Nation that “the big meaning of the [economic] crisis for Europeans is the vindication of their ideas about how to run an economy.”

“I remember the days when American economists came to Germany and told us we had to privatize our community banks, that our small, family-owned industrial companies were not a strength, that we had to move closer to the Anglo-Saxon way of doing business,” Jens van Scherpenberg, an economist at the University of Munich who for several years led the Americas unit at the quasi-governmental German Institute of International and Security Affairs, told me. “If someone came here and said that today, the response would be laughter–sarcastic laughter.”

Paul Krugman keeps saying that Germany has some major economic problems that it lacks the political will to address, so their cockiness is a little misplaced. However, the social support Europeans receive from their governments means that the economic crisis is causing much less individual pain for Europeans than it is for us here.

This bit from Stancil’s article is fascinating:

Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and a leading expert on differences in transatlantic economic cultures … argued that this is not about social justice; it’s about protecting skilled workers–the source of Europe’s competitive strength. He said this is in contrast to the United States, which doesn’t have, and never did have, as many skilled workers. “Production systems developed differently in each country,” Abelshauser said. “German industrialism always depended on high skill levels–and that was one of the main reasons for the establishment of the first social programs in Germany. It was not just about politics or social justice–it was about taking care of the skilled workers because they were economically valuable.” The profile of the US workforce was different, so American industry developed different production processes, ones that were suited to a lack of skilled labor.

It says a lot about our “every man for himself” mentality that we as a nation actually make it difficult for people to get job training and education beyond high school. You’re on your own to find the money and the time. I understand that in Europe there is much more support of apprenticeship programs that allow workers to learn advanced skills. Here, there are some vocational school-to-work programs, but they are always underfunded and mostly not taken seriously by either the education system or employers. Employers here may want skilled workers, but they don’t want to invest the money into training anyone. There are good apprenticeship programs run by the unions, but of course the Right has worked day and night to destroy the unions.

I’ve argued in the past that the Reaganomics-style, “free market,” unregulated economy we’ve been moving toward is unsustainable, and the only reason we haven’t crashed and burned a lot sooner is that the social/economic foundations laid by the New Deal and post-World War II programs kept us propped up. But now those props are just about burned.

For years the Right has predicted the European economies would collapse under the weight of “entitlement” programs like national health care and subsidized child care. From Europe’s perspective, it’s our — I should say, the Right’s — economic system that is unsustainable and sinking us rapidly.

Updates

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I don’t normally do “breaking news” stories, but the shooting at the Binghamton, N.Y. civil center may be an unfortunate sign of the times. More later, maybe.

[Update: I’m not giving her a link, but Pam “Atlas Shrugs” Geller predictably has blamed the shooting on (1) immigrants and (2) New York gun laws.]

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Much rejoicing in Liberal Land.

At the other blog, I get more political than usual and dump on Sen. Judd Gregg.

Stupid, Greedy, and/or Delusional

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Yesterday the House and Senate passed budget bills with no Republican votes whatsoever. Yet even without the GOP the bill passed the House with the biggest majority for a budget in 12 years. Carl Hulse writes for the New York Times,

Democrats said the two budgets, which will have to be reconciled after a two-week Congressional recess, cleared the way for health care, energy and education overhauls pushed by the new president. The Democrats said the budgets reversed what they portrayed as the failed economic approach of the Bush administration and Republican-led Congresses.

Of course, spending on health care, energy, education and other long-neglected matters is vital to any meaningful economic recovery. So what did the GOP offer? Tax cuts for the rich and a domestic spending freeze — during a recession, mind you –which is so breathtakingly wrongheaded one can only assume most congressional Republicans are either extremely stupid or extremely delusional. Or both.

I considered a third alternative, that they are extremely invested in protecting the wealth of the wealthy and don’t care if the rest of the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole. However, I think anyone who doesn’t understand even the wealthy eventually would suffer if the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole is either stupid or delusional.

The passage of the budget is particularly good news because all segments of the House Dems supported it, including many of the Blue Dogs. On the other hand, 38 Republicans voted against the GOP Clown Alternative.

Two Senate Dems voted against the budget — Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Evan Bayh of Indiana. Steve Benen: “Yes, Bayh is the new Lieberman.”

This CNN story has more details on the budget; see also Media Matters. Also note that in many ways passing the budget was the easy part. Crafting the health care, education, energy, etc. programs will be a fight. But maybe the Dems are learning they can, you know, do stuff without worrying about what the GOP thinks.

Which brings me to today’s David (“If I only had a brain”) Brooks column, titled “Greed and Stupidity.” Brooks writes that there are two competing explanations to the crash of the financial sector, which he calls “the greed narrative” and “the stupidity narrative.”

