There are a lot of angry people out there, and we have plenty of reasons to be mad. But that doesn't mean we have to be stupid.
The Tea Party movement claims to be a populist organization that spontaneously erupted from the grassroots to protest Barack Obama's usurpation of the White House and his "socialist" attempt to provide an economic stimulus and health insurance for the 44 million working poor who earn too much for Medicaid but are too young for Medicare.
But those "grassroots" were groomed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, political advocacy groups linked to oilman David Koch and other Republican operatives. Events were promoted by Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" and the Wall Street Journal. Also, there are several Tea Party groups, but Tea Party Nation, a for-profit corporation, charged $549 for a convention in Nashville that drew about 600 teabaggers to hear such luminaries as former US Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who longed for the good old days of literacy tests for voters, and former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), who thinks we should abandon hope for change.
Yesterday, the New Mexico House of Representatives unanimously decided to move the states' money into small banks and credit unions, becoming yet another example of the fact that progressive change will not come from the top down.
In the context of the larger movement against the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street, this is a dramatic repudiation of that behavior from a somewhat unexpected source.
The bill enables a possible switch of $2-5 billion of state funds into CUs and small banks.
If enacted, the municipal funds bill, in the works since last year and still subject to a Senate vote, would represent a setback to large national banks, like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, which have had a lock on such funds.
The altered view of New Mexico lawmakers in favoring local control of state funds, officials said, follows national mention of the New Mexico effort in the "Move Your Money" campaign of New York pundit Arianna Huffington in her online Huffington Post columns.
Several progressive thinkers have talked about how we might make common cause with populists on the right in order to make headway on issues of common interest. I am, generally speaking, pretty dubious about this, because though we populists of the left and right often find ourselves animated by the same problems, our solutions are often (to put it mildly) divergent. For example, I do not believe we could possibly work together on immigration issues, since progressives see it as a problem of enforcing employment law and protecting the weak, and the GOP base sees it as a border security problem and protecting themselves from immigrants. There's no piece of legislation that's likely to find support from both groups.
What Will Coakley's Defeat Mean for Health Care Reform?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Last night, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to fill Teddy Kennedy's senate seat in Massachusetts. Coakley's loss puts health care reform in jeopardy.
With Coakley's defeat, the Democrats lose their filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. However, as Paul Waldman explains in The American Prospect, Coakley's loss is not the end for health care reform.
Remember, the Senate already passed its health care reform bill in December. Now, the House has to pass its version of the bill. The original plan was for House and Senate leaders to blend the two bills together in conference to create a final piece of legislation (AKA a conference report) that both houses would vote on. Once the Democrats are down to 59 votes, the Republicans can filibuster the conference report and kill health care reform.
But if the House passes the same bill the Senate just passed, there's no need to reconcile the two bills. This so-called "ping pong" approach may be the best way to salvage health care reform. Some of the flaws in the Senate bill could still be fixed later through budget reconciliation. It would be an uphill battle, but nothing compared to starting health care reform from scratch.
The second option would be to get the bill done before Scott Brown is sworn in. According to Waldman, there could be a vote within 10 days. The House and Senate have already drafted some compromise legislation, which Waldman thinks is superior to the straight Senate bill. If that language were sent to the Congressional Budget Office immediately, the Senate could vote before Brown is sworn in.
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a statement last night that Brown won't be sworn in until the election results are certified, a process that could take two weeks. Historically, the winners of special Senate elections have taken over from their interim predecessors within a couple of days. If the Republicans were in this position, they'd use every procedural means at their disposal to drag out the process. The question is whether the Democrats have the fortitude to make the system work for them.
Remember how the Republicans did everything in their power to hold up the Senate health care vote, including forcing the clerk to read the 767-page bill aloud? They were trying to delay the vote until after the Massachusetts special election. If it's okay for the GOP to stall, the Democrats should be allowed to drag their feet on swearing in Brown.
Also, remember how the Republicans fought to keep Al Franken from being seated after he defeated Norm Coleman? For his part, Franken says he's determined to pass health care reform one way or another, according to Rachel Slajda of Talking Points Memo.
