Let's Get Clear On Something

Thomas Frank has said that, for a purportedly rightist party, the Republicans talk an awful lot about class resentment, but in a strangely inverted way: they define the elites in terms of cultural preferences rather than economics - "elitist, Volvo-driving, Latte-sipping, gay-loving liberal snobs in their big cities, sipping lattes and looking down their noses at the humble, hard-working common folk out in 'flyover country.'"

Thomas rightly points out that the one thing never mentioned by Republicans is the role of economics in the class structure.

The reason Republicans get away with this is the Democrats changed from having their policies grounded in economic fairness, and instead increasingly defined themselves by cultural issues. As the Republicans started defining themselves as champions of working people (a definition that, if you look at their economic policies, is ludicrous) the Democrats stopped talking about economic fairness and went along with defining themselves more along cultural lines.

One of the most disheartening things about the Democratic Party's haplessness is that it has allowed the Republicans to incrementally dismantle the hated New Deal, which they want to do because the New Deal costs Our Reptilian Corporate Masters power.

Our Reptilian Corporate Masters hate New Deal style policies because what they desire is a frightened, submissive, and most of all low-wage workforce, because that will allow them to Make More Money, And Thus Have More Power. The New Deal was absolutely hated by the oligarchy because it took away a lot of means of asserting absolute dominance over working people.

This is why single-payer health care represents such a threat to the Republicans' real constituency (the Oligarchy): fear of losing medical benefits keeps people from daring to step out of line and demanding better wages or working conditions.

This is why Our Reptilian Corporate Masters absolutely love crippling student loan debt: it is a potent tool to hold over folks to keep them from threatening the system. They want a population that is "educated" along the lines of vocational training (the knowledge that one is incurring a large debt tends to focus one's mind on the income potential of one's major...) rather than what used to be considered an "education" before the rise of Our Reptilian Corporate Masters in the late 19th century.

This is why raising taxes, and especially making our tax system more progressive (i.e., raising the tax rates as one goes up the income scale) is spoken of as That Which Must Not Be Done, if you listen to Republican rhetoric.

The thing is, actions have consequences, and the tiger the Republicans rode to success in the 2010 mid-terms will eventually start asking awkward economic questions of the Republicans, and then their venal fraud will be made plain. I pity them when that day comes.

We need "More and Better **Leadership**"

Digby, yesterday:

I also think that Democrats really don't like to govern because it makes them feel exposed. They have prostituted themselves to business and adopted neo-liberal principles, but they have to pretend that they are representing working people and the poor.

Well, there's your problem right there.

If you really want your heart broken, read FDR's first or second second inaugural addresses or virtually any utterance of Harry S Truman (the ones about economics, anyway) and then compare and contrast with the current Clusterfuck That Is The Democratic Party.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties; blue collar and union guys vs. the "New Left" college radicals. That split has consistently and only served one constituency well, really; the rich. It is worth remembering that the central, core, consensus issues that have united the left's most dominant constituency (the New Deal coalition) were economic in character.

The consensus left position was simple, and went like this: It is legitimate and necessary to use the power of the central government (through progressive taxation, income redistribution and support for labor) to restrain the tendency of big business to concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distictive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change. The Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy; the Democrats point out that the Republicans have been trying that for years, and really just want to give more money to their rich friends and weaken the government's ability to stick up for working folks, but we Democrats want to pass a big jobs bill to give our constituency, ordinary Joes and Janes, a chance to practice their legendary work ethic and provide a nice life for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Kruigman and others have been calling for the Democratic Party to take the golden opportunity of the current crisis to break out the economic populist rhetoric to sell economic populist policies.

This would seem to be an obvious and winning strategy that could plausibly lead to a couple generations of electoral and ideological dominance. So, why are we not seeing it?

What has happened is that the Democratic Party leadership has become corrupted by proximity and fealty to the wealth and power of our economic elites. Incrementalism and pressuring the current bunch has not worked, because they are too corrupted; we need new and better leadership. It's time to clean house. The leadership has failed us. It's time to acknowledge that and replace them.

The Machine

There are millions of ex-manufacturing workers who used to make good livings making things here in the USA. The "New Economy" had and has no real place for them: the Old Economy is the only place that offered them a way to use their skills and gifts in a way that afforded them the basics of life plus a little fun.

Again: the economy offers people with less than a college degree precious few (and vanishing) ways to support a family in anything approaching comfort.

Here's the thing: there are millions of folks who are, to be blunt, not smart enough, or are temperamentally unsuited, (or increasingly, too poor) to go to college. Are they to be consigned to working at 7/11 and making 9 bucks an hour? Don't we as citizens have an obligation to see that they have work available to them that will allow them to support their families in a dignified manner, and maybe even allow them to put something away for college for the kids and even something for their golden years?

