Rage On, Righteous One

The original Big Mac Attack.

I never felt that WikiLeaks release of State Department internal cables was that big a deal to the US.  In fact, I argued that it was a refreshing breath of fresh air into the stultified world on international diplomacy - or as it's known to most people: artful lying. (I just spend fifteen minutes trying to find what I wrote at the time, but I failed.)

Now, we have Anonymous.  Westboro Baptist Church are a bunch of evil, evil people.  Someone hacked their site.  WBC blamed Anonymous, who are a well known group of hackers who take on big institutions.  In a phone in show, one of the evil minions of WBC kept ranting about what Anonymous did - when someone else named j3st3r (jester) claimed credit for the hack.  The Anonymous member got so cheesed off at this nitwit that in the space of one her rants, he went in and crashed their website.  Took like ten minutes.

I love it when Hilarious and Awesome get married and have a kid named Justice.

I don't buy that Twitter leads to revolutions or Facebook ousts dictators.  But, while Julian Assange is a narcissistic jerkweed, what WikiLeaks and Anonymous are doing is really cool.

Ezra Klein has been wondering what will take the place of unions, as a 21st century economy renders them irrelevant.  Maybe the great democratic potential of the internet is finally beginning to be unleashed.

And if Anonymous has a contribution site, I will give them money.

A Zombie Post

It's been a while, but I saw this last night on Hulu and thought to myself, "Self, what the hell was THAT."

Is Starburst trying to win over the recreational drug user/zombie aficionado/Asian bagpipe enthusiast demographic?

Because if so, WIN!

Your Wednesday Morning Takedown

About a week or so ago, I launched an... intemperate... attack on David Brooks for being an asshat. You can read it if you want.  Anyway, Brooks went further down Asshat Lane with his latest column that eventually winds up with real, actual death panels for the elderly.  Which Brooks somehow equates with being the moral thing to do because it would allow us to spend more of our limited government money on education.  The moral thing, in Brooks' mind, is to kill grandma to pay for little Felix's education.

Not raise taxes, mind you.  Kill Grannie.

Rather than elevate my blood pressure, I'll just re-direct you to Tom Scocca, who is one of the best reasons to read Slate.  OK, close to the only reason.

Seriously, read it.  It's classic.

Just. Kill. Me. Now.

Roy Edroso found this gem over at the National Review on why teachers need their salaries and benefits cut:

Most importantly, teachers have important non-financial compensation — working with children in a universally admired profession, etc.

Something named Matthew Shaffer is responsible for that.

So, here's where we stand: Everyone hates bankers, so they get a ton of money.  Everyone loves teachers, so they should work for spare change and bus tokens.

Once again, fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market!

The Times Has a Poll...

So, there is a NYTimes poll out today.  Here.

They lead, of course, with the bad news for labor.  Labor unions are not that popular, though they are more popular than they are unpopular.  Interestingly, a plurality doesn't know enough about unions to offer an opinion.  Likely because for most people, unions are like unicorns. (See what I did there...)

The rest of the polls comes out very well for unions and public sector workers.  For instance, are salaries and benefits too high for public sector workers?  Well, 26% say TOO HIGH!  25% say too low.  36% say about right. The rest think magenta is a type of Italian food.  So, keeping score at home?  Fifty-one percent say public workers are either paid fairly or not enough.  Twenty-five percent agree with Walker-Christie-Kasich.

When asked whether wages and benefits should be cut to balance budgets, 37% favor cutting wages and 56% oppose.  When asked whether public sector workers should lose collective bargaining rights, 33% favor no collective bargaining, 60% favor collective bargaining.

Most interesting to me was what people thought should be done to balance state budgets. A plurality of 40% said raise taxes, 22% said cut public employees benefits, 20% said cut spending on infrastructure, 3% said cut education and 15% think fireflies are actually pixies.

What is striking about these opinions is how absent they are in most news coverage.  True, most news coverage is focused on Charlie Sheen at the moment, but when discussing budget woes at the state and federal levels, almost every conversation in the media outside of Rachel Maddow's show focuses on spending cuts - austerity.  In fact there is a lot of support for raising taxes.