Incongruously, some Democrats are arguing that rushing to a vote would be a violation of some vague democratic principle. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) wasted no time in proclaiming that there should be no vote before Brown was sworn in. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), of all people, averred last night that the Democrats should respect the democratic process and start acting like they have 59 votes while they still have 60.
All this talk of "respecting the process" is hand waving disguised as civics. According to the process, Scott Brown isn't the senator from Massachusetts yet. According to the process, you have the votes until you don't.
Talk about moving the goalposts. It's bad enough that we need 60 votes to pass a bill on any given day. Now, they'd have us believe that we also need 60 votes next week. Webb and Frank are arguing that Brown's victory obliges Democrats to behave as if Brown were already the Senator from Massachusetts. Of course, if Webb won't play ball, it's a moot point. The whole fast-track strategy is predicated on 60 votes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly thinks that Webb effectively took the fast-track option off the table with his strongly worded statement.
Katrina vanden Huevel of The Nation argues that this historic upset should be a wake up call to President Barack Obama to embrace populism with renewed fervor. I would add that Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change. There is no better way to fulfill a promise of change than to reshape the nation's health care system and provide insurance for millions of Americans.
Ping pong, anyone?
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I have complained many times about how frustrating it is to see Obama not wanting to go with a populist message, especially in regards to going after Wall Street.
Yesterday, in a proposal to impose a major new surtax on the biggest banks, he really went for it:
Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities.
And this:
My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed. And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people -- folks who have not been made whole, and who continue to face real hardship in this recession.
We want our money back, and we're going to get it. And that's why I'm proposing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee to be imposed on major financial firms until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance they provided to Wall Street. If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers.
We cannot go back to business as usual. And when we see reports of firms once again engaging in risky bets to reap quick rewards, when we see a return to compensation practices that seem not to reflect what the country has been through, all that looks like business as usual to me. The financial industry has even launched a massive lobbying campaign, locking arms with the opposition party, to stand in the way of reforms to prevent another crisis. That, too, unfortunately, is business as usual. And we're already hearing a hue and cry from Wall Street suggesting that this proposed fee is not only unwelcome but unfair -- that by some twisted logic it is more appropriate for the American people to bear the costs of the bailout, rather than the industry that benefited from it, even though these executives are out there giving themselves huge bonuses.
Ultimately, it is by taking responsibility -- on Wall Street, here in Washington, all the way to Main Street -- that we're going to move past this period of turmoil.
I know, I know, I can hear the protests rising already: Obama still isn't doing enough and Geithner and Summers are still out there messing things up. I'm with you. But going after the big banks with new taxes, and smacking them down with this kind of language is still a very good thing. So let's give credit where credit is due: if you never praise a politician even when they take a step in your direction, they won't have any incentive to do so.
There are two things I find especially encouraging about this:
The first is that when Bob Rubin worked in the Clinton White House, he had a huge impact not only on the policy but also on the rhetoric. He was always urging the President away from any hint of populist rhetoric, saying it would scare or anger the business community. And Clinton usually gave in. I don't know how much Geithner or Summers care about the rhetoric, but I would guess they have given similar counsel, and in this case they also lost big. Don't discount the importance of political rhetoric from a President, either. It makes it harder to back away policy-wise in the future, and it emboldens those White House staffers who do want to do the right thing (who are always in battle with the Geithner/Summers team who doesn't) in playing hardball with Wall Street.
The second reason this is good is that it means some decision has been made, at least for now, that the White House is willing to forgo some of the money that can be raised from Wall Street. In my experience, the biggest single reason for Democrats avoiding populist rhetoric is worrying about the political donations you would lose as a result. Giving speeches like that is going to mean several million dollars less in Wall Street money for Democratic Party committees and candidates, and I think that is well worth the price. As I have been writing, Democrats cannot win in the 2010 elections without going after the big banks, and that means they will have to give up a lot of money. The tradeoff is certainly worth it in terms of extra votes they will get.
As I wrote yesterday, there is far more to be done, including breaking up the banks, prosecuting bank executives, a tax on financial transactions. One speech doesn't change the overall direction of an administration. But yesterday's announcement- the speech and the tax- was a big step in the right direction.
