Eat the Rich – the Poor are Tough and Stringy

James Surowiecki has a good article in The New Yorker, "Soak the Very, Very Rich":

Between 2002 and 2007, for instance, the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms—while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income. Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.

The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account. At the moment, we have a system of tax brackets well suited to nineteenth-century New Zealand. Our system sets the top bracket at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, with a tax rate of thirty-five per cent. (People in the second-highest bracket, starting at a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars for individuals, pay thirty-three per cent.) This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates. LeBron James and LeBron James’s dentist: same difference.

This makes no sense—there’s a yawning chasm between the professional and the plutocratic classes, and the tax system should reflect that. A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners. A few extra brackets at the top could also bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue.

Definitely. Read the rest. Predictably, Megan McArdle feels the wealthy are terribly persecuted (and Roy's comment thread is good, as usual).

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Needy Wealthy?

Republican Senator Jim DeMint recently introduced an amendment to repeal the Estate Tax permanently. Not adjust it or improve it – repeal it entirely. Never mind that there's staggering wealth inequity in America. The amendment failed, but the GOP and some of the Blue Dogs voted for it. Like the Republicans, Blue Dogs Kent Conrad and Evan Bayh want to extend Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, despite the ineffectiveness of those cuts at creating jobs (and even though they don't affect more than 2% of family farms and small businesses). Needless to say, these are the same people who vote against unemployment benefits, fought for a smaller stimulus bill, and often oppose jobs programs. Their only goal seems to be to give more money to the wealthiest Americans, and everything else is secondary. As Paul Krugman points out, "The truth... is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back."

Senator Bernie Sanders has been speaking out against this, and Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars passes on a short video and Sanders op-ed. Here's DeMint, followed by Sanders:



And here's part of Sanders' op-ed in The Nation, "No to Oligarchy":

The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.

And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last fifteen years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest-paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007, as a result of Bush tax policy they now pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record.

Sanders gave a Senate speech on the same subject earlier in the week, which you can read or watch here, or watch below:



It's too bad Bernie Sanders isn't the norm rather than the exception, but it's refreshing to hear him speak. An earlier post, "Attack of the Plutocrats," goes into far greater depth, but as Bill Moyers says, "Plutocracy and democracy don't mix."

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

 

Attack of the Plutocrats

Plutocracy and democracy don't mix.
- Bill Moyers

There’s class warfare, all right - but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
- Warren Buffet

Check out any mainstream news outlet, and before long you'll encounter some rich person claiming that extending unemployment benefits makes people lazy or that the social safety net needs to be slashed. Others will whine that (despite historically low tax rates) the rich are overtaxed or that (despite under-regulation almost destroying the world economy) business is overregulated. Still others will claim that spending on the middle class and poor needs to be off-set, but tax cuts for the wealthy don't need to be paid for. Among the ruling class, austerity is all the rage - not for themselves, but to impose on the lower orders. Almost every discussion by the chattering class is heavily skewed by the fact that America is increasingly becoming a plutocracy, and most of the chatters themselves are members of the ruling class. This has been the norm for over a decade, and quite common for the past thirty years of Reaganomics, which have massively enriched the wealthiest Americans while squeezing the middle class.

It doesn't need to be this way, and capitalism can be done much better in America. In fact, it has been in the past. From the New Deal up to the Reagan administration, a variety of factors helped reduce wealth inequity and created a large, prosperous middle class, which in turn bolstered the overall economy. While correlation isn't cause, in The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman makes a persuasive case that more liberal economic policies are much better for the majority of the population and also benefit the national economy. Roughly speaking, what's good for the middle class is good for America. Being able to achieve basic prosperity has always been a key part of the American Dream. Restraining the abuses of the rich and powerful is also an essential component of a healthy economy, though. While "trickle-up" policies typically work well, "trickle-down" approaches have proved ineffective, harmful or outright disastrous. "The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times," with zero net job creation and the middle class making less than they did in 1999, when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans grew even richer, and wealth inequity has grown even more pronounced, back to "Gilded Age" levels.

Despite conservative accusations of class envy or class warfare, the reality is what Warren Buffet described back in 2006: The rich have been waging an aggressive class war, and they've been winning. It's foolhardy to ignore this, and a sucker's move to buy the scolding of upper class warriors given this reality. It's not necessary to believe that all the rich are evil, even if the old saw is true: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Beyond any proclivity toward greed or other faults, it's simply that the rich and powerful – due to being (duh) rich and powerful - can cause far more damage, and with far smaller effort. Consider: the campaign to repeal the estate tax has been lead most aggressively by a mere 18 families, comprising some of the wealthiest people in the country. They can easily spend millions every year to potentially net them billions more (and cut into the U.S. Treasury). A dozen or so wealthy Wall Street firms and corporations, greedy for even more, acted recklessly and almost destroyed the entire world economy. Any populist anger at Wall Street pales in comparison to the narcissism, spite, recklessness and grandiose sense of entitlement from some Wall Street players.

For any policy, it's wise to ask, what are the consequences? Who benefits? (And how much? And compared to whom?) Also, who holds the power, and how will this policy affect those dynamics? On almost every domestic issue (and foreign policy issue) currently before the American people, the GOP, the Blue Dogs, and many in the chattering class are pushing policies that benefit the rich and powerful much, much more than the middle class. Sadly, that's become increasingly common over the past thirty years. Moreover, it's become increasing common in the past ten years for the same forces to push for policies that only benefit the rich and powerful and screw over the middle class (not to mention the poor). It's difficult to think of a single Republican measure in the past 10 to 20 years that has favored average Americans over the ruling class. Often, the Democrats haven't been that much better, vying for corporate backers themselves. It's not solely due to greed - ideology has played a major role, too, especially on the conservative side. As Digby's remarked, the Republican Party of 1956 would be denounced as socialists by today's GOP. If both parties merely competitively pandered to the middle class (as they often did during the middle of the 20th century), they'd be far more responsible and responsive than they presently are, and America would greatly benefit. The current assaults on (perfectly fine) Social Security and the resistance to expanding much-needed (and economically stimulative) unemployment benefits are utterly appalling. But as has been noted for millennia, members of an entrenched ruling class often lack a conscience.

Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Ever-increasing wealth inequity is one of several key factors making America into more of a plutocracy, and endangering American democracy. We'll take a look at several factors in more depth.

Widening Income and Wealth Inequity


(Click any image for a larger view.)
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorites (CBPP) documents:

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

This has led to staggering income inequity:


(Read their full post for much more.) Moreover, while most Americans are facing economic woes, most of the rich have quickly recovered.

The picture is even more imbalanced if one looks not just at income, but at net worth and overall wealth, as Professor G. William Domhoff does in "Wealth, Income, and Power" (graphics used with permission):


This is mind-boggling. (Domhoff's piece, which he continues to update, is well worth reading in its entirety.) Let's simplify this data slightly and look at it through a more feudal lens, befitting America's ruling class:


Given this reality, basically, when anyone claims that the rich are overtaxed or put-upon, and that the American middle class and poor are the ones who need to sacrifice – they are completely full of shit.

Paul Krugman's 2006 piece "The Great Wealth Transfer" is still an excellent read on these dynamics, including the widening gap between executive pay and that for the average worker:

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1970. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared -- from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay.

The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income -- the richer they are, the taller they are.

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line -- representing those Americans living in extreme poverty -- is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle -- the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

What's useful about this image is that it explodes several comforting myths we like to tell ourselves about what is happening to our society...

Domhoff provides several other useful charts. For instance, here's CEO pay as a multiple of the average worker's pay over 27 years:


And here's CEO's average pay compared to production workers' pay and several other factors:


That top line pretty much tracks the top line of the first CBPP diagram (no surprise).

We won't cover every angle in this post, but comparatively low taxes on capital gains and other assets predominantly owned by the rich further contribute to widening wealth inequity.

Squeezing the Middle Class

Income and wealth inequity by themselves wouldn't be so bad if there were a healthy baseline of prosperity for the vast majority of Americans. However, that isn't the case at all, and hasn't been for some time, thanks again to Reaganomics. Furthermore, squeezing the middle class, bad enough on its own, carries other perils for the economy as a whole. Robert Reich summarizes these problems well in "The root of economic fragility and political anger":

Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.

In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.

We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.

And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.

Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

We all know what happened in the years immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008...

Concentrating wealth among a few and not investing in the middle class is a horrible strategy for both the long term and short term.

On a related note, socioeconomic mobility is America simply isn't good, especially when compared to other countries. While the landscape doesn't look great for middle class families, it's particularly bleak for the poor. It's all the worse given that, rather than leveling the playing field, "government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected." This strikes at the heart of the American Dream, which is that our country is a meritocracy, and if you work hard and play by the rules, you can prosper. As Jonathan Chait observed in "Wealthcare," (a piece on that sociopath high priestess of selfishness, Ayn Rand):

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity... there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

Fairness and a Sustainable System

While I'll look at this issue in more depth in future posts, just consider the prospects of children born in present-day America. Take 100 children, spread across the wealth spectrum by percentage. Using Domhoff's calculations, one child would be born to an extraordinarily wealthy family, another 19 would born to very well-off families, and the remaining 80 would be born to families likely facing financial insecurity, stagnant wages, and possibly outright poverty. Nor, based on the mobility studies cited above, would those 80 children have much hope of improving their situation by much. It's impossible to argue credibly that that situation is in any sense "fair." Every argument for a flat tax (a favorite cause of billionaire Steve Forbes) ignores that Americans do not all begin at the same starting line, with the same resources, opportunities and support. Even if wealth and income were zero-sum games, money could be much more fairly distributed in the United States – and the rich could even stay obscenely wealthy. However, wealth and income are not zero-sum games, because economic activity is often synergistic. More liberal economic policies, such as those discussed by Robert Reich above and in far greater depth by Paul Krugman in The Conscience of a Liberal, generate far more economic growth than do conservative trickle-down policies. Investing in the middle class, in "trickle up," is in a sense just good, basic portfolio advice – diversify.

There is such a thing as excessive levels of taxation on the rich and powerful, but overall, we are nowhere near that in America. When a self-described libertarian assails progressive taxes, or taxes altogether, and preaches about the virtues of the free market, this ignores both the starting line issue, and that wealth and power tend to concentrate among a very few over time – unless there are strong countervailing forces. This concentration is not good for freedom - except the "freedom" of the powerful to impose their will on others. Shockingly enough, those with largely unchecked power often do not wield it virtuously. Government (of the people, by the people, for the people) can be one of the strongest checks against such abuses. Meanwhile, when government allies itself with the plutocrats, and further tilts an already rigged game in their favor, it can inflict great damage.

For the rich, a more liberal economic approach would mean the gap between them and the lower orders would shrink. (Judging from indignant pieces from Wall Street players and other plutocrats, this upsets them a great deal, their own central culpability in the economic meltdown notwithstanding.) However, they would still be extremely rich, and they would continue to prosper - along with their fellow Americans. The main challenge facing America economically and fiscally is not whether or not the middle class and poor must sacrifice even more than they already have for the past 30 years. The main challenge is whether the rich and powerful will forsake some small measure of greed – and more realistically, whether they'll be forced to do so.