These questions have not been asked of Americans in any public and consistent way for years - decades even. The very clause, "we, as citizens, are obligated to..." is, in the libertarian, Hobbesian world of economic mercilessness we've allowed to flourish, a nonsensical phrase full of meaningless words. We are no longer "citizens" -- active participants in the building of our civilization -- but "consumers", defined by our economic worth; mere cogs in the soul-impoverishing machinery of "wealth creation" and economic oligarchy; passively doing our part to keep the whole corrupt machine humming, nothing demanded of us but to Consume.

I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the thing that most creeped me out about the movie The Matrix was the sense I had that it was not really about some future dystopia, but rather a piercing parable for the present world we live in; there is this sort of Machine that we all participate in, so immersive that we can't escape its greedy maw, can't but serve its needs rather than the needs of our brothers and sisters.

To break out of this losing game, we must realize - we must RESOLVE - that, to coin a phrase, the Economy is made by and for us, and not us for the economy.

Martin Luther King Jr. used to say "You can't ride a man's back unless it is already bent." It took decades for the ceaseless propaganda of the Machine to bend our backs; it only takes a moment, an instant, to decide to straighten your back and thus undo all its work.

Please Excuse my Cuss-Words

Here's the thing, rich people: you've been running the country for your benefit, not ours - to the point where the entire fucking system is now coming unglued. You have warred and underpaid and cripple-em-with-debt-ed your way into a big fucking crisis, and all I have to say to you is:

SCREW YOU.

In the last 30 years, your compensation has increased to the point where you are making hundreds of times what your average employee is making. I'm sorry, but you don't work 300 times as hard as I do, you don't experience 300 times the stress I do (want stress? Try getting by on what I'm making some time - it'll be not just "fire the nanny" but "kids, we'll be eating spam for the rest of the month.")

When was the last time you were out of money? And not, stuck in Paris in the summer after college and waiting for mommy and daddy to wire more money, but more like the following situation:

Money in checking account: $8.23
Money in Savings account: $36.18
Days til payday: 8
Proportion of that paycheck that will go to rent: 90%
Proportion of the post-rent remainder of your check needed to buy food until your mid-month paycheck: 108%
Reaction: "Oh, fuck."

That's spelled S-U-F-F-E-R-I-N-G, and millions and millions and millions of people are experiencing it, not just now, but for fucking YEARS because of what you have done and what you have failed to do.

To the politicians who are too afraid to stand up to this corrupt, wicked bunch:

FUCK YOU TOO.

What is so damned hard to figure out about our situation?

We need to organize the working poor into unions who will fight to raise their poverty wages; we need to re-industrialize the economy so that we're taking raw materials and using them to create things of real value and can afford to pay good wages, as opposed to an economy based on hallucinatory "returns" on financial instruments based on abstractions of other financial instruments.

We need living wage laws, and a real, functioning social service system. Government-provided, free daycare for anyone who needs it. Single-payer healthcare. Mixed-use development that is aimed at creating communities with a mix of incomes, rather than a population divided into either "exclusive" communities or slums. Geographically dividing the upper middle class and above from the poor is a good way to destroy the social fabric of a country.

We need a tax system that rewards work, but in which wealthy people pay a higher and higher price for each incremental increase of income, and that pays support to poorer folks in larger amounts as you go down the wage ladder.

We need to support small farmers with crop subsidies and cash supplements to their incomes, while providing incentives to use their land wisely, especially incentives to grow their crops as near to pure-organic as is practicable.

We need more taxes, especially on the rich. Way more taxes. Why is the media treating the huge deficits in California and the federal government as great big, gee-what-can-we-do mysteries?? You either need to:

1. Cut services (which will cause already suffering people's lives to become constant, desperate emergencies, which in turn will result in lots of social unrest and eventually, if it gets bad enough, armed revolution) OR

2. Raise taxes substantially on people who can afford to pay more, which will result in lots of huffing and puffing from the Limbaugh and business right (but I repeat myself), and if it gets bad enough, ridiculous, badly written polemical crypto-fascist novels featuring characters named "John Galt".

All of this would seem to be obvious to me, but that's only because I'm barely getting by.

Too many people call themselves lefties because they drive Priuses, are pro-choice and treat the nanny like a member of the family. Methinks they need a reminder of what real, actual leftism looks like.

They have a right to be bitter, I'd say

Robert Reich posts on the controversy over Obama's comments that working class Pennsylvanians are "bitter" about their circumstances:

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -- by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame "liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones.

Speaking of speeches...

A speech by FDR that may, sadly, become apropos given the ongoing financial collapse:

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Thought of the Day...

When Thomas Friedman says, "The World is Flat" what he means is, "Expect a pay cut before you're fired."