Note: While looking back for something else, I stumbled over this diary, and realized that it neatly filled a hole. I would have been remise not to talb about this sooner rather than later in the fight that's just roared back to the front burner. But here I'd already done it, and linked to a great piece by Michael Lind as well.
Today, the trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare issue their annual report, and Michael Lind has an excellent preparedness guide posted at Salon to help you deal with the inevitable propaganda assault. It's got the catchy title, "Let's cut Social Security to pay for banker bailouts!" because that is, at bottom what the privatizers are all about this time around, as Lind explains:
By the way, the huge expansion of the deficit and debt in the last year has had nothing to do with Social Security (without which not only retirees but the economy as a whole would have been much worse off). Indeed, thanks to the modest stimulus and the much larger bailouts, the contribution of Social Security to long-term deficits -- always pretty small -- has just gotten a lot smaller in relative terms. Anyone who says that the costs of the bailout mean we must now cut Social Security is literally saying that in order to bail out the bankers who created this crisis we need to slash benefits for American retirees.
But in addition to a hand-guide to the standard bogus arguments, Lind includes some of the backstory about how the modern assault on Social Security got its start:
Who is behind this disinformation campaign? The deficit hawks include billionaires like Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, Republican conservatives, libertarians and "fiscally conservative" Blue Dog Democrats. This coalition has campaigned against Social Security for more than a quarter of a century.
In 1983, in the Cato Journal published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Stuart Butler, a transplanted British Thatcherite, and Peter Germanis published their manifesto "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy." Small-government conservatives, they argued, should learn from Lenin, who sought to shape history rather than wait patiently for the inevitable evolution of socialism: "Unlike many other socialists at the time, Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement's ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents."
You really do have to ask yourself why it is that the right is so in love with authoritarian Soviet leaders. Lenin in this case, Trotsky as the father of neo-conservatism. When it gets right down to it, they really have no use at all for Edmund Burke. And why should they? Once Social Security and the rest of the New Deal and Great Society institutions became part of the organic fabric of American life, Burke would have defended keeping them in place. And that would never do for this rapacious crowd of sociopaths.
Have you ever had a conversation with your boss? Maybe not. "Do this!" "Do that!" "You're fired!" is not what the dictionary defines as a "conversation."
But if you have, then you probably know how it goes for most people most of the time: You talk about whatever the boss wants to talk about. In fact, the only reason you have a conversation at all is because the boss wants to have one. If he's not interested in having a particular conversation, then it just doesn't happen. Period.
That's what the oligarchy is like--the folks who own/run/control the dominant big businesses in America. They're the boss in America, and if they don't want to have a conversation, it doesn't happen. And when you do have a conversation, it's limited to what they're interested in talking about.
That's why we have the Catfood Commission in the first place. Back in 2001, when Bush was installed as President, we didn't have a deficit, we had a surplus. And we had a projected debt-reduction path that would eventually bring our debt down to zero. That doesn't mean it was necessarily going to happen. But it was at least foreseeable that it very well could happen, if that's what we decided to do.
Then Bush pushed through his massive tax cuts, got us into two wars (that had nothing to do with 9/11, except they were just the sort of response that bin Laden was hoping for), and crashed the economy. While he was doing all this, no one cared about the deficit. His VP, Dick Cheney, even said, "Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." The boss didn't want to talk about deficits or the debt. So we didn't. And it looked like this:
And the situation it left Obama in looked like this (if he was lucky):
Or this:
But, of course, that bit about crashing the economy brought us something new to worry about: the Great Recession....
In my post last week (Wow, France... Why can't we do that here?!??), I asked, as the title suggests, what prevents the kind of broad, committed, collective action that we're seeing in France from happening here in the United States. This is especially perplexing, given that their strike is about opposing the raising of the retirement age from 60 to 62 - whereas here our retirement age is already later than that, our college tuition rates promise a lifetime of debt, our health care system is all sorts of effed up, our hours are longer, our vacations shorter, our social safety net far less comprehensive. I could go on.