In this post earlier today, I wondered how many people are actually represented by the senators voting for and against health care reform. Well, I did some research and calculations, and came to the following conclusion regarding the party-line vote for cloture on the Manager's Amendment early Monday morning: not only did it enjoy support of 60 of the 100 senators, but those senators were elected by the votes of almost twice as many Americans as the senators who opposed cloture. About 80.1 million voters elected senators in the Democratic caucus, while only about 43.8 million voted for senators in the Republican caucus. I explain my method and show my work on the flip.
This project was inspired by the insipid yearning for "broad bipartisan support" expressed by DC insider fogeys like Broder, Gergen, and their ilk. The most powerful answer to their mewling, I think, is this: health care reform obviously enjoys broad-based support, since the senators who oppose it, all of them Republicans, were elected by half as many voters as the senators who support it. Of course, the same retort will work for any party-line vote in this Congress, but I think it might be useful to be able to point to the actual numbers.
Another strong answer to the same argument, of course, is that the Democratic caucus includes not only Democrats, but also Independents. Since one of those Independents (Moldy Joe Lieberman) wields more leverage over the content of legislation than the majority of the Democratic party, I think any legislation that gets his vote should be considered "bipartisan."
Anyway, the complete Senate vote table is on the flip.
I just finished reading this Digby post on the Versailles fetish for "bipartisan" solutions, and I had an idea for framing an argument that may be useful in this and other ongoing political fights regarding the Senate. The data we need, which I'm sure is publicly available, is this: how many votes did each senator receive when winning his/her Senate seat?
"Centrists" like Broder, Gergen, etc., get off on wringing their hands over how a lack of bipartisan Congressional support shows that a piece of legislation doesn't have genuine, broad-based public support. When (if) the Senate passes its version of health care reform, I'd like to see a study that reveals how many Americans actually voted for the senators who supported the bill, compared with how many Americans voted for the senators who opposed it. That would give us a number to offer in opposition to that idea.
If, say, supporters of the bill represent 60 million American voters while opponents represent only 40 million, that should serve as a pretty powerful piece of evidence that the measure has broad-based support. Given the population differences between red and blue states, the number should be even more lopsided than that. (Maybe for appointed senators, we'd substitute the number of votes received by the governor who appointed the senator).
Based on what I've read here, it seems to me that someone in the OpenLeft community has a lot of this data already gathered together, so this is partly a bleg to find out if that's true. If nobody has it, I'll see if I can assemble it from online sources. Such a table of data could be useful on any vote, given that progressive priorities tend to be supported by senators from more populous states.
UPDATE: O.K., I did the work. By my calculations, senators in the Democratic Congress were elected by almost twice as many American voters as senators in the Republican Caucus - 80.1 million to 43.8 million. More detail here.
I have a long-standing interest in trying to integrate what I see as the most positive aspects of the populist and the progressive traditions, which have all too often been at odds with one another, or at best been deeply disconnected. One manifestation has been the promotion of some voices who don't necessarily get along too well, even though I find something valuable in all of them. On the populist side, I've promoted diaries by John Emerson and educationaction. And on the progressive side, I've promoted Nancy Bordier's work on her interactive voter choice system. Here's a diagram Nancy sent me this week as part of her correspondence, and I thought it was particularly useful for crystalizing some concerns I have--and that it might help others as well in making her ideas more tangible. My comments/questions are on the flip.
Last week’s post, “What is Populism and Why are Democrats Afraid of It" set off a heated but productive discussion. This week I’m basically just expanding, clarifying, correcting, and even repeating what I said there in the comments.
WHAT IS POPULISM?
“Populism” is the code word within the Democratic Party, and it's something that most wonks and pros oppose. When Democratic pros talk about populism, they normally take the worst examples (e.g. Glenn Beck) as typical. This attitude toward populism is entrenched in Pol Sci 101, and many or most normally well-educated people blindly accept it. Democrats depend heavily on interns and low-paid staffers -- usually well-off kids from elite schools who can afford to work for nothing, Some of these interns go on to become party pros, perpetuating the anti-populist bias as well as the accompanying incomprehension of and disdain for people of the middling sort.