The Clueless, the Callous and the Downright Evil

The plutocrats shaping our discourse generally break down into the clueless, the callous, and the downright evil. Many mainstream reporters on TV fall into the clueless and cloistered category. Charlie Gibson is a prime example. To quote from an earlier post:

While the mainstream media's stories on social issues can be quite superficial, they tend to be better than their pieces on economic matters, which generally are told from a rich, corporate angle. Some of the problem is simply who's reporting. It's not an accident that ABC's millionaire Charlie Gibson, during the 2008 primary debates, thought $200,000 was a middle class income for a married couple, and repeated debunked claims about capital gains taxes that affect the rich the most. Nor is it surprising that during ABC's town hall with Obama on health care this June, Gibson and Diane Sawyer asked most of their questions from a "Shouldn't we be scared?" insurance industry perspective that ignored major problems with the status quo. They also weren't about to compare America's much higher health costs to those of other industrialized nations, or hammer Obama to justify why it wouldn't be wiser just to go straight to a single-payer system.

On Gibson's $200,000 gaffe, it's unlikely he wanted to look that clueless in front of a national audience and have the auditorium audience laugh at him. Many rich TV stars cultivate a "regular folks" image and emphasize humble roots (Tim Russert put great effort into this, and Brian Williams is always quick to mention his volunteer fireman stint). Of course, humble pasts don't matter much if the same people push a rich, corporate perspective in the present day. The cloistered perspective of many journalists is a serious problem, but in theory, some of the clueless chattering class can actually be reached and persuaded.

What of our elected representatives? A study in 2009 from the Center on Responsive Politics found that:

Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That’s 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall...

All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center’s 2008 figures.

“Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren’t hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make,” said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. “What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments.”

The CRP numbers are somewhat rough estimates – lawmakers are required to report their financial information in broad ranges of figures, so it’s impossible to pin down their dollars with precision. The CRP uses the mid-point in the ranges to build its estimates.

Senators’ estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House’s median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007.

But CRP’s analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet.

Given this, it's not surprising that members of Congress would reflect the plutocratic attitudes of many members of their class. Politicians may easily become cloistered and clueless without regular reality-checks from average constituents.

Some politicians are far worse, though. For decades now, Republican politicians have shown no interest in acknowledging fiscal realities. (See "The Persistence of Ideology" for more on this general dynamic.) Here's part of TPM's "It's Unanimous! GOP Says No To Unemployment Benefits, Yes To Tax Cuts For The Rich":

For weeks, Senate Republicans have filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits on the grounds that Democrats aren't willing to cut spending or raise taxes to pay for them. At the same time, the Bush tax cuts are set to expire, and Republicans want them to be renewed. For two days, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl has raised eyebrows by insisting that emergency aid to unemployed people -- what he called a "necessary evil" -- be paid for through either tax hikes or spending cuts, while the tax cuts (which mostly benefit wealthy people) not be offset in any way. Yesterday claimed that this view is shared by "most of the people in my party."

He was correct.

"That's been the majority Republican view for some time," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told TPMDC this afternoon after the weekly GOP press conference. "That there's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

The CBO and other budget experts strongly disagree. And Democrats want to preserve the Bush tax cuts for people making less than $200,000-$250,000 a year -- but only for them. Allowing them to expire for wealthier people would raise hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years, which could allow them to offset the spending Republicans currently decry.

The entire piece deserves a read. In a similar vein, John McCain decries paying teachers as pork, but is all for cutting taxes on corporations and for paying military contractors.

Back in reality, the Bush tax cuts - just like the Reagan tax cuts - lost revenue. Both presidents gave massive tax cuts to the richest Americans and increased military spending. Reagan nearly tripled the national debt and Bush nearly doubled it. This isn't exactly secret information.

So what's the explanation for the GOP's magical thinking? As always, it's the stupid versus evil question, or the hack versus zealot question. Surely some conservative leaders know what they're peddling is complete bullshit. But some others seem to actually believe this crap. I think the best catch-all explanation is that they just don't give a damn whether what they're saying is true or not, making them classic bullshitters, or "callous" as opposed to clueless. Their primary goal is to give more money to the rich, which benefits them personally as well as their most wealthy donors. They simply don't care about any negative consequences of these policies, except perhaps as an afterthought. And what's to make them stop? The press won't fact-check them or call them out. The Democratic Party often doesn't even try. And middle class and poor conservative voters don't know or don't care that they're voting against their own interests.

As Ezra Klein observes, statements like Kyl's about no need to off-set tax cuts is "how you tell people who care about the deficit apart from people who are interested in exploiting fears of the deficit to shrink the size of government." And as Matthew Yglesias points out, conservatives don't care about the deficit: "conservatives care more about making taxes as low as possible than they do about reducing spending or reducing the deficit." (See also "Conservatives Don't Care About the Deficit" #1 and "Revealed Preference and the Deficit.") Yglesias also notes that raising taxes on the rich is the most politically feasible path for reducing the deficit, if that were actually the goal. However, conservative politicians oppose this, voters often don't understand what spending cuts will actually entail, and the press doesn't explain any of it well, if at all.

As for the downright evil, there are several powerful groups who very consciously work to destroy any sort of social safety net, eliminate progressive taxes, or eliminate taxes altogether. It's horrible policy, not to mention heartless in its consequences, but it's the core of movement conservatism on economic and fiscal matters. Thom Hartmann gives a good summary of the history in "Two Santa Clauses, or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years," and explains Starve the Beast and other core conservative strategies. Key figures include Grover Norquist, Pete Peterson and Paul Ryan.