Given the breathless coverage of Chris Christie - whom the self-same Times said had found the perfect villain in public service unions - it's interesting that what Dan Malloy is proposing in Connecticut - a combination of spending cuts and tax increases - is actually more popular than the knife-to-the-bone ideas of Republicans.

George Gallup once said he was amazed at how the American people could reach the right conclusions with the wrong information.  Here, they seem to have reached for the compassionate, judicious conclusion in the absence of any information.  As noted, the Sunday Gasbags shows had Christie and Daniels on, but only one union spokesman - and that was because of external pressure.  The attacks on public unions - and unions in general - was clearly seen as news, but only one side was given a megaphone.

That comes through in the final question of the poll.  Do you think labor unions have too much power in politics.  A plurality of 37% said yes, whereas 19% said too little and 29% said the right amount.  That makes 48% saying the right amount or too little, but how can anyone rightly say that unions have too much clout in politics?  Name the last major battle that unions won in the political arena?  Free trade agreements?  EPIC?  I can't remember the last time the unions got what they wanted from Congress.  Maybe the saving of GM and Chrysler, but the unions conceded a lot to make that happen.

Unions are still easily vilified, and the news media are happy to carry that water.  They always have, going back to the days of Terrence Powderly and the Knights of Labor.  Labor unions are assaults upon the bastions of wealth, and that can make the middle class nervous.  What if they aim for the Upper East Side and hit Queens instead?

But the fact that unions are enjoying solid support from the American people, despite being vilified consistently  since their very inception is a heartening moment for me.

What Are You Gonna Do? Except Doing Something...

Expect to see this jpg a lot more in the future...

So, Arkansas is being hit by earthquakes.  Here.

The reason for the quakes looks to be natural gas extraction techniques.  Here's the money quote at the end:

She said she and her husband had removed everything from the walls of their house, including family photos and television sets, because many photos had fallen in recent quakes.

"Other than that, there's really not much more you can do," she said. "It's Mother Earth. It's going to do what it's going to do. All we can do is wait for the big one and hope and pray it doesn't happen."

This is a great example of the American ethos.  The "Shit Happens" school of human society.  If, indeed, the earthquakes are caused by injection wells, then there really IS something you can do.  Stop with the injection wells.  But Americans have a unique sense of fatalism when it comes to preventable environmental disasters.  Mountain top drilling poisons a stream?  Not much you can do.  Toxic waste dumped in the water supply?  Not much you can do.

The amount of crap the average American will eat is really amazing.  That's why the Wisconsin situation has been so surprising.  Usually, we just sit and take our beatings from the Invisible Hand of the market and complain about Wall Street plutocrats while doing nothing.

It's refreshing to see people say, No, I CAN do something.  Be nicer if that ethos spread.

Let It Bleed

I'm off to give blood.  I wish I could say I was doing this in solidarity with Libya Wisconsin Bahrain the Armed Forces  New Zealand quake victims Haitians pretty much any time Melissa Leo Thing Two who got a bloody nose at his birfday party the Irish.

But no, it's just time for my biennial bleeding.

The Hound of the Basketcase ran off as I was trying to get her home, so I couldn't work out.  And I'm such a big, delicate flower that I can't work out for at least three days after I give blood without getting woozy.

So... Yay!

But on the other hand, we all have to suffer the occasional prick from time to time, but when you do it this way, you get to save a life.

You can schedule your bleeding by calling 1-800-GIVE-LIFE.  Which doesn't add up to seven digits, which means the Red Cross sucks at math.

UPDATE: I am an excellent bleeder.  Everyone at the VFW said so.

Mercantilism vs. Microeconomics

This is a very interesting and provocative piece on the relative merits of mercantilism - as represented by the Whig party's American System of the 1800s - and what the author call the Iron Laws of Capitalism - perhaps best summarized as basic microeconomics.

Two points to build on, after you've read it.  Waiting.  Waiting.  Waiting... Done?  Good.