I started to answer my own question, discussing the mechanics of how collective action and protest have been negatively branded here, so as to effectively inoculate many people against participation. In response (over at Daily Kos), Pesto asked:
The $64,000 question WRT inoculation is why it hasn't worked as well elsewhere. It's not as if multinational corporations in France never considered trying to break French workers' solidarity or willingness to shut the economy down to win what they want. They certainly understand the basic concepts of propaganda that have worked so well in the US. But whatever they've been trying in France hasn't been working very well.
Big question. Where to begin? Well, why not start with Lady Gaga? More specifically, let's start with CNN's utilization of Lady Gaga as a cultural intermediary in their "coverage" of the strikes:
France strike - Some 200 demonstrators blocked France's Marseille-Provence airport for more than three hours Thursday as strikes and protests continued across the country. The action comes ahead of a final vote on the country's Pension Reform Bill. Pop star Lady Gaga postponed two Paris shows this weekend because of "the logistical difficulties due to the strikes," her website said.
I've been writing about hegemony, party systems and realigning elections since at least 2006. And for me, the bottom line is this: (1) elections like 2008--realigning elections--stand out as turning points between different political eras; (2) some such elections--like 1860 and 1932, for example, are quite clear and dramatic in their meanings, while oothers such as 1896 and 1968 (actually a de-aligning election, in that it brought in an era dominated by divided government) are much more muddled; (3) 2008 was a clearly in the second category; (4) but it remains to be seen whether it's an ambiguous realigning election (like 1896) where we have a chance to fight for our vision of what "progressive" means, or whether it's a de-aligning election, that will continue the drift, divison, and disconnect of the past 42 years.
A Republican victory this Tuesday will tilt the odds heavily in the direction of retrospectively casting 2008 as another 1968, despite all the numbers of election night pointing to the contrary. If Democrats hold on to control of Congress, however slightly, that means that we're in a new era, no matter how discouraging the current lack of vision by Democratic leadership may now seem.
That's why I find the following video (h/t Dave Johnson) so compelling. Because as I see it, it's not a dishonest representation of where the current DLC-dominated Democratic leadership is today. It's an honest representation of where we, the conscience of the party, have a damn good shot at taking it back to where it belongs once again. From the International Brotherhoood of Boilermakers Union:
It's time to take our country back... to the future, not the past.
Do you ever look at newspaper articles about worker and student strikes in countries like France or Greece or Argentina-you know, the kind of activity that shuts down the whole country-and think to yourself, "Holy shit, that's what I'm talkin' about! Those people know how to protest!?"
Well, I sure do.
Not to glorify any particular tactic for it's own sake, but geez, the spirit of collective action and common purpose that's displayed in those moments-let alone the negotiating power it awards to grassroots movements, unions, and progressive political parties-is something that sometimes, um, feels a little lacking here in the good old U.S. of A.
So what are you waiting for. Go ahead. Try that here. See how many people you can turn out. See where it gets you.
Likely. not. very. far.
We have a situation here. We're stuck in a Catch 22. As a society, we presently seem to be inoculated against the means necessary for our own collective advancement. (If you're at the top of the plutocratic order, now's the time to congratulate yourself on a brilliant system.) And I'm not talking about any one particular style of collective action or protest - we're not France or Greece or Argentina, and I don't particularly want us to be. I'm fully ready to embrace an all-American style, and I would settle for whatever kind of collective action (within ethical and strategic limits) powerful enough to challenge entrenched power and privilege. Is that such a tall order?
What do I mean, we're "inoculated?"
I'm glad you asked. Have you ever heard someone say something like, "I'm not an activist or anything," or they look at you like you're from Crazy-ville (or they simply don't engage) when you start talking about the protest you went to?
Think about the word protest for a minute. Seriously. Stop. And think about it. Notice. What comes to mind with the word? Now try it with the word activist.
I want to follow up on my previous diary, "Investigative journalist/historian warns of 40+ years of failure 'punishing Dems'", and Robert Parry's point about the progressive wrong turn in failing to build a hegemonic progressive national media structure at the same time that conservatives committed themselves to doing precisely that.