The greed narrative, he says, is explained in Simon Johnson’s Atlantic article “The Quiet Coup,” which many of us read this week. Brooks encapsulates Johnson’s article pretty well. “The U.S. economy got finance-heavy and finance-mad, and finally collapsed,” Brooks writes. (See also Thomas Geoghegan’s “Infinite Debt,” which you really can read online here.)

But then Brooks says, nah, that can’t be right. It’s more likely the captains of finance were just stupid.

The second and, to me, more persuasive theory revolves around ignorance and uncertainty. The primary problem is not the greed of a giant oligarchy. It’s that overconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk. But when big events — like the rise of China — fundamentally altered the world economy, their tools were worse than useless.

Yes, Mr. Brooks, and what made them “overconfident” and “stupid”? To me, it’s obvious much of their hubris came from the fact that they had become such a force of power — a true oligarchy, as Simon Johnson says — that they felt untouchable. And much of the “stupid” was a by-product of greed. They didn’t see how fallible they really were because they didn’t want to see it.

Brooks likes the “stupid” narrative because, he thinks, the stupid problem doesn’t require a big-government regulatory solution, whereas the “greed” problem does. “Instead of rushing off to nationalize the banks, we should nurture and recapitalize what’s left of functioning markets,” he says. “To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they didn’t understand.”

Brooks fails to explain why those causes are mutually exclusive. I say they’re both true.

Update: Reuters on unemployment:

The U.S. unemployment rate soared to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since 1983, as employers slashed 663,000 jobs and cut workers’ hours to the lowest on record, government data showed on Friday.

In a report underscoring the distress in the labor market, the Labor Department also revised its data for January to show job losses of 741,000 that month, the biggest decline since October 1949.

Yes, a domestic spending freeze is just what we need right now. And we can see how much Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy “trickled down.”

Anyone Else Remember the Five Chefs?

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The Right has worked itself into a frenzy about the alleged outrage of the British public over the Obama visit. The Obamas gave the Queen an iPod! Michelle Obama touched Her Majesty for a couple of seconds! Oh Noez!

Avedon Carol, who actually lives in Britain, says bull. Eric Boehlert notes that all of this outrage seems to be coming from the Times of London, owned by (guess who?) Rupert Murdoch.

I seem to be the only one who remembers the 2003 state visit to Britain by President Bush. Very little about the visit is still online, but I found this:

TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL BUSH. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly was steamed when George W. Bush brought five personal chefs to Buckingham Palace, London’s Daily Telegraph reported. “She’s not thought to be [thrilled] about the whole visit anyway,” a snitch told the Telegraph, “but when you consider that she has excellent cooks herself, you can see why this would be taken as a bit of an insult.” Then it got worse, according to the Nov. 23 Daily Mirror: “The Queen is furious with Bush after his state visit caused thousands of pounds of damage to her gardens at Buckingham Palace … Palace staff said they had never seen the Queen so angry as when she saw how her perfectly-maintained lawns had been churned up after being turned into helipads with three giant H landing markings for the Bush visit. The rotors of the Marine Force One helicopter and 2 support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria’s reign. And Bush’s army of clod-hopping security service men trampled more precious and exotic plants.”

Here are some old posts from the Mahablog archives:

Travels With George (November 18, 2003)

Heavy Fish (November 22, 2003)

At the time, many still were hoping against hope that George W. Bush was a real POTUS. When he behaved badly, everyone pretended not to notice. So George W. Bush could be a five-alarm boor and trash the Queen’s plants, and it was all politely swept under the rug.

How times have changed. Leslie Savan writes at The Nation,

The real question about how Barack and Michelle Obama are being received on their Rolling-G-20-Summit/Euro-Tour ’09 has nothing to do with how the Europeans treat them, but all about the American mainstream media itself: What infinitesimal nit will they find to pick about the new president’s conduct abroad that can be blown up into a two- to three-day pseudo-international incident? …

… Turns out the Queen requested the video iPod the president gave her, and he filled it with footage of her American visits and 40 showtunes; he also presented her with a rare songbook signed by Richard Rodgers, the Broadway composer who wrote one of the Queen’s fave musicals, “Oklahoma!” But that won’t stop the piss-ant dramas. When Gift-gate turned out to be just another murder of Vince Foster, some of the same folks started getting the vapors over Michelle patting the Queen’s shoulders during their meet’n’greet. Nobody “touches” the Queen, for chrissakes, they mooned–at least, until Buckingham Palace put out word that there was no violation of protocol, and the Queen thought Michelle was expressing a very natural “affection,” which she shares.

Also: In his last year in office, Bush still didn’t know what the G20 was.