First, Britain pioneered industrialism, then moved to advocate free trade, because Britain was the world's foremost industrial power.  Being the world's foremost industrial power, meant that Britain would benefit from open competition.  Closed markets - via mercantilism - would hurt British manufacturers.  So... free trade!

America embraced free trade most wholeheartedly after World War II.  The perils of closed, insular markets as typified by the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley tariffs had helped create the Great Depression.  Free trade would mean more markets and - the theory goes - more peace.  The fact that around the time of the Bretton Woods conference America produced roughly half of all manufactured goods on the planet probably helped cement America's embrace of free trade.

Second, we have seen much genuflecting before the altar of Chinese awesomeness.  Ironically, a lot of those flogging Chinese awesomeness - people like Thomas "My Head Is Flat" Friedman - are also ardent free traders.  It's ironic, because as the piece above explains, China has embraced a mercantile philosophy.  What we see in China is a real partnership between the government and business.  We see central organization - not Stalinesque central planing - where the government coordinates efficiency.  This is not that dissimilar to the German economic miracle of the '50s and '60s and up to today.  Germany coordinates between government, business and labor in order to create an economy based on harmonic national needs rather than pure free market competition.

Paradoxically, this allows them to compete better in the international market.  Just like China.

The US - like Britain before it - is largely ruled by the ideas of pure capitalism (the laws of microeconomics).  Like Britain, the US is currently seeing its preeminent place as the world's leading manufacture slip away.

The response has been to sink further into the orthodoxy of microeconomic law.  Obama did mention something about needing a national industrial policy, but can you imagine the batshit wailing from the right if Obama actually proposed that the government, business and labor sat down and figured out what was best for the country and how to get there together?  Death panels would seem quaint by comparison.

So, what we will get is more of this Wisconsin nonsense.  Not just the union busting, but the other stuff slipped into the odious bill: things like the no-bid sale of the state's power plants to private companies (why do you think the Koch's bankrolled Walker's campaign?).  We will continue to see Americans as a whole fisted by the Invisible Hand in order to further enrich the now effectively stateless American millionaire class.

Britain eventually met its collapse as the world's factory with a powerful welfare state borne of the travails of World War II.  I can't see a way to that place for the US right now.

But it will be interesting to see how far we can travel down the road of "comparative advantage" and "the iron law of wages" before we start to finally look at how "other countries" do it.

And how much wealth will be funneled off to the wealthy before we do.

UPDATE:  Here is something more about Germany via Bondad.  It excerpts a Time Magazine piece that describes Germany's mercantile impulses, but without really calling it mercantilism (at least not in the excerpt).

Walker and Christie Sitting In A Tree...

Christie is the one on the left.

John Cole found this.  Walker wants to BAN wind power from Wisconsin.  Ban it.  Wisconsin is not a coal state or a natural gas state or a petroleum state.  It does sit on the edge of the largest fresh water lake system in the world and has access to immense amount of wind.  Walker is basically saying that if a company wants to come in and start creating wind power in Wisconsin, he will stop it.  That's not free market.  That's... well it's crazy.

Dennis G found this. It's a Twitter exchange between Christie and a Jersey citizen, in which Christie is called on being factually inaccurate and responds pretty much with ad hominem attacks.  Facts aren't really relevant to Christie, just airtime.  By that measure he's doing well.

Walker and Christie are the current rock stars of the GOP.  One's an ignorant boob carrying the water for his campaign donors and wingnut ideology and the other wishes he could have been Tony Soprano instead of only looking like him.

Meanwhile other governors - Republican and Democrat - are working to balance budgets and work with their legislatures to keep their states afloat.

I know some of it is the media obsession with conflict - if it bleeds, it leads - but they have literally placed the sideshow, talk radio-type personalities at the forefront.  No wonder Brooks is so enamored with Mitch Daniels, Daniels isn't insane.

A World Without Endgames...

OK, so we know how THIS ends, but...

Wisconsin, Ohio, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Ireland, the federal budget, the NFL lockout...

The only thing we seem to know for sure is that The King's Speech will win best picture tonight.  Rarely do we have so many varied things happening without any sense of how they will end.