We can see the results of those two contrasting decisions very clearly reflected in a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show last night. Look at how easily and devastatingly Maddow takes apart all the dominant campaign narratives--supposedly "objective" Versailles narratives that just happen to perfectly reflect the GOP's very own narrativs. It's about as clear-cut an example of facts vs. hegemonic fantasy one could ever wish to see:
Of course, this is just one small speck. ID-iot boy Chris Matthews is still the public face of MSNBC, which is still just one tiny facet of the GE/NBC behemoth. So imagine if we had a full-fledged, multi-tiered, multi-platform, nationwide infrastructure of similarly on top of it reporters, anchors and analysts. Imagine, in short, if the media actually were "fair and balanced." Imagine what America would look like then.
Back in 2003 or so, when I first wore my anti-Bush t-shirt with the slogan "A hard reign's a gonna fall", I got a fair amount of smiles from my mostly Democratic neighbors. But even though I'm painfully aware of how much more continuity Obama's brought than change, I definitely would not expect a similar response if I were to don a "Dump Obama" t-shirt.
Can anyone tell why?
Here's the block I live on (2000 census, but the overall racial/ethnic mix hasn't changed that much):
And here's the 8-block census tract:
Of course there's no way to tell, but I generally get the impression that most of those pushing to "Dump Obama" are not only white, but travel in mostly-white circles. Well, the faces I see everyday when I step outside are not. About 1/4 white, tops. That's what I see. And that's a pretty fundamental reason that I think all this "dump Obama" talk is pure poppycock--or worse.
Starting with a series of three posts back in early April 2005, The Future of the Electorate, The Future of the Electorate, Part Two [page missing, alas!], and Maybe It Is A Battle Of Civilizations, for a little over two years now I have argued that a pluralistic vs. monoculture vision of identity politics, specifically based largely in ethnicity and religion, is the fundamental difference between the Democratic and Republican coalitions both now, and probably for the foreseeable future.
This is something that Democratic strategists sort of half-realize, but really don't want to. Like zombies, they just can't help themselves, they've got to chase after the brains of white people. But the more sophisticated strategy is what might be called--hearking back to the 1990s--the "Benetton Strategy", in which a basically bland universalist marketing strategy is accessorized with a broad pallet e of different skin tones. Obama represents the latest incarnation of this--but he still has that old zombie hankering that he just can't quit, which caused him to pre-compromise everything he started.
While it's pretty much obvious to all of us by now what a sure loser that is, this realization has not penetrated the core of the pluralistic identity culture that Chris wrote about. Disappointment and frustration have certainly touched many in that core, but that's about it.
Facts be damned, ain't democracy grand? That's Ross Douthat's response to recent commentary on the fact that the GOP is virtually alone among the world's major political parties in opposing the science of global warming.
Here's the sequence of events. In the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein wrote last Saturday "GOP Gives Climate Science A Cold Shoulder", about the GOP's unique situation. He lead off by noting the position of the British Conservative Party Foreign Secretary:
When British Foreign Secretary William Hague visited the U.S. last week, he placed combating climate change near the very top of the world's To Do list.
"Climate change is perhaps the 21st century's biggest foreign-policy challenge," Hague declared in a New York City speech.
and went on to note:
His strong words make it easier to recognize that Republicans in this country are coalescing around a uniquely dismissive position on climate change. The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones....
Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect. (Kirk is the only exception.) With sentiments among rank-and-file Republicans also trending that way, it's no coincidence that two Republicans who affirmed the science -- Rep. Michael Castle in Delaware and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska -- were defeated in Senate primaries this year....
Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."
Douthat led off by citing Brownstein's piece, then wrote:
What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe....
There's a reasonably large Western European constituency, in other words, for some sort of climate change skepticism.... But the politicians haven't been responding. Instead, Europe's political class, left and right alike, has worked to marginalize a position that it considers intellectually disreputable, even as the American G.O.P. has exploited that same position to win votes.
