Crazy Like a Fox

That's how Michael Lind describes the Tea Party insanity going on in Washington. It's the culmination of decades of the southern strategy, which, he argues, is more about cheap wages and shitty living standards than even about race.

In fact what is going on is one part of a batshit whole, that being the whole libertarian/neoliberal "philosophy" is all about cheap labor and destroying living standards in order to further enrich a tiny minority. It is tragically a worldwide movement. Much of the rest of the political establishment embraces neoliberalism, and people with sense are being relegated to the sidelines.

Lind's article is interesting because in a real sense this is about the revenge of the South against the rest of the country. I totally agree with his suggestions, which of course Congress won't do one shitting thing about:

A federal living wage.
Nationalization of social insurance.
Real voting rights.
Nonpartisan redistricting.
Abolish the Senate filibuster.
Abolish the federal debt ceiling completely.

And here is what he says about the debt ceiling:

The federal debt ceiling is another institution like the filibuster which has now been ruined by being abused by Southern conservatives. Now that the Southern right is trying to turn it into a recurrent tool of hostage-taking when it loses votes in Congress, the federal debt ceiling should be abolished. The federal government should be authorized to borrow any amount necessary to fund spending appropriated or authorized by Congress, if there is any shortfall in tax revenues.

Speaking of Crackpot Cults

Michael Lind wrote an article for Salon detailing the latest incarnation of the Ayn Rand "philosophy," which would never work in the real world and only cause suffering and even revolution by the masses hurt by such ideas.

It has been said Ayn Rand probably suffered from Asperger syndrome, something that wasn't even given a name (until around 1944) when she was a young girl trying to make sense of the world around her, and something that wasn't formally recognized as a disorder and standardized as a diagnosis until after she died. In interviews she came across as somebody who tried hard to explain her philosophy and seemed to have put a great deal of thought into her ideas, but it was obvious to anybody but the most brainwashed of cultists that something was missing from her analysis. That missing piece was a complete inability to empathize with others, to be able to see issues from other viewpoints.

Rand had an excuse for having such a harebrained outlook, but the same cannot be said for her "followers," many of whom are now in positions of influence and are wrecking the country with idiotic ideas that have never worked in the past (after all, history bears this out) and would never work now.

The Gilded Age was a goddamned disaster and nearly destroyed the country economically. There should not even be nostalgia for such a destructive time in our history.

Everything old is new again, I am afraid. These con artists are now trying to rebrand this radical cult as "populism." "Libertarianism" and populism are total opposites.

Lind:

Ben Domenech, for example, tries to define libertarian populism by arguing that it takes “a few of its aims from the Rand Paul approach – a balanced budget amendment, flatter and simpler taxes, and more – but there is also a stronger focus on issues which cut across party lines, including reform of higher education, prison and justice systems, civil liberty protections, and an assault on D.C. cronyism from green energy to Big Banks.” But all of this is standard-issue libertarianism, including libertarian critiques of “prison and justice systems” and “civil liberty protections.” Nothing new here, folks, move along.

What Domenech and others mean by “populist” appears to be “popular.” They want a popular libertarianism, a libertarianism that majorities of Americans might vote for, not a movement that has anything to do with actual historic populism in the United States, which has generally been, to coin a phrase, illibertarian.

Of course the proponents know that. It's call about protecting the "rights" of the privileged to continue to live off of everybody else and not have to be held accountable for it.

The Parasitical Class

is destroying the country by taking all of the wealth and buying off almost all of the politicians.

Michael Lind is almost always right in his analysis:

Low taxes on rentiers. In the late 20th century, the U.S. and a number of other capitalist countries made tax rates on capital gains lower than tax rates on wage income. This was supposed to encourage investment in productive enterprises, but in fact it merely provided the super-rich with windfall fortunes that have often been used for stock market and real estate speculation. Thanks to privileged tax treatment of capital gains, Warren Buffett complains that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, and Mitt Romney — the poster boy of rentier financial capitalism — paid 13.9 percent in taxes in 2010, lower than the combined employee and employer payroll taxes paid by low-income workers who pay no federal income tax (and not counting the state and local taxes that they pay). America’s rentier plutocracy has deployed campaign contributions to intimidate Congress into keeping taxes extremely low on those who make most of their income from investments, whether the investments enhance the American economy’s productive capacity or not.

