Leaving 20th Century Economics Behind

Eric Hobsbawm writes in The Guardian about the economic realities of the 21st century.

The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.

This is exactly right, I think, but until a majority of our politicians and what passes for public intellectuals grasp this, our policies will drag way behind realities.

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s.

The True Believers of both sides will argue no, no, no, pure Marxism/Free Market Capitalism has never been tried. But “pure” anything has never been tried. That’s the reality of our human condition. Any endeavor that requires human input is never pure. It will suffer some degree of corruption. Put together people, money, and power, and corruption is a certainty. That’s why any workable, sustainable model factors in corruption and makes some provision to keep it to a minimum.

That’s what the Marxists and the Ayn Rand culties cannot understand. Give all power to a central government planning authority, and you’re screwed. Give all power to an elite cabal of corporate heads, and you’re screwed. There has to be a way to reign in the power, to diffuse it, to oversee it and make it accountable to other power. That’s one reason the public and private sector need each other — to keep each other semi-honest.

The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

From here, Hobsbawm talks about recent British history, New Labour and Thatcherism. But similar things go on here (is it the almost-common language?). Our Right has effectively taken itself out of the conversation (even though it won’t shut up) because it can’t let go of its old ideologies and aphorisms that don’t work any more. I’m not sure if what passes for a “Left” here is fully cognizant of the new reality, either.

But unlike the Right, the current Left has no one economic model that we all put on an altar and worship. At least some among us are looking hard at the current reality and thinking through solutions that might work in the real world, as opposed to solutions that make good sound bites and look good on a bumper sticker.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people.

That’s something else that neither the Marxists nor the free-market Randbots ever understood.

Red Alerts

Yesterday I described the partisans of the Right as being in a big potato sack race, hopping to crazyland. Well, this guy got there. He’s making a Big Bleeping Conspiracy Deal out of the fact that newspapers use press releases. I’m sure the same newspapers who are “complicit” in pushing the “radical” agenda of Families USA have also in the past published stories based on press releases from the “totally off the sanity charts” Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

(Do these people live in caves? They’re so … innocent of how the world actually works, one wonders.)

Another news story that’s got rightie panties in a twist is from Rasmussen: “Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism.” Younger people actually are evenly divided on the capitalism v. socialism question. The older the demographic, the higher the approval of capitalism over socialism. No big surprise.

I have words of comfort for those predicting the End of AmericaI doubt that most of the respondents know what “socialism” is any more than you do. I suspect only a very small portion of the respondents would say yes to the end of private ownership of property, for example.

But since the meatheads on the Right keep erroneously defining President Obama’s policy proposals as “socialism,” I can see how “socialism” might look good to a lot of people right now. It’s just that “socialism” isn’t really socialism. This country is no more going to embrace real, undiluted socialism than it’s going to fold itself up and fly to Jupiter. So chill.

Update: See also Chris Good and Melissa McEwan.

Hopping to Crazyland

Call it Clash of the Titan Wingnuts. Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged is accusing Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs of being an infiltrator, a neo-nazi, a fellow traveler of jihadists. Macranger calls CJ a “closet liberal” (ouch!).

Johnson actually said something sensible, which of course is beyond the pale for a wingnut. Commenting on a Politico piece called “Extremist rhetoric won’t rebuild GOP,” Johnson said,

This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP—unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.

Based on blog reaction to Johnson, we needn’t be concerned that the Right will take Johnson’s advice.

I want to shift gears for a moment and look at some numbers — Nate Silver shows us that the GOP has lost considerable popularity in recent years. “[T]hose persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened — and very conservative — lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten,” says Nate.

If you go to Pollingreport.com you can find a page with “Dem versus GOP” approval ratings going back several years. There have been more Dems than Republicans all along, but since the 1970s the Dems took a big dive in party dominance. However, in very recent years they’ve been coming back.

A question asked sporadically by the ABC News/Washington Post poll, “Overall, which party — the Democrats or the Republicans — do you trust to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?” shows the Dems consistently ahead going back to 1992, except for the years 2002 and 2003, when the GOP came way out on top. But by 2004 the Dems had the advantage again.

A Gallup question, “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” had the two parties evenly split, 42 to 42 percent, in 2002. But in 2007 the Dems were up, 54 to 34 percent.

So this movement in public opinion away from the GOP and toward the Dems isn’t something that just started this year. It appears it started in 2004. It just took awhile to become obvious even in mass news media.