The debate over climate change isn't unusual in this regard. On issues ranging from the death penalty to (at least until recently) immigration, America's major political parties generally tend to be more responsive to public opinion, and less constrained by elite sentiment, than their counterparts in Europe. Overall, I much prefer the American approach, populist excesses and all. (It helps in this case, of course, that I'm deeply skeptical about the efficacy of climate change legislation anyway.) But there's no denying that its left the G.O.P. on the wrong side - and increasingly so - of a pretty sturdy scientific consensus.
As usual with Douthat, there are problems galore with his reasoning.
This is a followup to my previous diary, "Debtors prisons: They're back!", on the ACLU report, "In For a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons". As the title indicates, the focus of this report is less on the phenomena of debtors prisons themselves than on the larger dysfunction of the legal system that they are part of: the role that legal system "user fees" aka LFOs (legal financial obligations) play in hindering people with criminal convictions from reintegrating as productive members of society. The report, "Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry" can be found here.
The executive summary explains:
Many states are imposing new and often onerous "user fees" on individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose severe - and often hidden - costs on communities, taxpayers, and indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find employment and housing as well to meet child support obligations.
This report examines practices in the fifteen states with the highest prison populations, which together account for more than 60 percent of all state criminal filings. We focused primarily on the proliferation of "user fees," financial obligations imposed not for any traditional criminal justice purpose such as punishment, deterrence, or rehabilitation but rather to fund tight state budgets.
Across the board, we found that states are introducing new user fees, raising the dollar amounts of existing fees, and intensifying the collection of fees and other forms of criminal justice debt such as fines and restitution. But in the rush to collect, made all the more intense by the fiscal crises in many states, no one is considering the ways in which the resulting debt can undermine reentry prospects, pave the way back to prison or jail, and result in yet more costs to the public.
As you'll see from the key findings that follow, policy-making has been haphazard at best, downright perverse at worst. And for the most part, it's been at its worse. The cumulative and systemic impacts have routinely been ignored, and as a result unexamined, simplistic and ideologically conservative ideas have have been transformed from habitual assumption to established social fact: The criminal "type" is confirmed as virtually irredeemable, and virtually incapable of reintegration into society. But viewed systematically, one sees that people are given long odds to struggle against, and little opportunity to turn things around. Meanwhile, the criminal justice itself becomes increasingly arbitrary, inefficient and non-transparent. Here are the report's key findings:
• Fees, while often small in isolation, regularly total hundreds and even thousands of dollars of debt. All fifteen of the examined states charge a broad array of fees, which are often imposed without taking into account ability to pay. One person in Pennsylvania faced $2,464 in fees alone, approximately three times the amount imposed for fines and restitution. In some states, local government fees, on top of state-wide fees, add to fee burdens. Thirteen of the fifteen states also charge poor people public defender fees simply for exercising their constitutional right to counsel. This practice can push defendants to waive counsel, raising constitutional questions and leading to wrongful convictions, over-incarceration, and significant burdens on the operation of the courts.
• Inability to pay leads to more fees and an endless cycle of debt. Fourteen of the fifteen states also utilize "poverty penalties" - piling on additional late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when individuals are unable to pay their debts all at once, often enriching private debt collectors in the process. Some of the collection fees are exorbitant and exceed ordinary standards of fairness. For example, Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, while Florida permits private debt collectors to tack on a 40 percent surcharge to underlying debt....
At first I had no idea what Glenn Beck was talking about (From the August 23 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program):
"We're being pitted against each other again. We're being pitted against each other on religion. And I want you to know this is, this is part of the strategy.
This is why we brought up Soujourners, and Jim Wallis, and Reverand Wright, and I told you about social justice. I told you that our religions are being hijkacked.
Religion plays a huge role in the progressive movement. You must have religion. If you can beat down re--... Why do you think they chased God out of the public square? And now Nancy Pelosi's talking about God all the time. That you have the President talking about...bashing the Bible 'Oh, well, who's Bible are we going to listen to now?' And then talking about faith and religion. Why do you think this is all happening?
It's critical. It's critical. And these people Let me say this. When you pervert the founding documents. I think you're a pretty bad dude. But when you pervert the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you are evil.