Grover Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform, and sponsors regular conservative lectures in Washington. A friend of Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff, Norquist infamously said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." I've covered him in more depth in previous posts, but Norquist is an anti-tax zealot who wants to get rid of taxes altogether, and pressures Republicans to sign an anti-tax pledge, that they will never support any tax increase ever, even in the face of Armageddon. Norquist was also one of the major forces behind creating the myth of Saint Ronnie Reagan.

The Peterson Foundation, run by former Nixon cabinet member Peter G. Peterson, keeps trying to slash Social Security and Medicare. It has at least one billion dollars to spend toward these ends. Among other things, the Peterson Foundation commissioned a documentary to push its views, and the Texas School Board has echoed Peterson's arguments. The Peterson Foundation recently sponsored "America Speaks" meetings in 19 cities across the country. However, these were very slickly designed events with Peterson's biases enforced on the participant discussions to arrive at pre-determined conclusions. In fact, 86% of Americans wouldn't cut Social Security, and similar majorities oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid. But what does that matter for Peterson and his allies? What's important is the illusion of public opinion, not the real thing. (The same goes for independent expert opinion.)

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan has been advocating similar measures in the House. Ryan, a huge fan of Ayn Rand, has been pushing a radical budget plan that he claims will balance the budget. In fact, it wouldn't even do that, but would destroy the social safety net, and make taxes far more regressive, raising taxes on the middle class and slashing them on the rich. The Tax Policy Center pointed out the fundamental error that Ryan's budget hinges on and the plan's other consequences. The CBPP provided a detailed analysis of the Ryan "Roadmap," and also dissected his "off-base" response to their analysis. Citizens for Tax Justice came to similar conclusions, remarking that:

It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Paul Ryan has met that daunting challenge. This analysis makes obvious that Congressman Ryan’s budget plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget, but has everything to do with creating a system that takes more from the poor and less from the rich.

Ryan has complained about reality-based criticisms of his highly regressive plan, and is still pushing the same crap, in some cases directly contradicting himself or just lying (the CBO has not proven his case). What Ryan is pushing is evil - although zealotry seems to be his defining characteristic.

Tallying the Bill, and Where to Go Next

Who's really to blame for the debt and the deficit? One way of looking at it would be tally up all the costs by the political parties that incurred them. (Hint: Reagan and Bush the Younger would sink it for the GOP.) However, another way to look at it is to examine who benefited from these deficits. Cui bono?

Here's a revealing diagram from CBPP:


The biggest problem is the Bush tax cuts. After that, it's the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, started under Bush, never ended under Bush, and now continuing under Obama. Most of the TARP money went to wealthy Wall Street banks. The middle class and poor who have lost their homes certainly haven't won in this scenario, and the military personnel who get injured and die serving overseas tend to be middle class or poor.

Here's a CBPP diagram that renders the situation more starkly:


This covers 2001-2007, not all the way back to Reagan or earlier. Still, overwhelmingly, our national debt has resulted from funneling money to the rich and to the military-industrial complex. Yet oddly, the plutocrat consensus is that this trend should continue – and that the middle class and poor should sacrifice more to lower the debt. Hmm.

If the debt is such a terrible threat to our national well-being, why not let those who benefited from all that money repay it?

Here's my deal. I'll be willing to look at conservative pet causes, such as cutting Social Security in some fashion, if and only if we try sensible policies first and they don't work. So sure, we can cut Social Security, if first: We make income taxes much more progressive again, at something resembling pre-Reagan levels, and probably with a couple of extra tax margins added at the top. (I defer to the experts on the details, for this measure and all the rest.) Make sure the estate tax continues and is progressive, allowing family farms and small businesses to continue (the argument that they've ever been imperiled is largely conservative propaganda). Examine capital gains taxes and other income that primarily benefit the wealthy. Close tax loopholes for the rich and ensure that corporations actually pay their taxes. Make any tax cuts targeted and jobs programs focused so they actually create jobs, since we have proof that massive, blanket giveaways to the rich don't. Re-examine usury laws and allow mortgage cramdowns to help average consumers. Invest in education, scientific and medical research, the arts and humanities. Invest in infrastructure and in public services and works that benefit everybody. Consider a new New Deal to do that, putting Americans to work. Cut military spending, particularly on obsolete or useless programs, and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The short version: tax the rich, cut military spending, end the wars, and invest in the middle class and the country as a whole.

The United States of America was founded by overthrowing a monarch. As Bill Moyers states, plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Ever-increasing wealth inequity is one of several key factors making America into more of a plutocracy. The campaign to increasingly concentrate wealth and power with a tiny few is a dangerous, regressive movement. The ruling class has almost advantage on its side – except the vote. Every measure that pushes us towards a plutocracy and a neo-feudal state is perilous, and every step toward a more egalitarian society is a small but important victory.


(Cartoon by Matt Wuerker.)

