Speaking of David Brooks

His latest column is the usual concern-trolling nonsense I expect from his unctuous, oily mouth. The real treat is in the comments that follow it:

Twice a week you write a column, and the thesis of that column is always the same: we, the little people, ought to want to suffer a little more in order to make sure that our reptilian corporate masters become incrementally wealthier.

Here, the superstructure you build upon your predetermined thesis is that those entrepreneurs in Racine and Yakima, to whom you have surely actually spoken rather than just making them up, are more concerned about debt than they are about the recession. Facts do not back up your assertion. Repeated public polling has shown that Americans are much more concerned about jobs than they are about debt. You dismiss the stimulus bill, whose only real problem was that it wasn't large enough, by claiming it didn't create jobs, when the more accurate statement would be that it didn't create NET jobs: it merely prevented millions more jobs from being lost.

And, of course, we could balance spending on stimulus by raising revenues, specifically by raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy. But since you are paid very, very well by our reptilian corporate masters, you would never suggest that taxing them at the 70% rates that were commonplace until the upper class really took power with the ascension of Reagan, as such a restoration of the progressive tax code would force them to purchase a slightly less opulent second yacht. And how would THAT look?

You mock the more liberal among mainstream economists by basically calling them eggheads whose theories don't work in the real world. But the truly laughable and demonstrably false economic theory is the one which claims that making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of everyone else will result in greater prosperity for the nation. It has been tried, over and over again, and we've been trickled down on enough. This country needs more stimulus and unemployment spending, not less: while there are indeed long-term debt issues, these can be addressed quickly and easily by cutting military spending and restoring the progressive tax structure that made America prosperous throughout the mid-20th century.

NY Times's cluelessness, and the Decline of Trad Media: Related?

[T]his is just the Times typically looking at the nation's problems through the lens of the upper class -- as Linda puts it, "stories about the recession where people struggle along without their nanny, and find that the recession reconnected them with their soul, instead of making them live in a refrigerator box."

David Brooks specializes in the "Recession Is Good For Our Souls" Genre of editorializing.

Brad DeLong for White House Chief of Staff

The situation is grim. So why isn't everybody running around with their hair on fire?

Why aren't there irresistible political demands for more government action to steer us toward a better economic recovery --or at least to hedge against a double-dip in what seems likely to be called not a "recession" but a "depression" when historians get around to writing about it?

I have my theories:

1. widening wealth inequality and an upgrading of the class position of reporters and pundits, who are no longer ink-stained wretches immersed in mainstream America;
2. the collapse of union power, which ensures that nobody who sees real workers on a daily basis sits at the table when the deals are made;
3. increasing job security for the powerful in Washington, aided by the growth of the lobbying apparatus that envelops the mixed-economy government;
4. the collapse of professional integrity among the Washington press corps, which no longer dares to call balls and strikes as it sees them, preferring to say only that the Democrats say it was a strike and the Republicans say it was a ball, and that opinions on the shape of the earth differ.

I don't know which theories are right. But the situation does leave me feeling like one crying in the wilderness. (Say not "we are children of the market!") I cry out to boost aggregate demand -- by banking policy, by monetary policy, by fiscal policy, by spending increases, by tax cuts, by anything -- I don't care what! (Well, I do, but not by much)

This really gets at the heart of things. The American leadership (in government and the press) are failing their fellow citizens.

1. The President needs to pull himself together (cough fire Rahm cough) and address the country's suffering with that famous eloquence of his -- and then follow up with effective policies, or else risk destabilizing the country.

2. We on the left need to make ourselves way, way more active and visible to those who lead the country. We no longer have the luxury of self-indulgent despair. We need to get busy.

Some Thoughts on Middle Age

I think back to me at 18, and for all the tumult of being that age, my life stretched before me with seemingly limitless, even frightening, promise. I had not yet known failure of any significant scope. I had yet to have my heart broken. I was going to change the world, dammit, and I wanted answers, and clear ones at that.