And when you know. And when you are intentionally doing it for power and control and money and a hidden agenda. And you lie, cheat and steal every step of the way to do it, you are evil.
Now let me show you Jim Wallis. Jim Wallis is a guy from Sojourners who has lead a campaign against me. They are trying to pit our religions against each other. They are trying to... I stood at the feet of Abraham Lincoln yesterday. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' They must have us at each other's throats.
I've told you before that this is George Soros money. That this is nothing but a hidden progressive agenda. That social justice as understood by Jim Wallis and Jeremiah Wright and people like him. It is evil. He claims that there's no money coming Soros. If I saw my name smeared on the internet one more time on th... I mean it's become laughable. Because people actually believe George Soros isn't involved in this?
Okay, okay. So I get that he's projecting wildly all over the place. But even knowing that I was terribly confused--and not just because he's a paranoid freak with the attention span of a gnat with ADD.
On the projection side:
(1) He says the left is trying to divide us with religion, because, of course, that's the right's whole game plan. But it's not just the use of wedge issues, and usurpation of individual conscience--stuff that anyone can see with their own two eyes. No, there's an entire hidden battlefield that's the exact mirror image of what Beck is talking about. The right has been involved in a decades-long war against the mainstream Protestant establishment that supported the civil rights movement out of its commitment to social justice. (Talk2Action has tons of material on this, this piece by Bruce Wilson is as good a place as any to jump into the middle of it--lots of links to different facets of it.)
Yesterday, Mike posted a diary, "Time for a new discussion", that prompted a very vigorous debate. Mike's diary began thus:
The argument over Obama and the left rages on unabated. It started in earnest the day after his election with the first leaks of who would be appointed to the transition team, and has kept going since....
However, I'm writing this post not to join the debate, but to say that at the end of the day, I find myself confused as to why it matters. Clearly people are very passionate about it, but I don't get why. What matters in my view is not how we judge Obama, but what we do to shape his actions, and what we do in response to his actions. Everything else is just metaphysics and your particular perspective on life.
I think that the short answer to Mike's question is that he's a very task-oriented sort of guy, and that given his understanding of history (read his book, hint! Hint! Hint!) this is prime time to get tasks done. Given that, he sees a vast chasm between task-oriented discussions and "Everything else [that] is just metaphysics and your particular perspective on life." But other people who aren't that task-oriented tend to see much more of an interweaving, which was expressed in a wide variety of ways in the comments. Simply put, in a wide range of ways, the issues raised in the debate affected how people thought they could and should act most effectively, so they simply didn't see the same sharp dichotomy that Mike does.
I want to stress that although President Obama is the focus of this discussion, this is really about something much bigger: it's about how we understand history and politics and the meaning of being progressive.
Of course, many others will have different reactions, as the comment threads always remind us. But that's what I'm up to.
But this was just one facet of the larger range of contrasting views that all basically amounted to expressing a need for greater clarity in order to act more effectively. I'll have more to say about the diversity of ways that people expressed this, but first I want to take note of the wider discussion that continues to unfold.
The importance of this need for greater clarity was further reflected in a pair of pieces in Salon, one focused on presidents and base discontent, the other focused on the unfocused nature of the meaning of the term "progressive."
In Quick Hits, counterspin calls attention to a several weeks old Alternet piece by Open Left's Dave Johnson, who wrote the original as a Fellow at Campaign for America's Future, "6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America". It's actually more than that. It's more like "6 Charts Showing 6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America Starting with the Election of Ronald Reagan", and it reminded me of another item I noted recently, but didn't do a diary about, Paul Krugman's late May blog post, "Did The Postwar System Fail?" What struck me about these items in tandem is the contrast between the density of Krugman's argument vs. the conversation-stopping clarity of Dave Johnson's sequence of charts.
Johnson's piece starts off bluntly, followed by a series of charts telling a simple, but powerful story (the first three are included):
It seems that you can look at a chart of almost anything and right around 1981 or soon after you'll see the chart make a sharp change in direction, and probably not in a good way. And I really do mean almost anything, from economics to trade to infrastructure to ... well almost anything. I spent some time looking for charts of things, and here are just a few examples. In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.
Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then:
Working people's share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down:
This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top:
The rest of the charts illustrate further links in the chain:
And forced working people to spend down savings to get by:
Which forced working people to go into debt: (total household debt as percentage of GDP)
None of which has helped economic growth much: (12-quarter rolling average nominal GDP growth.)
In contrast, Krugman gives us one much more ambiguous chart, comparing the 1970s and 2000s:
The de facto firing of David Weigel by the Washington Post the week before last was much less remarkable than the fact that they hired him in the first place. The Post, after all, is well-known for firing people who get the story right: Dan Froomkin was the best they had covering the Bush Administration, and they fired him without even the pretext of a pretext. So the functional firing of Weigel didn't really tell us anything new about the Post, but it was a useful occasion for looking afresh at what we already know, and taking it more fully to heart.
It was also an extremely fortuitous counterpoint to Michael Hastings rudely committing an act of actual journalism about the Afghanistan War. Hastings, too, got criticized by the stenographers for not doing things properly, but since he worked for the DFH press, his job was secure. OTOH, the fellow who allowed him to interview Gen. McChrystal was the first to lose his job--long before it was clear that McChrystal himself would be made to step down.
Before saying anything else, I want to stress the total bogosity of the dominant new media/old media spin on this story. Old media figures have personal opinions, just the same as new media figures do. There is no real difference between the two on that score. Nor is the mix of reporting and opinion anything new. Evens and Novak built one of the most successful old media brands on the right using that formula starting back in the 1960s. Nixon henchman William Safire did much the same at the New York Times, which offered him safe haven as an act of repentance for their own excess of truth-telling about Nixon's Whitehouse, a perch from which he almost single-handedly gave birth to the endless GOP quest for a Democratic Watergate. And who can ignore George Will, an openly confessed criminal--receiving stolen property in the form of Carter's 1980 debate books--whose mendacity is arguably his most defining characteristic?
Similarly, the salient fact about Hastings was not so much that he worked for Rolling Stone than that he didn't work for any of the folks who brought us the war in the first place. A reporter for McClatchy, for example, could very well have written something very similar. This is just what actual journalists do--the kind who haven't been drinking Kool Aid all their lives.
Brad DeLong captured the essential dynamic here quite nicely when he wrote:
the Washington Post never wanted to be perceived as impartial in the sense of an umpire with good eyesight who called balls and strikes as he or she saw them. The Washington Post wanted to be perceived as neutral in that roughly half its calls would go for the establishment Democrats and half its calls would go to the establishment Republicans. There are very big differences. For one thing, a neutral paper is bound to be untrustworthy as a source of information.
And this is why we can't have a better press corps right now.
Just to add some further detail: If the Post and the rest of the not-strictly rightwing Versailles press aim for such "neutrality", then the incentives are quite clear: (1) Move as far to the extremes as possible in your own statements, in order to shift the neutral point in your direction. (2) Attack the other side continuously for its "extremism" in order to deter it from doing the same--and perhaps even to get it to do the opposite. This is precisely what the conservative movement has been doing for most of the past 30+ years, and Democrats--with a few lonely exceptions like Alan Grayson--still have yet to catch on.
Last Sunday, in his weekly "Left Ed" diary, "Left Ed: Where Are the Journalists?" jeffbinnc gave the Washington Post his "Duncehat Award" for its editorial "High-scoring school reforms". The next day, Matt Yglesias in effect answered the question Jeff asked in his diary title with a big fat, "Not here, dude!" No journalism for Yglesias, no-siree! Facts? Uh-uh. Context? You gotta be kidding! Yglesias often writes tight, cogent little posts. Not this time, though. This time, he went with something worthy of a "Chatty Cathies" nomination. So much so that, despite the fact that Jeff himself called attention to it in quick hit that same day ("Matt Yglesias Doesn't Agree With Me"), I felt it necessary to to examine the incident in a full-blown diary.