The attacks on labor unions in the midwest: I can't see a way out for either side.  Walker and Kasich appear to have gone "all in" and for the unions, this is life or death.  How do we see a way out of this?  Especially in Wisconsin, where Walker and the GOP have taken some bad faith moves that will make it hard for the Democrats to trust them on any compromises.

In the middle east, I think Qaddafi-Ghadafi-Kahtoffee-Whatever is obviously toast.  But there is no clear roadmap or precedent for what comes next in any of the North African countries.  And what happens when these protests spread?  I'm optimistic that what comes next will be - at least in the long term - better than what came before, but who knows?

Take Ireland, the thrashing of Fianna Fail... heh heh "Fail"... at the polls is something I think we've all been waiting for.  The IMF and the "Global North" have been running around the developing world for years forcing these austerity measures of countries in economic difficulty.  Most of these countries have poor levels of political efficacy, a fancy way of saying they have little democracy.  As they try and force austerity on the Irish, the Irish are saying "Feck no, ya bastard!" There is talk of the Irish leaving the Euro, which would set off another round of economic instability which will further impede the economic recovery globally (as if gas prices weren't doing that already).

The same austerity fetishists - who Frank Rich correctly pegs as being guys who really only care about transferring wealth upwards - are at work in Washington.  Using the rubes and bumpkins of the Tea Party as their sock puppets, they are working to strip even the most basic social safety nets and human and physical infrastructure from the budget.  There are rumors of a deal to put off a shutdown, but who knows?  Can Boehner control the teatards?

Oh, and no NFL?  Because the billionaire owners want 60% of the revenue?  For doing what exactly?  While I'm sure it's possible Jerry Jones will get brain damage from anesthesia on his next round of plastic surgery, it is almost a certainty that NFL players will see their lives shortened for playing the game.  Nobody pays to see the owners.

At some point, the plutocrats of the West are going to overreach, just as the autocrats of North Africa did.  What brought down Mubarak and what will bring down Getoffme was an economic crisis brought about by steeply rising food prices.  Amartya Sen wrote that democracies don't experience famines.  Well, let's hope that's true in the era of global climate change.  But my point is that when people see, very tangibly, their standard of living fall apart, they will reach for radical solutions.  Conservatives embraced the Tea Party - who are crazy - and who don't appear to actually care about the current economic crisis, preferring instead to grind their ideological axes.  But 2010 shows just how quickly a democratic process can turn on a party that doesn't do something about an economic crisis.

The Berlin Wall came down, because East Germans couldn't see any hope for their economic future.  The Chinese regime survived Tiananmen because they gave the urban elites prosperity.  We shall see if they survive the anger of the poor peasants, but they met a challenge with prosperity, not democracy.

If the middle classes of the United States and other western countries see their declining standards of living as being the product of plutocratic rule, I have hope that we can change the disintegration of our public sphere.

But I can't see the endgame.

My Saturday Post on Friday

Chris Christie at work...

Since I'm going to be stuck watching the athletic majesty that is JV wrestling all day long - I say watching, because for most of them, coaching won't help - I thought I'd go ahead and get my Saturday post out of the way.

I'm impressed with Chris Christie.  Here's a guy with negative numbers in his home state, who's a blowhard bully and is as telegenic as a canker sore.  Yet somehow he has the national media's rapt attention.  Certainly some of that can be ascribed to his being in New Jersey, which is right next to one of America's media capitols.

But Governor O'Malley of Maryland and our new Guv, Malloy, are also near the seats of power and influence.  They have balanced their budgets with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases that spread the pain around much more equitably and don't eviscerate public spending on public goods.  They do it without puffing up like a blowfish and thundering for the cameras.  (I'm reminded of that scene in Crimes and Misdemeanors when Woody Allen's character intercuts shots of Mussolini with Alan Alda's character pontificating about how great he is.)