Things seemed simpler, or maybe it was easier to convince myself they were. Men in my peer group typically did a stint in the armed forces, and I enlisted in the Army with scarcely a thought to the justice of my country’s causes, or the effects of propaganda on my decision-making.

If my body ached, it was my own damned fault (well, mine and rum’s, anyway...). Time had yet to start insisting on its supremacy, had yet to supply me with the pains of its passage – pains of both body and mind. I understand the temptation in men my age to vainly try to hold on to a mercilessly vanishing youth — but that would require me to surrender wisdom, too, and more; being 18 again would mean the erasure of some memories by which I mark the years, experiences which have softened and mellowed the fabric of my soul.

I would lose the morning I got up before dawn, walked out into a meadow and watched the sun come up over the Vermont mountains and frosted-blue grass and fiery autumn woods. I would lose my first real love, and the way her face looked that one night as the moon lit its contours with blue and sacred light; I would lose the moment, praying the Stations, when Christ showed me His pain with such tenderness that I wept and gave Him some of mine.

Bob Seger once said in a song, "I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then."

Me? Nah. For all the melancholy and aches and increasing limitations, I’ll keep the lessons I’ve learned.

A Gun is Not a Penis

I mean, here's the thing: I hunt deer. I am a gun owner (well, technically not currently, but you know what I mean...). Guns are not Magical Totems Of Manly Power. They are a means of getting venison and wild turkey, both of which are delicious.

Lots (most?) of my fellow lefties are against hunting, and there's a lot to be said for that. Me, I think that, if I'm going to eat meat, it's more moral to kill an animal myself - one who's had a nice life roaming the woods munching on leaves and mating with does - as opposed to eating a cow that was raised in a pen, and spent the last few weeks of its life knee-deep in its own shit in a stockyard someplace. And, of course, not eating meat at all is something I can totally respect.

A lot of American gun-fetishism just seems childish to me.

The Chattering Class Club

DougJ has an amusing rant over at Balloon Juice - "meta" talk on the left blogosphere can get tiresome, but this is right on:

And things aren’t getting any better. I spent the last week with too weak a WiFi signal to post, comment, or do much of anything internet-related besides read the RSS feed on my phone. Obviously, it’s my fault for what I’ve chosen to put on my Google reader, but the entire fucking thing was Kevin Drum congratulating Matt Yglesias on how well he countered Ezra Klein’s point about Megan McArdle. And half the time the topic was how clubby SCOTUS had become.

Cokie is dead, long live Ana Marie Cox.

Johnny Reb They Ain't

Hunter, as usual, is hilarious:

And I admit, a small bit of me almost hopes they manage pull off their own little Beer Belly Rebellion, just so the New Oklahoma Drunken Asshole Redneck Wolvereeeeenes Coors Light Freedom Brigade could finally go up against the U.S. Army like they want and get a nice, barrel-end view of all the pretty gadgets our tax dollars have been buying to use against crazy people waving guns around.

FDR Populism

If, for some strange reason, you really want your heart broken some time, 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 Thing That Used To Be Liberalism.

FDR:

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties, over Vietnam and (to a lesser extent, civil rights); 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, the set of beliefs that really distinguished you as "left," used to be very 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 an elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distinctive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change.

FDR again:

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

When the Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy, I'd love it if the Democrats countered that by pointing 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. They might also say that 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 future for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Krugman 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.

More Like This Please

Funniest Facebook Status Update in, Like, Ever

Well, that didn’t take long---a death panel showed up in my living room this morning. They have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. At the moment I have 'em repainting the rumpus room. This could work out well, I'm thinking.

It IS Waterloo, Alright...

One of Life's Enduring Mysteries

Here’s the thing I’ve never understood. If I walk into a club looking like a nice, respectable guy who is likely to be considerate, caring and a good provider, women will ignore me in droves; but if I walk into a club with tattoos on both arms, a scar on my face and generally create the impression that I’m a likely to be little tardy calling my parole officer, I’ll be freakin’ mobbed. WTF is up with that, anyway? Can someone of the female persuasion just explain this to me, please??