I define populism as participational politics by ordinary citizens, working either inside or outside the major parties but almost always against the party leadership, which opposes big business and finance in the interests of the majority and which proposes specific policies to that effect. Between 1870 and 1940 groups of this type (including farmers’ groups and unions) provided most of the progressive energy in American politics, but since about 1950 the Democrats have shunned populism in favor of nonconfrontational "win-win" politics: “a rising tide lifts all boats”. At the same time, many rank and file Democrats have populist sympathies, and these voters are contiunually baffled and angry when the Democrats end up supporting business rather than the common interest.
Michael Moore's latest film and Alan Grayson's "die quickly" speech in the House have revived interest in an old question: What is populism, and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?
Populism is politics which opposes wealth and power in the name of the common folk. It takes both left wing and right wing forms and sometimes degenerates into bigotry and attacks on minorities. Populism can be faked, and that is being done right now - e.g., Limbaugh and Beck. Populist appeals can be made by spokesmen for special interests who have no intention of fulfilling their democratic promises, but who are just opportunistically faking populism as part of an attack on some enemy. (As I never get tired of saying: Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real).
Since the Fifties the Democratic Party, whose populist wing was critically important during the New Deal, has avoided and repressed populism. Individual populists such as Paul Wellstone have occasionally been elected, often in defiance of the party machine, but they have never had much influence in the party. The Democratic strategy has been cooperation with big business, and their slogan has been "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- "win-win" solutions where everyone wins and nobody loses. This worked pretty well until about 1970, when business started to pull away from the deal, and since that time it's been mostly downhill for the Democrats, for labor, and for the average American.
When they made their deal with big business, the Democrats became a wonky party of technocrats and expert administrators who balanced all the various interests and came up with the answer which was best for everyone, and they distanced themselves from their earlier party-of-the-common-man pretensions. Rather than to represent the majority of the electorate, they increasingly defined their constituency as a hodgepodge of special interest. Political parties inevitably do represent plural interests, as the Democrats certainly had done ever since the Civil War, but the post-Fifties Democrats made a fractionated constituency a deliberate goal and did everything they could to avoid majoritarian appeals and to marginalize majoritarianism within the party.
As part of this transformation of the party, the Democrats needed to misrepresent populism. Since then there's been an almost unmixed stream of slanders coming from both parties, until by now anyone counts as a populist as long as they're abusive, ignorant, racist, and dishonest. (The Nazi David Duke sometimes calls himself a Populist, and he was allowed to get away with it). Almost everyone comes out of Pol Sci 100 knowing that the Populists were bad guys, and the Pol Sci 101 attitude is pervasive among party leaders, wonk staffers, and a big chunk of the Democratic electorate.
However, during most of the period since the Civil War, however, progressive energy in this country has mostly come from movements of the Populist typeworking outside the parties or against the party leadership: Greenbackers, Progressives (three kinds), Socialists, Farmer-Laborites, Nonpartisan-Leaguers, and independents -- to say nothing of unions, farm organizations, and civil rights groups. (Martin Luther King's movement was essentially populism, albeit minority populism).
Below I will sketch the history of the Democratic Party in its relations with the Populist Party, small-p populism, and the various sorts of progressivism during the period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1950s, and suggest that many of the problems the Democrats have now can be traced back to the redefinition of the Democratic Party that took place at the end of this period.
(There are very good reasons for some to feel thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party right now. Rather than infighting among progressives over this, I'd like to see us think creatively about ways people can work creatively outside the box that others would put us in. I'm working on a diary about this myself, so I was pleased to see this one as a natural part of the same general conversation. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Like almost everyone here, I have frequently asked myself why the Democratic Party tends to be so worthless. even though many individual Democrats are pretty good.
The answer is this: Loyalty is always punished, and betraying the voters is what political parties are for. The Democratic Party is not us. The Democratic Party is a billion-dollar hierarchal bureaucracy made up of careerists with axes to grind. For them we're just a resource. It's our job to learn to deal with them; they've already figured out how they're going to deal with us.
Supporting a candidate or joining a political party is not like falling in love or finding Jesus. It's like making a high-risk, high-stakes business deal with someone who cannot entirely be trusted. You have to keep your eyes open and protect your leverage -- once you've lost your leverage, you've lost everything. Liberals can beg and whine forever, and all Rahm will ever do is laugh. We need to learn deal with Rahm (and Obama) as coldbloodedly as they deal with us.