There are literally dozens of governors around the country who are dealing with budget crises without vilifying public servants or stripping away collective bargaining rights.  This includes potential presidential candidate Mitch Daniels and wingnut extraordinaire Rick Scott.  Even the reliably nutty like Perry of the Republic of Texas have opted away from what Christie, Kasich and Walker are doing.  (They sound like the law firm of the damned.)  Oh, yeah, here it is.

Every governor in the country is facing a budget crisis.  The economy is weak and revenues are down.  Every governor is coping with this.  But Walker and Christie have resorted to blaming people who have almost literally nothing to do with the economic meltdown.

Much has been made - and rightly so - about the fact that of all the Sunday talk shows, only one has a labor leader on it, and that was after a lot of pressure.  The punditry has largely assumed that Walker and Christie's "brave" stand against public service unions makes them popular or at least principled.  The numbers don't support that, but what would David Gregory know about what unions mean?

Walker has already been exposed as a guy who is primarily concerned about union busting and only marginally - if at all - concerned about fiscal orthodoxy.  Yet Christie continues to get glowing press coverage.

Christie won, because the incumbent governor of New Jersey was tied tightly to Wall Street and was not very popular.  He doesn't have a mandate to do anything.  But he runs around like a wee Mussolini, strutting and sticking his jaw out and treating his political opponents like shit.  And for this he is lionized?

I honestly don't know what to make of our public discourse anymore...

Thug Life

The GOP call on reinforcements.

So, what has happened recently?

Well, in Wisconsin, the GOP-led assembly conducts a potentially illegal vote on Walker's Union Killing Bill.

Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia laughs off a comment about someone assassinating the President of the United States.

And, with a federal governmental showdown days away, Beohner goes golfing.

Chris Christie declares he's going to the border and wait for the jobs to come flooding from Connecticut because our governor has actually increased revenue while also cutting spending.  You know, responsible governing.

The GOP seems entirely made up of people who want to beat up and bully others and funnel money to the rich.

They do not deserve to govern this country.  They simply don't.  In an honest and fair exchange of ideas they would lose horribly.

Too bad that won't happen.

Required Reading

This is perhaps the best piece I've read about why Wisconsin is the most important story of the year.  More important to Americans, I would argue, than the Jasmine Revolutions.

Read it:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline

Drum compelling lays out how labor - wedded with the electoral power of the Democratic Party - created the modern American middle class.  And how the New Left (hippies for the non-academic) ruptured the New Deal coalition by driving a wedge between Old Labor - the cigar chomping union bosses - and the Democratic Party. This led to the decline in union membership and union electoral muscle and launched the DLC neo-liberalism that further undermined unions, as Democrats began to solicit corporate money rather than union votes.

It's a fascinating read and I think largely historically accurate.  The question is: what comes next?  Unions - as we have known them - are largely dying.  What will take their place as advocates for a blue collar middle class and - frankly - everyone else.

When you're sitting at home enjoying your weekend, in the house where your mortgage was made possible by federal tax policy, watching a TV you bought with your decent wages... think about the unions who helped make all that possible.

More Thoughts On DOMA

I was thinking about using the Courts to get rid off DOMA as opposed to the Congress.  "Serious" people - who can best be defined as temperamental conservatives who think change might be good but can also be scary so no thank you - suggest that Congress should take the lead in repealing DOMA.

This is largely because the conventional wisdom is that if abortion had been legalized via legislative action as opposed to Roe v. Wade the issue of abortion would have magically gone away.  The Courts, in this line of argument, short circuited the will of the people and created an automatic backlash.  There may also be some unspoken thinking that Brown might also fall into a case of the Courts rushing ahead of the legislature.

I think that's wrong.  First of all, there would be no legislative movement on these issues.  Southern states would have never voluntarily ended Jim Crow.  Abortion would have become a patchwork of state laws with varying implications for women's health (not that different than it is now, frankly).

Sometimes the Courts have to lead.  Does anyone REMOTELY think that this House of Representatives is going to repeal DOMA?  To argue that ideally the Congress should lead on this issue is to endorse the status quo, which is discriminatory.  To advocate non-action on this issue is itself an action that reinforces discrimination.