All Your Prosperity Are Belong to Us

Via Tristero, here's a great letter in response to The New Yorker's portrait of Paul Krugman. The letter describes the different approaches of liberals and conservatives very sharply:

Larissa MacFarquhar’s Profile of Paul Krugman suggests that the economists with whom Krugman does battle could use a little history of political philosophy mixed in with their economic prophesying (“The Deflationist,” March 1st). The main political issue of our time isn’t whether markets are always right but whether they are always good. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” advocated free trade based on his theory that the market’s invisible hand would provide for the greater wealth of nations across the social spectrum. This moral vision was long ago abandoned by free marketeers in favor of another theory from the founding era: the inviolability of property rights. But we know that capitalism has historically followed a pattern of boom and bust, a cycle whose impact has been mitigated—in the spirit of Smith’s moral philosophy, and for economic conditions he could not have foreseen—by civic intervention, otherwise called government regulation and progressive taxation. This is the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats tend to believe that, in the light of our long experience with boom and bust, fiscal policy should provide social and economic equity for the American people. Republicans seem to believe that fiscal policy should protect the acquisition of wealth, however skewed the distribution of wealth may become and however small the number of citizens protected. The difference is abundantly apparent in California today, where the Democratic legacy of equitable distribution of wealth, through public education especially, but also in many other areas, was long ago sacrificed on the altar of property rights in Proposition 13.

Dee E. Andrews
Professor of History
California State University, East Bay
San Francisco, Calif.

Race and gender are important issues in America, but class and power are often much more important, and the key dynamic underneath other struggles. As Warren Buffet once stated, "There’s class warfare, all right - but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Paul Krugman's great 2006 article "The Great Wealth Transfer" explains much more, and this study gives an important look at how lopsided wealth is in America:


(Click for a larger view.)
The country as a whole does better when prosperity is more shared and less concentrated; "trickle up" works much better than "trickle down" has ever done (to the degree "trickle down" has ever done any good). Unfortunately, we have one party dedicated to transfering more money and power to those who already have the most - and too many in the other party have decided to pursue a piece of that action. The health care reform bill, while flawed, is an important step in the right direction, but now it's time to take on Wall Street, and also make our tax system much more progressive again.

No Way to Run an Empire

"Caligula had to appoint that horse. Here they are nominated by acclamation." - Roy Edroso

(This post was originally part of "American Political Insanity Explained," but I thought it might be better as a separate piece. So. Ahem.)

While it's not a surprise that there are evil bastards in the world, and that plenty of people in power are selfish and/or flat-out idiotic, I'll admit to being surprised at the ruling class' almost total lack of concern for basic competence. Is this any way for the business class to run a business? Don't the neocons have any interest in being competent imperialists? Where's the basic self-respect from our would-be Machiavellis and Neros?

While "enlightened self-interest," which generally points toward more liberal policies, might be too much to expect from an entrenched establishment, I at least thought that "savvy, evil self-interest" might win the day. When you're in the top 10%, or especially the top 1% (or 0.1%) of the population in the richest country on Earth – and you will remain so, even under extremely progressive policies – giving a slightly larger sliver of that wealth back to the country is smarter than becoming more greedy. One, it's revolution insurance (as Digby's called it), and two, as Paul Krugman and others have shown, the economy as a whole will do better, and this could easily make you, an evil rich bastard, even more money, which is in your view the goal - nay - the very pinnacle of human achievement. Alas, our evil rich bastards are letting their country down. They would rather fight for the best staterooms on the Titanic (and burn all the lifeboats reserved for the unwashed lower orders).

While the Democratic Party certainly has its problems (especially the Blue Dogs and the Larry Summers crowd), the current Republican dogma is incoherent and completely unworkable for actually running a country. The Bush years showed this, painfully. It's one thing to be a ruthless scumbag, but to be so reckless about everything is stunning. Over the past few decades, several conservatives have proudly adopted the nickname "the Prince of Darkness," (or something similar) yet none has been an evil genius – just evil. (Bush was more the Inspector Clouseau of evil.) No one's ever really doubted that Dick Cheney is a nasty asshole, but his fans mistakenly thought that he'd be their asshole, and that his nastiness would translate into tough, effective foreign policy and basic competence. Instead, even the would-be emperors seem more driven by psychological need than any steely-eyed realism.

The Emperor has no clothes, but in the Beltway, saying so means one isn't "serious." The Mayberry Machiavellis of the Bush White House thought policy was irrelevant and only public relations mattered, but driving all of this was the staggering hubris that they could not be wrong, could not fail, and could re-shape existence itself, unlike the reality-based community. They have plenty of company today in both politics and the press. Call this approach what you will: the fantasy-based community, inept McCarthyism, Tinkerbell thinking, the Green Lantern Theory, or perhaps the foam finger brigade. What's essential to them is to yell that America is the bestest country ever – and shout down anyone treasonous enough to actually work to make it so. It's hard to deal with a crowd that puts almost all their energy into tribal rituals affirming their inherent superiority and attacking those too "uncivil" to play along. Granted, not everyone actually bought into that revolution against the British Empire, or the whole principles of American democracy. Still - this is no way to run an empire.

The Persistence of Ideology

If conservatism at its best involves sticking with policies that have proved effective, at its worst it entails sticking with policies that have proved unsuccessful or even disastrous. It's not as if some pure, beneficent strain of conservatism is common, though, to the degree it exists at all. Movement conservatism has long consisted of policies that benefit a select few at the expense of the nation as a whole. In many cases, conservatives are still obstinately pushing ideologies and policies that have yielded horrible results – sometimes even for themselves. Admitting error is rare among this ideological crowd, taking blame is rarer still, and actually changing approaches is seen as anathema. Here's a look at this dynamic in three areas. (Be warned this is a long post; please feel free to skim it or skip around.)

Economics


Most of the teabaggers weren't quite sure exactly what they were for, but they were sure they were against Obama. Some unwittingly or willingly were demonstrating to lower poor Steve Forbes' taxes. As many liberal bloggers observed, merely raising the top marginal tax rate to Clinton levels was somehow labeled socialism, while many of the protesters seemed unaware that the middle class was getting a tax cut under Obama. The disconnects were many, but the most glaring was probably that many were effectively protesting for the same ideology and policies that had proven so catastrophic during the Bush administration.