You see, not only did Matt deliberately ignore the actual content of Jeff's diary to take aim at "teacher-bashing" phrase, he was actually proud of his disdainful refusal to even consider what Jeff was saying. Here's the very first sentence in Matt's post:
One tic I really don't understand is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
Well, one tic I really don't understand is the practice of saying that you don't understand something as a way of proving your superiority. Since when is being dumb and incurious something for would-be progressives to be proud of? The same pattern was in evidence when Jamelle Bouie criticize me while substituting for Matt a couple of weeks back. That piece started off in a strikingly similar manner:
I need help understanding how OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
What's more, both pieces proceeded by making no attempt whatsoever to understand--or even look into--that which they claimed to find puzzling. Instead, they simply regurgitated whatever self-validating glop they could find. They're giving intellectual laziness a bad name. How hard would it have been, really, to make intellectual laziness look normal? All they would have had to do was phrase things a tiny bit differently. Matt could have written:
One tic I really don't understandthat really bothers me is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
And Jamelle could have written:
I need help understanding howI'm really surprised that OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
Both their diaries would still have been utterly lame. But they wouldn't quite have been calling attention to their own intellectual laziness as a matter of pride. It may seem like a small thing, but this sort of snobbery is just par-for-the-course trickle-down from Obama's "new tone" in Versailles. It's an attitudinal "tell" that a neoliberal apologist has nothing but junk in their hands--and they know it in their guts, even if their beautiful minds are otherwise engaged in fooling themselves as well as everyone else in sight.
Turning from tell-all tone to content, the bottom line here is fairly simple: Jeff called out an egregious example of mindless Versailles teacher-bashing--which has pretty much always been a staple of the decades-long corporate/conservative hegemonic war on public education. And Yglesias, unable to defend it, played dumb.
It needs to be stressed here that Yglesias was being blithely indifferent to one of the most basic strands in conservative hegemonic warfare--so basic, in fact, that it constitutes the textbook example for explaining the Overton Window, the example that Overton himself introduced: privatizing education is the prime exemplar in defining the functioning of conservative think-tanks in hegemonic struggle. (See, for example, my discussion in "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future-Pt. 4" in the section titled "Think Tanks".)
In Overton's view, privatizing education was the libertarian conservative agenda on education. The desired end-state was "No government involvement in education." That was it, period. What's more, to push his ideas, Overton--in typically delusional libertarian fashion--falsely designated the opposite educational policy extreme that libertarians were doing battle with as "Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries"--a position promoted by no one outside of the paranoid fantasies of libertarian crazies. This is the decades-long political reality that Yglesias simply ignored in order to take a mindless star turn in puerile Versailles-style sophistry. And that sort of sophistry is precisely what conservatives are counting on to keep winning their battles, even when they're losing elections.
A blow-by-blow look at what Jeff said and how Yglesias bungled it on the flip.
Does Washington care about unemployment?
In 1983, Ronald Reagan's Washington regarded high unemployment as a national emergency. Today, with unemployment kissing 10 percent, Barack Obama's Washington scarcely seems perturbed. Why?
....Today, the unemployment rate is kissing 10 percent. Global financial markets are sending us a message that the excess demand for high-quality financial assets is growing again.
Yet, unlike 1983, there is no sense of urgency in Washington.
.... When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world's policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn't a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as "the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability."
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world's advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment's conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
G20 drops support for fiscal stimulus By Chris Giles and Christian Oliver in Busan
Published: June 5 2010 11:54 | Last updated: June 6 2010 17:25
Finance ministers of the world's leading economies have been so spooked by the sovereign debt crisis that they have decided they can no longer wait until economies are growing strongly before they remove fiscal stimulus.
The meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Busan, South Korea, at the weekend also dropped proposals for a global banking levy, giving countries leeway to do what they thought best for their domestic circumstances.
The communiqué of the meeting made clear the G20 no longer thought expansionary fiscal policy was sustainable or effective in fostering recovery because investors were no longer confident about some countries' public finances.
Item: Spinning off from the a discussion of the later, Digby writes:
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