Privatizing natural monopolies. The classic productive capitalist wants to found a company to provide a new, socially useful good or service and make money by sales. In contrast, the classic parasitic rentier wants to bribe the state legislature into privatizing and selling state roads so that he or she can make money without effort or innovation every time somebody drives and pays a toll. Not only progressives but mainstream conservatives used to agree that natural monopolies, such as many infrastructure services—water, electricity, transportation — should be either publicly owned or publicly regulated utilities. Today, however, some plutocrats, seeking guaranteed, recurrent streams of money for little or no effort, fund politicians and ideologues who favor privatizing or deregulating infrastructure and public utilities and cutting or voucherizing Social Security and Medicare, to force the elderly to buy financial products and costly health insurance from the rentier sector.

It's all about the greed.

As with parasites in the animal kingdom, they eventually kill off the host and eventually die themselves.

These greedheads, however, have politicians in their hip pocket and an ideology called "neoliberalism" that provides "intellectual" cover for their sociopathic behavior.

Michael Lind Tells It Like It Is

about public education, and how the reforms are nothing but a bunch of crap.

There isn't any "choice" anyway for parents. The schools ALWAYS are the ones that pick the students, and they generally pick off the top students. This has always been the case with private schools, especially nonsectarian ones.

As we know, Milton Friedman came up with the voucher bullshit as a way to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education.

Lind:

You might think that the debate about educational reform in the U.S. would therefore be about how we can spend more money overall on public education; how the federal government can increase its share of public K-12 funding from 10 percent to 50 to 80 percent; and how to raise public school teacher educational credentials while substantially raising public school teacher salaries.

Instead, the American conversation about educational reform goes, in effect, like this: “In order to compete with countries like South Korea and Finland, we should completely ignore what they do in achieving superior education results, and indeed do the opposite. Instead of copying what works abroad, we should remodel our K-12 system along the lines suggested by libertarian theorists at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, even though no successful foreign country today or in the past has ever based its educational system on anything remotely resembling what those market utopians propose.”

In the last generation, conservatives managed to drag the Overton Window away from reality because attacks on U.S. public education as a total nationwide failure (rather than merely a failure in some high-poverty neighborhoods) served the interests of two right-wing constituencies: libertarians, who know, without examining any data, thanks to Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand, that all public services can be done better by markets if privatized, and Southern Protestant fundamentalists who want their fellow to subsidize their anti-Darwinist separatist subcultural schools, by means of tax-funded vouchers.

Bingo. Remember, Lind used to be part of the traditional Republican right until he had a falling out with the late bloviator William F. Buckley over Pat Buchanan.

Of Course the Government Needs to Step In

The biggest problem is with politicians who are either bribed by neoliberals or subscribe to neoliberalism and won't do what is necessary for the country:

I think you have to get the timing right. The Civil War started in 1860-61, and the period of reform came to a conclusion in 1877 with the end of Reconstruction, so it came about over a 15-year period. It’s the same with the New Deal. Most of the New Deal reforms came in the late 1930s, and in some ways the Great Society reforms of the 1960s were simply the finishing touches to the New Deal, so there you had a 15- to 30-year reform period. A lot of people thought that when Barack Obama assumed the presidency he would be in the position of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. But, arguably, he was more like [President Herbert] Hoover. In other words, the real wave of reform will come after him. I may be mistaken about this, but I think that no matter who wins the next election – even if the Republicans recapture the White House and control both houses of Congress – their stated program simply will fail. Even an all-Republican government will have no alternative than to undertake some alternatives to this program of tax cuts for everybody. It helps them when they’re out of power, but once they’re in power it is not a governing program.

I am not sure "reform" in terms of helping people who are not in the elite class will ever happen. The country is pretty far gone at this point.

Michael Lind Tells the Truth

Obama should run as a Republican because the neoliberal ideas he espouses run contrary to traditional Democratic or liberal ideas.