No one should ever be surprised, shocked, hurt, or heartbroken when a Democrat doublecrosses them. That's what politicians do. Being doublecrossed the same kind of thing as losing a hand of poker. You should figure out what, if anything, you did wrong and get ready for the next hand.
I just got back from a trip to Oregon, Washington State, and Montana. A little bit of work (4 book events, a lunch w/Ron Wyden's Chief of Staff, meetings and discussions with various progressive-minded folks in each state) and a little bit of play (a glorious long weekend in Glacier National Park). I was relieved and delighted to get out of DC and spend time with real people on the ground who are working to make things better, but also frustrated (as I always am) by how big the disconnect is between the activists on the ground and the politicians in DC. From the stories I heard in Montana, for example, it is clear that now that Max Baucus was re-elected last year, he could truly care less about what the good people of Montana think should be done on health care. He is spending far more time meeting with (and raising money from) health care lobbyists than he is in actually listening to people back home, and the frustration of these folks back home is palpable.
But I did come away very encouraged by the healthy kind of progressivism I saw in those states. Having grown up in Nebraska, it's a brand of politics I relate to very much: a healthy fusion of progressive libertarianism and populism.
There is, of course, a dark side to both of those things. Right-wing populism of the kind that the teabaggers, Limbaugh and Palin practice can turn racist, xenophobic, and ugly really fast. And reflexively anti-government libertarianism would lave us handicapped by a lack of investment in badly-needed public capital (schools, infrastructure, etc.) and defenseless against the rapaciousness of unrestrained big business interests.
A blend of the best of libertarianism and populism, as practiced by the kinds of people I was talking to out west, is in my view progressivism at its best. From the libertarian side of things, you get a healthy skepticism of government and authority, and a rejection of fundamentalist religion's over-reaching into our personal lives. From the populists you get the equally strong skepticism of big business, and a push for government to take on the wealthy and powerful. That fusion makes for compelling politics, and is the reason that the Western states have been moving more and more towards the Democratic coalition in recent years.
Every time I go out west, I feel drawn to the region. The combination of the people and the mountains may get me out there for good one of these days.
Last weekend, we had a very interesting discussion about Nancy Bordier's web-based tool gor bottom-up self-organizing. In the course of the discussion, perhaps the most fundamental questioning of the whole concept came from educationaction, here, for example. Although they come from very different directions, I regard both Nancy and educationaction as valuable contributors to our community, and I wanted to make a few comments that I hope will help enhance the value of their different perspectives, by stressing how they both contribute in different ways.
This is especially timely in that we're going to be running a diary by educationaction on the front page this coming Friday, 11 AM EST, with a special guest appearance by Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, which the diary builds upon.
There are two big-picture comments I want to make. First, I think it's fair to say that Nancy represents a strain of thinking generally associated with the progressive tradition, while educationaction reflects the populist, working-class critiques of that tradition. This is a long-standing debate in American politics, which shows no signs of going away anytime soon, and so it's frankly ridiculous to expect any two individuals to rush things along. What we can hope to do is find and focus on the more fruitful results from this tension. Second, I think it's crucial to remember that none of us is grand generals in charge of vast armies. We're talking in the trenches here, lucky if we command the next sentence that comes out of our mouths, so that it doesn't turn around and bite us.
Thus, educationaction raised a number of concerns that he had about what Nancy hadn't done in the process of developing her concept. And while I agreed in the abstract, and felt it was important to have him draw attention to these things, I also felt that it was important to realize that, like most of us on the left side of things, Nancy is working with very limited resources, without any sort of far-sighted institutional support.
(Speaking of populist backlash, apparently Wall Streeters think there is too. - promoted by Mike Lux)
I hate the phrase "jobless recovery". If people are not getting decent employment, there is no such thing as a recovery. It doesn't matter if corporate profits go up, if the Dow Jones rebounds, if Goldman Sachs honchos got record bonuses, if the Gross National Product rises. What matters is whether regular folks are feeling any difference in their lives. And when you hear the phrase "but jobs are a lagging indicator", let's be clear: that's just another way of saying trickle-down economics.