Oh, yes, the G20. Heads of state form around the world are discussing the future of the global economy, but there must be 20 times the news coverage of the Royal iPod than about, you know, real stuff.

Redistribute This

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Just when you thought Andy Sullivan was waking up to reality, he writes something like this:

The new cultural divide will not be on guns, gays and God. It will be between the makers and the takers, the producers of wealth and the recipients of redistribution. And it will be about tempering the over-reach that the Democrats will be unable to resist. But that means the critique should not be undermined by mindless partisanship now, and it should be based upon clear and constructive policy proposals to advance individual liberty and restrain the cold, clammy hand of the state. That’s the medium term challenge for the sane, imaginative, serious right. It requires discipline and thought. And it also requires time.

I infer that

  • Producers of wealth = investment capitalists and the financial sector
  • Recipients of redistribution = the unwashed masses who expect to receive “paychecks” for their “labor”

Can we call this attitude “elitist”? To me, that’s what genuine elitism looks like, but I’m just a poor working schlep, so what do I know?

I got this from DougJ at Balloon Juice, who brings up a response from a commenter:

Well, the producers of wealth are the people who make things: the workers. And the wealthy are the recipients of redistribution.

How the opposite became such a common assumption that we automatically know Sully is saying the opposite, that the Democrats are the “moochers and losers” is really, when you think about, quite strange. And, yes, I know it’s the result of nearly a century of GOP and upper class propaganda, but doesn’t make it any less strange.

There are some objections posted on Andy’s site here.

When right-wingers and libertarians talk about the “cold, clammy hand of the state,” what they really mean is they’re terrified of slave uprisings ordinary citizens using government to address their interests and concerns. Can’t have that, you know. Cuts into profits.

I say that if there’s ever going to be something that might pass for a “sane, imaginative, serious right,” it’s got to get over the “us versus them” mentality that colors all of their thinking now. But maybe “us versus them” is too much about what defines conservatism, and if they progressed to “we’re all in this together” mode they’d be liberals.

To me, “wealth” is something created through a collaboration of investment capital and labor. I’m fine with some people making more money than others. It’s only right that someone who takes the initiative and does the hard work of starting and growing a successful business should make a nice profit. I don’t even begrudge Bill Gates all of his money, although I may be in a tiny minority there.

But if the masses of people who work for paychecks for a living are perpetually squeezed, exploited, treated like “cost” and denied any ownership of the wealth they are helping to create, sooner or later it hurts everyone.

A rising tide may not lift all boats — throughout history, the wealthy have found countless ways to game the system so that only their boats get raised — but a waning tide sure as hell will drop all of the boats eventually.

You knew Sully was going to get into trouble with his first three words of his post — Ruffini is right. Ruffini may be Right, but right? Please. Ruffini hasn’t a clue what’s going on. Get this (emphasis added):

It’s true that Obama’s ideas were not new either — but he was able to sell them as “change” because they had been not tried in toto since the Johnson Administration, and people had forgotten how badly they had crashed on the rocks their last time out. Obama’s central thesis — that government ownership and central planning can outpace returns in the private market — is actually very, very old.

Excuse me while I go pound my head against a wall and howl for a while.

I certainly don’t think that “government ownership and central planning can outpace returns in the private market,” and I doubt Barack Obama does, either. I say Ruffini has his head shoved so far up his ass he has forgotten what daylight looks like. And Sully, too, if he thinks Ruffini is right.

I know most of you don’t need this explained, but I suppose I should go on record in case some wingnuts drop by:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What’s Going on in the World Outside Your Ass

See, guys, our economy is crashing. Auto industry going bankrupt, and all that. There are a great many complicated factors that are causing the economy to crash. But the first domino to fall was pushed by executives in charge of the financial sector, who did a lot of really stupid things and lost lots and lots of money. And because the finance well is dry other parts of the economy, like manufacturing, are suffering also.

Now, the critical part you seem to be missing is that the private sector lacks the means to pull itself out of the hole it’s in. The credit crunch and some other factors have sent the economy into a downward spiral — no jobs, no consumers; no consumers, no sales; no sales, no business; no business, no jobs; etc, down, down, down. If there were sufficient private sector credit available the private sector might be able to rescue itself, but there isn’t, so it can’t. So government has to rescue the private sector. This isn’t something anyone wanted to do. It just has to be done. The alternative is Worse Than the Great Depression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maybe “sane conservatism” is an oxymoron, but I’m an open-minded sort and willing to work with conservatives as soon as they show signs of recognizing reality.

GM Engine Overhaul

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Never fear for Rick Wagoner. He’s walking away from GM with a $23 million pension. It’s the rank-and-file GM worker who is more likely to suffer.