Of course, if the GOP did run him instead of Romney or somebody else, they would lose the election.

How's this for insults to the president?

If Obama chose to run for reelection not as a Democrat but as a moderate Republican, he could bring about two healthy transformations in the American political system. The moderate wing of the Republican Party could be restored. And the Democratic presidential nomination might be opened up to politicians from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

In the last generation, the old-fashioned moderate Republicans from New England and the Midwest symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller have been driven out of the GOP by the conservative followers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Streaming into the Democratic Party as voters, and buying it with ample Wall Street cash as donors, this upscale elite has changed the party from a populist liberal alliance of unionized workers and populists into a socially liberal, economically conservative version of the old country-club Republicanism of the pre-Reagan era. The transformation began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Bill Clinton and has nearly been completed under Barack Obama. This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. It is your grandfather’s Republican Party of 1955.

I'd say today's "Democratic Party" is the Republican Party of 1980. Obama is a big admirer of Reagan, after all. The party has embraced discredited and debunked neoliberal ideas that are right out of the Chicago School playbook.

Miscellaneous Articles

The WSWS mentions the report noting the incidence of hunger has gone up, according to a recent report.
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Now this is odd: Although Sarah Palin is anti-abortion to the point of having had a Down syndrome child, one anti-abortion group is going to protest an appearance she makes Thursday.

I suspect the group is mad not because of her stance on abortion but the fact that she has been a non-traditional mother. And it maybe it's over her recent family woes i.e., Levi Johnston.
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So isn't the Pledge of Allegiance, that foundation of Republican Party principles (not), un-American?

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)

The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with "the Bellamy salute," a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.

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This economist's prediction things will get worse before they get better is no surprise to anybody who is jobless:

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

In other words the jobs aren't being created to absorb the multitudes of people who are out of work.
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Echoing Some of My Complaints

with Obama, Michael Lind asks what in the hell happened to Democrats that they jettisoned supporting public institutions and went the neoliberal route, which will NOT work:

The point of this imaginary monologue is simple. Once upon a time in the United States, public goods -- from retirement security and energy research to public roads -- were provided by the government and paid for by taxes. As late as the Nixon administration, the provision of public goods by government was considered perfectly compatible with a robust market economy by so-called Modern Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon as well as New Deal Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. In the intervening 40 years, however, free-market fundamentalists of the Chicago School have managed to change the debate, redefining "socialism" to mean not only public ownership of the means of production, but also public provision of public goods.


Rather than fight back, most Democrats in the last generation adapted to this hostile conservative political climate by jettisoning New Deal "big government" liberalism for "market-friendly" neoliberalism. Neoliberals shared the right's enthusiasm for deregulating industries that New Deal Democrats had regulated in the public interest. Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy supported the deregulation of trucking and airlines, while Bill Clinton presided over the dismantling of the New Deal era's banking regulations and declared: "The era of big government is over." Neoliberals and conservatives agreed that public goods should be provided by private, for-profit or nonprofit entities, rather than government agencies. If private corporations or universities had no motivation to provide public goods, well, then, they would be bribed with tax credits or other government subsidies.

We need to get back to true Democratic principals, not try to beat the Republicans at their own (losing, destructive) game.

Campaign Advice

Hillary Clinton should ignore her advisors and simply board the U.S.S. Obama.
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We DID have a candidate this year who spouted New Deal-style populism, and we all know what happened to him.

With Edwards gone, who is going to take his place?
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Campaign Notes.

With all due respect to former president Carter, he really needs to keep quiet about the campaign.

The superdelegates should do absolutely nothing about the contest. Besides it WILL go to the convention.

Obama is totally tainted and CANNOT under any circumstances be the nominee.
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In this article from a month ago, Michael Lind, who wrote the excellent Up from Conservatism, explains what Obama's problem in a nutshell is. He represents the interests of the elites of the party rather than the working class, and he will not do a thing to repair the rift.

Hell, by the time the GOP gets done with Obama, if he gets the nomination, the elites and the working class will unite by voting for McCain or not voting at all.