Some of this is the old conservative shell game of moneyed elites and their shills, selling resentment to the base against the "cultural" elites and minorities who are supposedly oppressing them - all the better for those moneyed elites to increase wealth inequity in America to ever more harmful levels. Yet at times, it seems some conservative shills have convinced even themselves of an alternative reality where the New Deal was a colossal failure and Reaganomics (and its many variations and attendant policies) were somehow successful for the country as a whole.

Back in October 2008, Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) spoke at the University of Chicago about Milton Friedman's economic philosophy. I'd strongly recommend reading (or watching) the whole thing, but here's one key section:

When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld. I have it on my website. My favorite quote in that speech from Rumsfeld is this: he said, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”

So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them…

Now, the Friedmanites in this room will object to my methodology, I assure you, and I look forward to that. They will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedman’s theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. We’ll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.

But here’s the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman’s other life—he wasn’t just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world—China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a “who’s who.” So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedman’s great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.”

Throw in the Laffer curve, the Two Santa Claus Theory, E. Coli Conservatism, dishonest attacks on Social Security and the tax code, "deficits don't matter," Phil Gramm, strangling government in a bathtub, and vowing never to raise taxes, not even in the face of Armageddon – and it all adds up to a disaster, except for a select few.

For any economic philosophy, it's important to ask, what are its goals? Who benefits? What are the actual consequences of implementing policies based on this philosophy? In the case of conservative economic approaches, are wealth inequity and poverty even seen as problems? How is "the public good" defined and addressed, if it is at all?

Defenders of these conservative approaches still abound, especially among devotees of Reagan or George W. Bush. The ever-popular conservative mantra, "no one could have predicted," was especially fashionable for them after the financial crisis hit and before the looming presidential election. On NPR show Left, Right and Center back in early October 2008, conservative columnist Tony Blankley, both a free marketeer and pro-bailout, claimed there was no contradiction in his positions. He went on to offer one of my favorite attempts at white-washing conservative ideology (about 13:10 in):

Let me suggest – and we can have this discussion, and we will – that the causes of the Great Depression, the causes of the French Revolution, continue to be seriously debated, decades or centuries after the event, and we're going to be debating what caused this crisis for a very long time. I would argue that it was not free markets, and you'll argue that it was, and this is a debate we can have, nobody at this point knows, because we're in the middle of it. We haven't had a chance to step back and start looking at the data. That's something that will be done over the next number of years.

It's a wonder anyone studies history or the market at all, given this fog. Details may not be known, but the broad strokes and key culprits are. In Blankley's defense, he's acknowledged elsewhere that some deregulation was harmful (Robert Scheer and Matt Miller both challenged him in the same segment). But conservatives' perfect free market - a sort of capitalist Garden of Eden of purity and innocent, victimless greed – simply doesn't exist. It's dangerous to insist that it does or that it should. It's not as if conservative solutions to grave problems in the actual market responsibly address reality, either. The only "consistency" between widespread deregulation and a bailout is always giving the rich what they want - allowing them high profits for themselves in good times and protecting them from risk at public expense in the bad. Like many conservatives, Blankley also acted as if the crisis was some mysterious natural occurrence outside of human agency, and no one could possibly say why it happened.

If it's a mystery that passeth all understanding to these people, it raises the question as to why they should be running things at all, or consulted - but economic theories of movement conservatism often seem more grounded in theology and fantasy versus empirical data. It's not just economics that seems to mystify them, though, but basic human nature. DDay's recent post on Brooksley Born featured this tidbit:

Greenspan had an unusual take on market fraud, Born recounted: "He explained there wasn't a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him."

The mind reels. Although Greenspan's tried to revise his own culpability in creating the financial mess, he did admit to Congress last year that:

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

As Digby quipped at the time, "Apparently, it never occurred to the great guru that wealthy people would be greedy enough to destroy the system. It didn't show up in his "models.""

Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and the Obama gang seem to be too willing to continue the dodgy moves of Paulson and the Bush administration. Maybe it's class solidarity, similar ideologies, or the difficulty of fighting the bankers who own Congress. Maybe they simply aren't working hard enough to protect the country's economy against astonishingly arrogant, reckless and selfish corporate narcissists. Maybe they simply fail to realize the true nature of these oligarchs, and how dangerous they are. Maybe they're just too corrupt themselves. What Jonathan Schwarz wrote back in October about a flabbergasted establishment is as relevant as ever:

Who wouldn't be stunned when the most greedy, venal, vicious, cruel, arrogant, ignorant human beings on earth aren't eager to work in the public interest? Especially when people like them have never been willing to do so in the entire history of mankind, except on the rare occasions when they've been directly threatened with execution? It's stunning!

Somehow, it never occurred to them that human beings would be greedy and selfish.

Foreign Policy


In The Prince, Machiavelli advised it's better for a political leader to be feared than loved, but neoconservatives and followers of the Bush Doctrine clearly believe that's just too tame. Why bother with the good will of most of the world and cooperative approaches when instead, you can charge ahead, foster hatred in a greater number of people and nations, and cultivate distrust and disapproval even among allies? Yet strangely, this pugnacious approach has not helped national security.

If the neocons have been right about anything of consequence, it's a well-kept secret. For years now, they've blamed the mess in Iraq on the Bush administration's poor execution of their lovely plan, and ignored that America has been bogged down already in two wars in all their reckless saber-rattling against Iran. Just as conservative economic theory presumes that a perfect free market exists, neocons hold that America is simultaneously infallible and omnipotent. Let the reality-based community worry about such paltry things as the actual consequences of policies; great thinkers and armchair warriors cannot be trifled with such matters.