About 20% of adult Americans are either officially unemployed, have given up looking for work, or are involuntarily working part-time or at temporary jobs. As long as that stays true, we can be very clear about what the consequences are:
Foreclosure rates will keep going up, and housing prices won't start to recover
State and local government will continue to be broke, and the federal deficit will continue to rise
Our manufacturing base will continue to be in desperate shape
In other words, our economy- the real economy- will not start getting better. I know that the big banks' executives will be getting huge bonuses, and I'm sure they will be spending that money around like manure, making things grow and all that. But the real economy will not be getting any better.
I hope the President understands that, and understands very keenly how much his fate is tied to real people getting real jobs. His political project will be dead in the water unless the real economy- not Wall Street profits, not the stock market, but real jobs for real people- starts to get better reasonably soon.
The American people like President Obama so far. They know he inherited a big mess, and they know he's working hard to fix it. They are willing to be patient for awhile. But they don't want to be the ones who are the lagging indicators.
There are some very specific things our government can do to create jobs: invest a lot more in infrastructure projects and green jobs, for example. Give the same kind of help to emerging industries that virtually every other industrialized country does. Negotiate tougher with China on currency manipulation. This ain't rocket science, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later.
There is a populist backlash brewing in this country. Folks are going to blame somebody for this economy. I would personally rather it be the banks than President Obama, but that will only be the case if President Obama is making real progress on jobs.
In response to the weekend's murder of George Tiller, MSNBC's lead thought this morning was that the "culture wars" have returned.
Not to always be the irritating know it all sitting in the first row of class or anything, but I have news for MSNBC. The culture wars never left American politics. In fact, they will always be with us. We are never going to enter a period as a nation where our cultural differences fail to have an impact on our political choices.
While I do agree that (1) MSNBC was being foolish, (2) the "culture wars" never went away, and (3) cultural differences will always have a substantial impact on our politics, I think history shows quite clearly that there are ways to mitigate the intensity of such conflicts, which have varied considerably in their intensity over the course of our history. Thing is, though, the Versailles CW is (wait for it...) wrong once again on both where this comes from, and how it might be overcome.
What's more, it's not always a good thing to calm the culture wars. Gaining equality for despised and disempowered groups has regularly required that the culture wars heat up, not cool down: freeing the slaves, winning women's rights, ending racial discrimination, gaining social acceptance for every major wave of immigrants, winning equal rights for gays and lesbians--all these struggles have been held back by the insistence on social peace, and only advanced when people were willing to risk intensified social strife, which now goes under the rubric of "culture wars".
This gives rise to a simple observation: as a first approximation, there are three favored ways to end the culture wars:
(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by pushing for equality. (The problem is those people.)
(2) Progressives believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. (The problem is lack of "liberty and justice for all.")
(3) "Responsible" centrists believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.)
Pity the Grand Old Populists. One day the Republican grandees are railing against President Obama's Treasury secretary for standing by while AIG gave bonuses to the traders who helped to wreck the economy. Then the memo comes from GOP Central that they are opposed to the Democratic move to claw back those hateful bonuses with a 90% tax. It appears that Republicans and their ideological mentors hate tax increases a lot worse than they hate nameless greedy insurance company executives.
But Wall Streeters really resent it when we rubes stick our noses in their doings. They were alarmed when the House, with 85 Republicans joining the Democratic majority, passed a bill that would slap a 90% tax on bonuses for executives of government-rescued corporations whose family incomes exceed $250,000.
It's incredible. Just as 20,000 viewers signed an open letter to CNBC telling them to listen to Jon Stewart and hold Wall Street accountable instead of mindlessly repeating Wall Street talking points, NBC doubled down.
This morning, Meet The Press host David Gregory repeated what CNBC's Erin Burnett has been saying all along: The public is ignorant. If only the simpleton public understood what the Wall Street "experts" understand, we wouldn't be so populist and angry. See for yourself:
In these economic times, NBC needs to stop blaming the public and instead focus like a laser on holding Wall Street accountable. David Gregory, instead of calling the public stupid, how about saying on the air that there are, in fact, no "best and brightest" at AIG worth giving bonuses to if they threaten to leave?