At The New Republic, Chris Orr has an intriguing analysis of what’s happening on the Right. Essentially, the Right is already so marginalized its members have nothing else to do but compete with each other for position within the movement. And to do that they’re all trying to out-flank each other on the Right. So conservative politicians and media personalities are in a big potato sack race, hopping to Crazyland.

See also No More Mister Nice Blog.

Sedition and Crowded Theaters

In the comments to the last post several of you mentioned sedition, so let’s talk about that. Sedition is the incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority, the dictionary says. You can find plenty of that in the delusional rantings of Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck.

We know now that part of what set off Richard Poplawski’s shooting of three policemen was the belief that Barack Obama was going to take away his firearms. This belief has no basis in fact, but it’s been propagated by well-paid right-wing media figures and the National Rifle Association. Isn’t this something along the lines of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater?

We don’t have to speculate that right-wing hate speech has real-world, violent consequences. It’s happened. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

As a liberal, I am loathe to dig up the Smith Act — which I understand is still on the books — or enacting any anti-sedition legislation to prosecute people for their speech. In U.S. history sedition laws mostly have been used by people in authority to harass citizens they don’t like, or whose associations were suspect, not to suppress speech that was actually dangerous to anyone. And you know if sedition prosecutions become an issue now, as soon as the Right gets back into power (which is bound to happen eventually) everyone they don’t like will be in jeopardy. Got to suppress the fifth columnists in the name of freedom, of course.

So, what’s to be done? I haven’t a clue. You know they can’t be shamed into shutting up.

Update: Here’s a couple of videos I just picked up from Kos:

Newt is a politician. It’s hard to make them go away.

See also Joan Walsh.

Insanity Unleashed

Kevin Drum writes that the crazy Right is getting crazier.

A sense of besiegement has been the right’s stock in trade for as long as I’ve been alive.

But there is something different about their tone these days, and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there’s an inchoate quality to their fears that’s new.

See also “Scenes from the Real America” at the Washington Independent.

I don’t know that the wingnuts are any more “inchoate” than they’ve ever been. I don’t know that their problem is that they don’t have an enemy. I mean, who was their enemy in the 1990s? Bill Clinton, black helicopters, and the phantom liberal elite. Now they’ve got Barack Obama, Muslims, and the phantom liberal elite. What’s the diff?

Are they less sensible now than in their glory days when they stampeded us into Iraq or went after Dan Rather like a pack of rabid wolves? Yet there is a difference, as Gary Kamiya says.

With the collapse of the GOP into the party of Rush Limbaugh, and as Limbaugh and his ilk grow ever more reckless in their attacks on Obama, the boundaries between “respectable” right-wing paranoid hatred and “extreme” right-wing paranoid hatred are getting more blurred. Right-wing fanatic du jour Glenn Beck teased his recent Fox show with images of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin and said that he was wrong to say that Obama was leading America to socialism — because Obama is actually a fascist. “They’re marching us towards 1984,” Beck intoned. “Big Brother, he’s watching.”

I think the real difference is that, deep down, they know they’ve lost. They can’t admit it to themselves. They are still blustering as if they represent mainstream America. They still pretend to themselves the majority of Americans give a bleep what they think.

But the truth is, the majority of Americans don’t give a bleep what they think. They’re jokes.

President Obama is popular. Legislation gets passed without conservative votes. The nation is not in shock and awe of, or even paying attention to, their “tea parties.”

Remember back in January, when the stimulus bill passed in the House with no Republicans votes? For a time House Republicans seemed actually proud of themselves for standing together. Then they noticed nobody but them cared how they voted.

They threaten to “go Galt.” America says fine; go right ahead. Don’t let the door hit your butt on your way out.

This is the real danger. They still have the sense of besiegement, but before 2006 they felt they had power, and that they represented the mainstream. Now about all they have is paranoia and guns.

Watch your back.

Who’s Paranoid Now?

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?

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.

What’s It All About

From Matt Taibbi’s latest article at Rolling Stone:

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. …

…So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

Well, yeah.

Although I might quibble with some details, I think on the whole Taibbi gets to the core of the matter better than most. His article also made me think of the Harper’s article by Thomas Geoghegan I mentioned last week, “Infinite Debt,” which you can now read online in PDF form. [Oops, it appears the PDF is available only to subscribers. Sorry.] In a nutshell, the financial sector has eaten the other sectors, and our national wealth has been hijacked into a vast scheme of money chasing money. Less and less of our wealth is being used to create tangible things like food or consumer products; more and more is plowed into financial investment instruments that are, basically, air.