Back in 2006, neocon Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about his disenchantment with the movement, and Louis Menard made a number of sharp observations:

Although “America at the Crossroads” is intended, in part, for policy intellectuals—the journal-of-opinion writers and editors, political advisers, and think-tankers who deal with questions of governance from a philosophical point of view—Fukuyama is not, fundamentally, a policy intellectual himself. He is an original and independent mind, and his writings have never seemed to be constructed on a doctrinal foundation. He takes ideas seriously and he tries to see the big picture, and even if you think that he takes ideas too seriously, and that his pictures tend to be too big to help with the practical challenges of political decision-making in the here and now, his views on American policies and their implications deserve thoughtful attention. Such attention might begin, in the case of the present book, with the observation: No duh. It took Fukuyama until February, 2004, to realize that Charles Krauthammer, who has been saying basically the same thing since the end of the Cold War, is the intellectual cheerleader of a politics of American supremacy that appears to recognize no limit to its exercise of power? And that the Bush Administration, to the extent that it has any philosophical self-conception at all, operates on the basis of the crudest form of American exceptionalism? And that neoconservatism, whatever merits it once had as a corrective to liberal wishfulness and the amorality of realpolitik, long ago stiffened into a posture of reflexive moral belligerence about everything from foreign policy to literary criticism?

The present condition of the neoconservative movement is the outcome of a classic case of the gradual sclerosis of political attitudes. All the stages of the movement’s development were based on the primitive psychology of the “break”—the felt need, as one ages, to demonize the exact position one formerly occupied. The enemy is always the person still clinging to the delusions you just outgrew. So—going all the way back to the omphalos, Alcove 1 in the City College cafeteria, where Kristol and his friends fought with the Stalinists in Alcove 2—the Trotskyists hated the fellow-travellers they once had been; the Cold War liberals hated the Trotskyists they once had been; and the neoconservatives hated the liberals they once had been. Now the hardening is complete. Neoconservatism has merged with the politics that its founders, in their youth, held in greatest contempt: the jingoist and capitalist American right. We look from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

(Gotta love a really apt Orwell reference.)

To his credit, Fukuyama has criticized his past positions, and some conservative economic dogma as well. That's in sharp contrast to the deep intellectual dishonesty endemic to a neocon movement that views war as glorious and war spending as good business. As Steve Clemons noted back around the 2006 midterm elections, neocon Richard Perle's 'truthfulness depended on whether it was before or after the election.' And in February 2009, in "How to Disappear Completely," Eric Martin noted how several neocons (including Perle) have gone to darkly comical lengths to erase their own histories, down to denying that the neoconservative foreign policy they themselves crafted and named has ever existed. I find the dynamic fascinating and damning – most of the neocons still won't admit that they're wrong, but they're aware enough of the damage to their reputations to lie about their central role in one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history.

Neocons and most movement conservatives seem to take a dismissal of consequences as proof of seriousness and a disconnect from reality as a point of pride. As Fred Kaplan observed back in 2006, "The Republican administration has violated so many precepts of International Relations 101 that clichés take on the air of wisdom." Back in 2002, as the administration was trying to sell the Iraq War, Bush officials spoke with several conservative think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute supported regime change in Iraq – yet opposed reconstruction, because that was "nation-building." The Bush administration, in turn, didn't want to talk about reconstruction or overall costs, either, because it might hurt selling the war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who talked about Phase IV (reconstruction), although he also insisted that Defense and not State be in charge of all operations. It's a convenient ideology, that allows for bombing the hell out of a country and its population without any responsibility for picking up the pieces. It's an arrogant and cruel approach, especially when one also actively interferes with others' attempts to fix any of the mess.

Damning the consequences (or the torpedoes) seems to be one hallmark of cowboy diplomacy. But these cowboys and wannabe warriors are a strange breed, viewing cooperation as wimpy, and preoccupied with asserting their dominance and tough guy bonafides. For people obsessed with their own images, they're shockingly unaware of how others see them. John Bolton's approach to diplomacy amounted to walking into a bar and punching some poor schlep in the face, thinking everyone else in the bar would be impressed (or intimidated) and want to buy him a drink. When informed in 2007 that 80% of Iraqis wanted American troops out of their country, neocon father and imperialist Norman Podhoretz said, "I don't much care." Meanwhile, Bush was positively fixated on the Iraqis showing gratitude; back in 2006:

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . .

[T]he president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd.

Nor is cluelessness and belligerence limited to one party. In October 2008, Glenn Greenwald scrutinized an op-ed on Iran by "Two former Senators -- conservative Democrat Chuck Robb and conservative Republican Dan Coats (that's what "bipartisan" means)." Predictably, it contained more sabre-rattling and tough, serious talk. As Greenwald observed (emphasis his):

It's just objectively true that there is no country in the world -- anywhere -- that threatens to attack and bomb other countries as routinely and blithely as the U.S. does. What rational leader wouldn't want to obtain nuclear weapons in a world where the "superpower" is run by people like Dan Coats and Chuck Robb who threaten to attack and bomb whatever countries they want? Even the Coats/Robb Op-Ed argues that Iranian proliferation would be so threatening to the U.S. because "the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent" -- in other words, they'd have the ability to deter a U.S. attack on their country, and we can't have that.

So: It's not that we necessarily want to attack Iran, but we can't allow them any safeguards should we choose to attack them in the future. Their potential self-defense is a grave threat to our potential invasion. It's comparable to Bush administration claims about torture back when they were still officially pretending we didn't torture – another law outlawing torture would be harmful, because even though we didn't torture, we might choose to do so in the future.