Stupid Alert: David Brooks today argues that restructuring doesn’t work. The automakers have been “restructuring” for years, he says. He prophesies that

The most likely outcome, sad to say, is some semiserious restructuring plan, with or without court involvement, to be followed by long-term government intervention and backdoor subsidies forever. That will amount to the world’s most expensive jobs program. It will preserve the overcapacity in the market, create zombie companies and thus hurt Ford. It will raise the protectionist threat as politicians seek to protect the car companies they now run.

What should happen? Brooks says,

It would have been better to keep a distance from G.M. and prepare the region for a structured bankruptcy process. Instead, Obama leapt in. His intentions were good, but getting out with honor will require a ruthless tenacity that is beyond any living politician.

Let’s go back to what the Anonymous Liberal wrote yesterday:

When a company files for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code, it doesn’t just disappear into a puff of smoke. The goal of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a reorganization of the company, and that reorganization process is overseen at every step by the government. Upon filing of the Chapter 11 petition, a federal bankruptcy judge takes jurisdiction and all important decisions from that point forward must by approved by the court. The officers and executives of the company are often replaced. Sometimes a trustee is appointed to run things. All sorts of business issues get litigated during the process. Eventually, if things go according to plan, a plan of reorganization is approved by the judge and the reorganized company emerges from bankruptcy.

In other words, bankruptcy is a process by which a company relinquishes ultimate control of its destiny and its operations to the government in exchange for protection from its creditors. It gives the government a veto power over everything. What the Obama administration is doing right now is no different in principle from what a bankruptcy judge does; they’re just trying to do it outside of the formal bankruptcy process because they believe that doing so will minimize the harm to GM and the overall economy.

As I understand it, the concern is that if a big automaker actually did go into formal bankruptcy, consumers would be frightened away from buying the products. The other concern is that, at the moment, the automaker would be unlikely to get the loans needed to continue operations while the bankruptcy was in process.

Brooks insists that GM already was “restructuring” and had been for some time. I assume Brooks defines “restructuring” as “trying to wriggle out of Union contracts,” because that’s about all I saw the old GM management doing. Brooks continues,

Corporate welfare rarely works when the government invests in rising firms. The odds are really grim when it tries to subsidize fading ones. (In the ’80s, Chrysler already had the successful K-car in the pipeline.)

I’m not sure if he thinks that what the Obama Administration is doing amounts to corporate welfare, or if just shoveling money at Detroit while the old management floundered is corporate welfare.

Wingnut hysteria to the contrary, I don’t think President Obama or anyone else in Washington really wants to be running a car company right now. My interpretation is that the administration is putting GM through the steps of a bankruptcy while reducing the risk that GM will fail completely.

Beep Beep

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“I believe that the power to make money is a gift from God.” -John D. Rockefeller

I ran into that quote this morning, on the Forbes website. Forbes seems to think it exemplifies wisdom.

Anyway, this morning President Obama announced a policy toward the automobile industry, GM and Chrysler in particular, that lays out what the administration thinks needs to be done to put the automobile industry back on its own four wheels without subsidizing it forever and ever. Alex Koppelman has a succinct explanation of the policy.

Also at Salon, Andrew Leonard asks the question on many minds — Why so hard on the Rust Belt, and so easy on Wall Street?

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan to create a market price for toxic assets has been widely lambasted as a scheme to paper over banking sector insolvency. If Obama can force Wagoner to resign, based on his record, then why haven’t Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis been forced to step down? If the White House can declare that G.M.’s bond-holders must accept they will not be repaid in full what they are owed, then why aren’t Citigroup and Bank of America’s debt-holders being told the same thing?

Well, yeah?

Leonard cites Simon Johnson’s article “The Quiet Coup” at The Atlantic, which argues there’s a long pattern of nations being unwilling to squeeze the financial sector hard enough to correct crises such as ours. The Obama Administration appears to be falling into this pattern. The financial team has excessively close ties to Wall Street. Obama policies are crafted to prop up failing executives, not resolve the financial crisis.

However, Leonard continues,

But it is not the only possible explanation. There are a few brave, or perhaps foolhardy, analysts who are willing to argue that the administration’s approach to the banking sector could actually be preparation for the ultimate endgame of nationalization or government-expedited bankruptcy restructuring, rather than the free pass to the banks it currently appears to be.

In this scenario the ongoing stress tests, in conjunction with the price discovery mechanism for toxic mortgage-backed securities that is at the heart of of the Geithner plan to fix banking balance sheets, will reveal once and for all which banks are truly insolvent and cannot survive in their current form. Having established that beyond a doubt — much as the government’s analysis of G.M. and Chrysler’s situation has established pretty conclusively that they cannot continue as currently structured — there will be no other alternative than a government takeover.

See also The Double-Standard Question Haunting Today’s Detroit Announcement.