That being said, CNBC is still the center of the fight to get the media to do their job. If we can get CNBC to truly start holding Wall Street's feet to the fire, that will have ripple effects throughout NBC and the entire financial news industry.
You can join leading economists, journalists, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and over 20,000 members of the public in signing the open letter to CNBC here.
Dear moguls, magnates, captains of industry and masters of the universe,
Lately, we've noticed some media chatter over the notion that you might "go Galt" in response to the recent leftward political drift and the increasingly populist demands of the disgruntled public. Going Galt entails following the example of John Galt, the romantic, individualist hero/businessman of Ayn Rand's best-seller, Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Galt decides to withdraw from the world in order to deny an ungrateful society the fruits of his creative genius. We think it's a great idea.
The truth is, we never deserved you. Please go. We never deserved your visionary leadership in the manufacturing, transportation and energy sectors, your inventive ability to devise new, arcane financial instruments, your wonderful political lobbies and their committed advocacy for sound policies in the realms of health care, education and foreign policy. We never deserved any of it.
We tried, half-heartedly, to show our appreciation by rewarding you with massive tax cuts, subsidies for your industries, grants for your research departments, and multi-billion dollar no-bid government contracts. But apart from those meager contributions, it was really your entrepreneurial spirit that earned you your first, second and third yachts, your helicopter and your diamond toilet bowl.
So teach us our lesson and leave. Let our economy devolve into a primitive bartering system where ten chickens will be worth one goat and two goats will be worth one i-Pod . Meanwhile, you can eat, drink and make merry in your secret Xanadu.
Please, follow the John Galt model as faithfully as possible and vanish without a trace. Leave your properties, art collections and, especially, your liquor cabinets intact. We, the hoi polloi, will now be burdened with the responsibility of managing your holdings and disposing of your estates as best we can.
We only ask that you pack your bags and spirit yourselves to your top-secret pleasure dome before we take the trouble of raising the scaffold, unpacking the guillotine and sharpening the blade. It's such a pain.
Sincerely,
The Rabble
P.S.: Please take any and all copies of Ayn Rand's fabulous novels with you. We don't deserve them either.
One of the main pillars of Republican thought is that LBJ's spending on social programs and his relatively modest federal deficits caused the hyperinflation and economic stagnation of the 1970s and early 1980s. The problem with this theory which largely goes unopposed is that the much larger deficits of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Georhe W. Bush stubbornly failed to cause inflation. LBJ managed to produce a b udget surplus in his last year in office, as well. I f federal deficits cause inflation, this record makes no sense.
In fact, I patiently waited for Regan's deficits to run into hyper inflation and lo and behold, we never had it. The same thing held with George W. Bush. Were larger Republican deficits kept in check by complicit bankers and Wall Street types or was there something else at work here. Well, it turns out that price inflation remarkably correlates with rise in oil prices rather than with federal deficits. Following the Arab-Israeli War OPEC applied an oil embargo to countries considered friendly to Israel. prices zoomed from $3 a barrel in 1971 to over $12 a barrel and the prices at the gas station went above $1 per gallon. A scond shock followed with the Iranian Revolution (1979-80) and the Iraq-Iran War which mostly cut off Iranian exports until Iran started winning in late 1981 or 1982. By 1981, oil prices rose to $35 a barrel.
Reagan exacerabated hyperinflation and stagnation by secretly supporting Iraq as retaliation of the hostage crisis. It was Dick Cheney who first armed Saddam Hussein while working for reagan. But Reagan got the politically credit by deliberately engineering a steep recession (10 straight months with unemployment over 10%) which broke the back of both our own economy and oil demand. Future deficits, which were huge, were paired with falling oil prices (and therefore) falling or stable cost of living stats. This economic malpractice tranferred the blame from the Nixon-Ford era to LBJ and "social programs." Social programs were tarred and feathered semi permanently while the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts were deified. Only the tax cuts really didn't produce much growth and the social spending does not appear to be the real cause of infalation. Nonetheless, this is politically effective and has seeped into conventional wisdom.