This mad approach to foreign policy and human rights is strikingly similar to an old Monty Python book gag, Llap-Goch (caps in the original):

"LLAP-Goch is the Secret Welsh ART of SELF DEFENCE that requires NO INTELLIGENCE, STRENGTH or PHYSICAL courage… It is an ANCIENT Welsh ART based on a BRILLIANTLY simple I-D-E-A, which is a SECRET. The best form of DEFENCE is ATTACK (Clausewitz) and the most VITAL element of ATTACK is SURPRISE (Oscar HAMMERstein). Therefore, the BEST way to protect yourself AGAINST any ASSAILANT is to ATTACK him before he attacks YOU... Or BETTER... BEFORE the THOUGHT of doing so has EVEN OCCURRED TO HIM!!! SO YOU MAY BE ABLE TO RENDER YOUR ASSAILANT UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE he is EVEN aware of your very existence!

(It's a bit frightening that the Pythons basically predicted almost the entirety of the conservative blogosphere.)

Jonathan Schwarz captured a similar level of insanity and befuddlement about human nature in a post that quotes from an old news article (his emphasis):

Intelligence officials believe [Hezbollah leader Imad Moughniyah] is seeking personal vengeance on the United States and Israel for the deaths of his brothers, which explains in part his willingness to lend his expertise to operations organized by other groups. Mugniyeh's brothers were killed in retaliatory attacks in Lebanon believed to have been carried out by Israeli and U.S. operatives.

"Bin Laden is a schoolboy in comparison with Mugniyeh," an Israeli-intelligence officer told Jane's Foreign Report recently. "The guy is a genius, someone who refined the art of terrorism to its utmost level. We studied him and reached the conclusion that he is a clinical psychopath motivated by uncontrollable psychological reasons, which we have given up trying to understand. The killing of his two brothers by the Americans only inflamed his strong motivation."

Wait...you're telling me that a young man, when his country was invaded by foreigners, got angry? And then when they killed his brothers, he became even madder? And he wanted revenge on the people who'd done it?

Somehow, it never occurred to them that people won't appreciate having their loved ones killed.

Torture and Human Rights


(Read the full cartoon here.)

I'm not going to spend much time on this one (since I've tried to do so in greater depth before), except to note a handful of points. The Bush administration was warned about abusing and torturing prisoners many times by some of their own people – but did it anyway. The JPRA report even told them that any information obtained through torture was unreliable –something that's been known since at least Roman times. Perhaps they knew that torture "worked" well enough for their purposes – false confessions to justify a war of choice – or they just didn't care. Regardless, it was impossible for them to arrive at that dark place without monumental arrogance, dehumanization of all potential victims, and a deep and utter contempt for democracy. Conservatives Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg, among others, condemned the abuses at Abu Ghraib - until it became apparent how high up the blame probably went. Then they started making excuses. Is it possible to be more authoritarian, partisan and dishonorable than that? Most of the movement conservative base has done the same, supporting torture - torture - and done so rabidly, all because their leaders told them it was necessary and done to mysterious, dangerous men who don't look or speak like the "real" Amuricans who love their country. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line than torture, but for authoritarians, it's all about tribal loyalty – torture is wrong when done to them, right when done to an Evil Other (even if he or she happens to be innocent). For the far right, torture is like everything else – the right thing to do when so ordered by Republicans, and absolutely imperative to do if it upsets a Democrat or liberal. Spite and tribal identity are about their only "moral" standards. A significant number of rule-of-law conservatives, including members of the JAG corps, oppose torture and support due process for the innocent and guilty alike, but the conservative base and most of the conservative punditry ferociously oppose them on both counts.

Somehow, it never occurred to them that people will say anything if tortured.

More likely – and more frightening – they simply don't give a damn.

It'd be nice, and good for the country, if any remaining sane, fiscally responsible and rule-of-law conservatives could take over the Republican party. As it stands, it'll be a wonder if they can even get back to the good ol' days, when the Republican party stood merely for screwing over the poor and hating minorities, and not torturing people to start unnecessary wars.

As for the Democrats - my concern for the Obama administration is that in too many areas, they're adhering far too closely to the Bush playbook. The tasks they face are monumental, and often with powerful, entrenched interests opposing them. But while competent management helps a great deal, it can only do so much if the plans themselves are fundamentally flawed. Their stances on military tribunals, possible indefinite detention and state secrets range from troubling to horrible. On the economic front, I have to wonder if Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin are similar to liberal war hawk Michael O'Hanlon. For O'Hanlon, still resistant to admitting error on Iraq, it's not enough that he be right in the future – he needs also to have been right. His reputation and pride hinges on his past, dreadful policies somehow being vindicated (even though attempting that is a quagmire on its own). I wonder if Obama's economic team is comparably set on vindicating their past, harmful policies. They certainly seem committed to rescuing the established, corrupt order versus the economy itself. (Then there's the possibility of good ol' corruption itself.) Human folly isn't limited to one political party, even if one has a strong natural advantage.

Conservative stances on economics, foreign policy and human rights provide a pretty bleak snapshot of the Republican party. The poor remain faceless to them, as do foreigners blithely bombed and the victims of torture and abuse. Torture, with its dynamics of power and false confessions, actually makes a frighteningly apt metaphor for movement conservatives and obstinate ideologues everywhere. Why do these people ignore data and counsel, inflict suffering on populations foreign and domestic, and fiercely dismiss overwhelming evidence against their favored approach? Just as with torture itself, it's simple - they like the answers it gives them.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo and Blue Herald.)