Wrong is Wrong

Since the election of Barack Obama, the GOP–aka “the party of no”–has shown impressive discipline, putting party orthodoxy ahead of both the common good and, frequently, sanity. The Democrats, on the other hand, have happily confirmed Will Rogers’ great line: “I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” The left wing of the party has pretty constantly criticized the President for not doing more, not doing it more quickly, and not doing what they wanted.

I’ve considered much of this criticism unfair–often it has been the result of not understanding the constraints imposed by Separation of Powers, or the magnitude of the economic threat he inherited. Other complaints have had more merit–contrary to Republican rhetoric, for example, Obama has often seemed too willing to compromise, too reluctant to play hard-ball. But by far the most serious criticism has been his acceptance of Bush-era infringements on civil liberties.

This is a man who taught Constitutional law, a man who stood up for the rule of law as a Senator and who said all the right things as a candidate. It was a relief, after 8 years of a profoundly lawless administration, to cast a vote for someone who could be expected to respect Constitutional limits. That expectation has proved illusory, and Obama’s embrace of Bush-era surveillance measures has been painfully disappointing.

The recent announcement that the President would not veto the current Defense bill , however, is worse. While much of the bill is uncontroversial,  its counterterrorism section states that the entire world, including American soil, is a battlefield in the war on terror, and that the U.S. military thus has the authority to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, even citizens, suspected of aiding terrorists.

I can’t think of anything more profoundly unAmerican.

It’s bad enough that large numbers of Congressmen and Senators support this assault on the Constitution and the rule of law. For Obama–who clearly knows better–to sign it is simply inexcusable.  Laura Murphy, the longtime head of the ACLU’s Washington office, said it best:

“If President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law. The last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was during the McCarthy era and President Truman had the courage to veto that bill. We hope that the president will consider the long view of history before codifying indefinite detention without charge or trial.”

In ordinary times, when we had two responsible political parties, the loyal opposition would provide a corrective to Executive Branch over-reaching. The saddest thing about the farce that is our current political environment is that no such counterbalance exists; indeed, the major movers of this appalling provision include Lindsay Graham and the ever-angrier John McCain. The same GOP that contests the power of the White House to reform health care evidently has no problem handing over the power to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens.

We can only hope the Supreme Court remains sufficiently “activist” to invalidate this incredibly unAmerican measure.

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Pants on Fire

The interminable GOP debates continue to offer entertainment, if not enlightenment. Michelle Bachmann continues to display total ignorance of the Middle East (as Pierre Atlas notes, she clearly has no clue that there are differences between the Shia and Sunni–but then, she has little comprehension of the US Constitution, either). And in the most recent debate, Mitt Romney claimed that Obama’s policies have been the most costly of any President–a clear “liar, liar, pants on fire” statement that may have played well to the debate audience, but is wildly untrue.

As a helpful graph in the New York Times makes clear, George W. Bush’s “policies” cost 5.07 trillion dollars. Obama’s, by contrast, have cost 1.44 trillion.

But what is more revealing by far is what that money bought. Bush waged wars he didn’t pay for–one of which was an unnecessary and ruinous war of choice. Obama’s spending was primarily on the stimulus–to prevent the economic depression that Bush’s policies would otherwise have ushered in–and health care reform. And if the health economists I know are correct, the initial costs of health care reform will eventually be recouped as the reforms force efficiencies and savings in our patchwork, bloated “system.”

Faced with the stark differences between the two administrations, I can understand why Romney might duck the issue entirely. But he is apparently unable to refrain from pandering–even at the expense of the truth.

Commentators continue to puzzle over the “anyone but Romney” attitude of the Republican base. It may have something to do with this pandering, which is painfully obvious. The current base wants authentically crazy, not just pretend.

I Guess It Isn’t the Money….

Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports:

“By employing a plethora of tax-dodging techniques, 30 multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day — including weekends — during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections, according to a new report from the non-partisan Public Campaign.

Despite a growing federal deficit and the widespread economic stability that has swept the U.S since 2008, the companies in question managed to accumulate profits of $164 billion between 2008 and 2010, while receiving combined tax rebates totaling almost $11 billion. Moreover, Public Campaign reports these companies spent about $476 million during the same period to lobby the U.S. Congress, as well as another $22 million on federal campaigns, while in some instances laying off employees and increasing executive compensation.”

To put these numbers in perspective, these corporations spent three times as much lobbying for preferential treatment as they paid in taxes.

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Sounds Familiar….