I think there is also another reason why this is not Roe.  The majority of Americans have more than made their piece with Brown.  To the degree that we have racists in American public life, they have to guard their true colors.  Roe remains more controversial, but the fact is that a majority of Americans have made their piece with abortion.  The difference is that opposition to abortion is still acceptable, largely because there is a moral position in opposing it.  It's not a moral position I agree with, but I imagine the vast majority of anti-abortion Americans really do see the fetus as a living creature deserving of protection.  There is no comparable moral position on racial discrimination.

Which brings us back to DOMA.  DADT was going to be overturned in the Courts, I think, but it was helpful to have it hashed out in Congress so the Pentagon could do a managed, orderly, boring transition.  But DOMA will not play out that way.  If it is overturned (Justice Kennedy, we're looking at you), presumably there will be a lot more gay marriages.  Presumably, the full faith and credit clause will apply to Bob and Jim's marriage from Massachusetts.

And what is significant is that nothing will happen.  I used this yesterday, but it illustrates my point:

Brown took a long while to become accepted.  But we mostly do accept it now.  I think the end of DOMA will precipitate massive amounts of hot air on Fox and hand-wringing at the Washington Post.  But after a few years, people will shrug and say, whatever.

There will always be bigots.  There are those that oppose Brown because blacks people are subhuman, that oppose Roe because women should shut up and have babies and oppose marriage equality because fags should burn in hell.

But the simple fact of gays getting married - it's legal in my state - has become invisible to the greater population once the bill was signed and the first marriage certificate stamped with the notary's seal.  And so it will be with gay marriage everywhere else.

So, let's not cede the debate to the bigots and the blowhards.  LGBT people are going to get married.

Deal with it.

John Cole, Paging President Obama

Time to get this guy off the sidelines...

I supported most of the President's first two years agenda.  I understood that the Stimulus should have been bigger with fewer tax cuts, but he didn't have the votes.  I understood that most people would have liked a public option, but he didn't have the votes.  I understood that he wanted a stronger "Volcker Rule" but he didn't have the votes.  And I bet he would've liked to just GET a vote on tax cuts and cap-and-trade before the midterms skewed everything.  The assumption was that Obama spent two years acting against the wishes of the American people, so his party got trounced in 2010.

John Cole makes a really, really good point here.  You can actually ASK the American people what they want.  And anytime you get a result over 60% on something in this country, that's pretty rock solid.  Today we saw such a poll supporting collective bargaining for state employees.  There are similar polls showing support for the EPA, taxing the rich more and generally allowing reproductive choice.

But, as John notes, we don't hear about those on the TeeVee.  The wealthy Communications majors who make up our media have little real idea about what Americans think or feel.  Probably because most of the time, the American people don't know what they think or feel.  Take the 2010 midterms.  Almost 30% of those voting for the GOP wanted the government to do more about unemployment, yet they still voted for the party that has no desire in any way shape or form to do anything about alleviating unemployment.  Hey, "So be it!"

Americans are pretty anti-union, but they are also pretty pro-fairness.

The problem is that for years, to quote John: "we are constantly only given choices that range from center right to far right."  Part of it is the capture of the DC based media that has basically been the entire reason for the rise of the blogosphere.  So much of what people like Brooks and Broder and others write is so divorced from the reality of everyday life that you wonder what country they live in.  Whatever the country, you can be sure they live in a gated community.

I believe Obama does have a plan to be a transformative president.  I believe his plan is to demonstrate to people that government can work for them.  I think that's entirely his philosophy, or as he puts it: "Together we can do big things."

Today's decision to stop defending DOMA in court is remarkable, because I'm not sure it's a majoritarian position in the country right now, though it will be at some point in the next few years.

Obama COULD take the majoritarian positions on economic issues.  You can call them populist positions if that helps you feel better about associating with dirty, smelly, hippie ideas like progressive income taxes or social safety nets, but he can LEAD here.  There is so much misinformation about the economic state of equality in this country that a clear and compelling message, repeated ad nauseam, could tilt the country back in his direction.

That would indeed be transformational.