And ordinary citizens have been sucked into a treadmill of debt bondage. I keep thinking of that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song —

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.

Maybe we didn’t see all of the details, but many of us have been viewing the bigger picture for some time. We unhappy few are called “liberals,” and of course nobody listened to us.

What’s remarkable is the degree to which apparently intelligent people still don’t see the bigger picture. These include, unfortunately, the Obama Administration, which appears to be in tweak rather than overhaul mode.

Not to say he is “apparently intelligent,” because he isn’t, but much of What’s Wrong With America is exemplified by the meathead anchor, CNBC’s Mark Haines, interviewing Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) in this video:

So to Power Tool John’s question, “Are We a Banana Republic?” I’d say yes, and for some time, but not for the reasons he thinks.

And you want to know how we gave it all away? Memory Lane time —

[Video no longer available, but I believe it showed Ronald Reagan claiming government is the problem.]

The disconnect in Saint Ronald’s thinking was that government is not a hindrance to self-government. It is the very tool the founders left us that enables self-government. By persuading people that government is irrelevant, Saint Ronald enabled the colossal power grab that is strangling our country. Forget the Road to Serfdom; we’re serfs already, and have been for years.

Analogies

Steve M has a great analogy in the title of a recent post — “AIG is to righties’ economic theories what George W. Bush is to their political theories.” So true.

Of course, as Steve says, to righties nothing is ever the fault of rightie ideology. In many ways George W. Bush was more Reaganite than Reagan, but as soon as he became overwhelmingly unpopular the Right suddenly discovered Bush was not a “real conservative.” Just so, in their minds the financial sector gurus who drove the economy off a cliff are traitors to free market theory, not the naturally selected consequence of it.

More fascinating — Greg Sargent reports that rightie politicians and rightie media are going separate ways on the AIG scandal.

GOP Congressional leaders have roundly condemned AIG and its executives, as part of a strategy to position themselves as heroic defenders of the taxpayers and to paint the Obama administration as weak and ineffectual. … But increasingly, leading conservative media figures are moving in a different direction: Defending AIG.

Rush Limbaugh recently said: “I am all for the AIG bonuses” and attacked the Obama administration for trying to undo them. He also blasted Dem efforts to get the names of the AIG bonus recipients as “McCarthyism.”

Fox News followed suit, also comparing Dems to “Joe McCarthy.” And Sean Hannity has now derided efforts to tax the execs by saying: “In other words, we’re going to just steal their money.”

If you were a Faux Nooz viewer, exactly how stupid would you have to be to agree with Hannity?

It gets better. Today there’s a story that the House plans to slap a 90 percent tax on the bonuses. Actual title of a Michelle Malkin post in response: “First They Came for the AIG Bonuses.” You can’t make this up.

As I said, this is fascinating; the sort of thing social psychologists ought to be studying. Put the Right under a bell jar, or better yet, on a dissecting table.

Editorial Pencil Alert

Before it scrolls into oblivion, be sure to read Fareed Zakaria’s latest column at Newsweek. Then notice the slight editorial change made in the same column at the Washington Post.

Newsweek version (emphasis added):

Two weeks into Obama’s term, Charles Krauthammer lumped together a bunch of Russian declarations and actions—many of them long in the making—and decided that they were all “brazen provocations” that Obama had failed to counter. Obama’s “supine diplomacy,” Krauthammer thundered, was setting off a chain of catastrophes across the globe. The Pakistani government, for example, had obviously sensed weakness in Washington and “capitulated to the Taliban” in the Swat Valley. Somehow Krauthammer missed the many deals that Pakistan struck over the last three years—during Bush’s reign—with the Taliban, deals that were more hastily put together, on worse terms, with poorer results.

Many normally intelligent commentators have joined in the worrying.

WaPo version:

Two weeks into Obama’s term, Charles Krauthammer lumped together a bunch of Russian declarations and actions — many of them long in the making — and decided that they were all “brazen … provocations” that Obama had failed to counter. Obama’s “supine” diplomacy, Krauthammer thundered, was setting off a chain of catastrophes across the globe. The Pakistani government, for example, had obviously sensed weakness in Washington and “capitulated to the Taliban” in the Swat Valley. Somehow Krauthammer missed the many deals that Pakistan struck with the Taliban over the past three years — during Bush’s reign — deals that were more hastily put together, on worse terms, with poorer results.

Even liberal and centrist commentators have joined in the worrying.

I guess at WaPo one is not permitted to imply that Krauthammer is an idiot.