I was filing some papers the other day, when I came across my somewhat dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s classic article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It was written for Harper’s Magazine in 1964–but it sounded as if it could have been written for our own toxic times. Hofstadter explained his terminology thusly:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds….I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind.”

The article used historical examples–the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement and others–to give the reader a flavor of the “paranoid” mindset to which he was referring. The anti-Masonic hysteria he described just seems quaint today, when the few Masons still around have an average age of 103 or so, but the anti-Catholic rhetoric has uncomfortable resonance. “A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by the ‘potentates of Europe,’ multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation and sending increasing thousands of of voters to ‘lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.'”

As Hofstadter memorable put it, “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”

He also made an observation that seems particularly salient today–that the difference between the spokesmen for these historical movements and today’s right wing is that previous hysterics felt they were fending off threats to a way of life they still possessed, while today’s culture warriors feel dispossessed. They believe America has largely been taken away from them and their kind. And he quotes another author’s observation that there may be a “persistent psychic complex” made up of “preoccupations and fantasies” that characterize the paranoid style: a megalomaniacal view of oneself as Elect, wholly good, persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of great power to the adversary of the moment…It’s hard to read that without thinking of the contemporary insistence that “bible-believing” Christians are “victims,” that gays are a rich bloc pursuing a nefarious “agenda” and that all Muslims are well-funded and powerful terrorists.

I don’t know whether to be comforted or disturbed by the similarities between today’s “paranoids” and those described in the article. On the one hand, America survived those past eruptions–the know-nothings, the nativists, and the other ugly and regrettable episodes of our history did become footnotes of our larger story.

On the other hand, we waste an enormous amount of time and energy trying to solve not only the real problems we face, but the problems such people create.

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Who Should We Trust?

These may not be the times that try men’s souls, but they sure are times that confound economic policymakers.

We have one set of economists telling countries to implement austerity measures, and another group insisting that for now, stimulus is the answer. For those of us who are not trained in the “dismal science,” it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between medicine and snake oil. Prescriptions sounding eminently reasonable to those of us unschooled in economic arcana turn out to be counter-productive in practice—case in point: research showing that so-called “right to work” legislation just depresses wages without generating the promised economic growth.

So where should we look for advice?

An October paper for the New America Foundation, by Daniel Alpert, Robert Hockett and Nouriel Roubini (not-so-affectionately dubbed “Dr. Doom” after he predicted the mortgage meltdown) proposes a way forward, and the logic seems—at least to this non-economist—pretty compelling.

The authors spend considerable space analyzing “how we got here,” and they note that digging out of the present crisis will be particularly difficult because, thanks to the entry into the world economy of “successive waves of new export-oriented economies,” and the concurrent, dramatic rise in productivity gains “rooted in new information technologies and the globalization of corporate supply chains,” the world economy now has excess supplies of labor, capital and productive capacity relative to global demand. Furthermore, the integration of new economies with competitive workforces has shifted the balance between capital and labor, resulting in income inequality as bad as—if not worse than—the gilded age.

The bottom line, as they see it: it will be difficult to sustain even current levels of consumption without improved wages and incomes, but such increases are unlikely due to the gluts of both labor and capital. In such a situation, austerity simply leads to a vicious downward cycle of weaker demand, weaker investment and more unemployment.

What to do? The authors lay out a three-part prescription: first, a “substantial” five to seven year public investment program to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure; second, a “comprehensive” debt restructuring plan; and third, global reforms to offset diminished demand in the developed world and correct the current imbalance in supply and demand.

The paper is long and quite detailed, and the descriptions of each proposal deserve to be read in their entirety, but I was particularly struck by the logic of the infrastructure recommendations.

  • Fixing infrastructure now would take advantage of a “historically unique opportunity” to put idle capital and labor to work rebuilding at an extremely low cost and with potentially high returns. Capital costs are now at historic lows, and labor is in abundant supply. It will never be less expensive to fix our decaying infrastructure than it is now.
  • The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates we need 2.2 trillion to meet even the most basic infrastructure needs. Less than half of that is currently budgeted.
  • Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure generates 23,000 well-paying jobs. Over the course of five years, such a program would create over 5.52 million jobs.
  • The CBO estimates that every dollar of infrastructure spending generates a 1.6 dollar increase in GDP.
  • Fixing our infrastructure is also essential to restoring American competitiveness. China invests 9% of GDP annually in infrastructure—we spend less than 3%. Public infrastructure investment lowers the costs of transportation, electricity and other core business expenses.

Even if these economists are overstating the case, what’s the worst that would happen if we took their advice? Our bridges might stop falling down? Pollution levels would abate? Workers with jobs might have money to spend?

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