Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Where we are now.

My last few posts have attempted to put some of the historical ugliness of American presidential campaigns into context for understanding the ugliness of today. (here, here, and here) While it would be impossible to detail all of the empirical events of even one campaign, it is important to try and pull out as many comparisons as possible. What I would like to demonstrate is that the somewhat idealistic perception that politics should be about persuasion and democratic process, that politicians are better than schoolyard bullies, and that we as a nation are somehow now grown up is an illusion. The perception had some merit after WWII, divisive figures like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon on his worst days could be seen as aberrations or exceptions to the rule of professional, mature leaders taking responsibility for America's place in the world. However, the polarization and breakdown of compromise, to say nothing of bipartisanship that has accelerated since 1980 makes the case that it is almost the opposite that is true. The New Deal coalition that saw us through the Great Depression, World War II and Cold War was the actual aberration.

So if we start at the assumption that politicians are corrupt and irresponsible, and that the special interests they represent are incompetent, greedy, selfish, short-sighted, and have no actual allegiance to the United States, then at least we have a basis or starting point. At the same time we should not fall into conspiratorial thinking, both-siderism, or fatalism that it is all just an act. This is just as dangerous as idealistic naivete. Then, if we find a leader who bucks the corrupt and cynical status quo it will be possible to raise expectations a little. But there is the strong possibility that the "establishment" or whatever the forces that restrain democracy happen to be called at the moment, will simply swallow anyone like that.

What then is the proper balance? There are obviously forces that resemble conspiracies in America, but degenerating into frothing-at-the-mouth Alex Jones disciples who see everything as a vast and coordinated conspiracy to destroy freedom or reduce you to slavery while ignoring the empirical reality that most of these conspiracies can be explained by simple greed or incompetence does no service to a good and just society. Alex Jones and his minions do a great job of keeping people distracted by "chemtrails" and lizard men though. People that might otherwise work toward solving problems more out in the open. You are not that clever fellas, so knock it off with all the false flag accusations.

It is both easy and frustrating to study "conservatism" in the contemporary United States. Because, simply put, there are no ideas. Intellectual historians half a century from now are going to look back at our last half century and be completely baffled. The Republican Party platform is the incoherent rambling of a mental patient, all their policy positions are utter failures and contradictory. Abroad the bullying swagger of militarism has not solved a single problem and at home the country is like a devastated peasant society as Noam Chomsky has put it. James Galbraith spends an entire chapter in his book The Predator State detailing how free market fundamentalism has been tried and has failed completely in every metric.

The entirety of the right wing message is deceit. They threaten the American people based on lies; on economics, "if we raise the minimum wage the economy will collapse!" on foreign policy, "ISIS is here already!" on elections ""if we don't make the right choice in November, then we will be attacked again". They lie about history "the civil war was not about slavery it was about taxes and overreaching federal power". They lie about ideology "it was the democrat[sic] party that voted against civil rights" and my favorite "it was called the national socialist party!" They have turned Christianity into a religion of war and hate, selfishness and greed. And now, finally they have proven that the "political correctness" tyranny that they constantly rail against is completely toothless by bringing racism back into the open and paying no price for it.

Then there are the rest of us, who have not been able to make a dent in the right-wingers delusions or hate. The majority, or nearly so, of Americans have remained politically inert. How many millions of regular Americans feel the hurt inflicted by corporate greed? How many of them then fall into the right wing trap of blaming government, their government, for the suffering causes by big business? Even with a vibrant network of liberal bloggers, pod-casters, and websites the voice of the left in this country is still a whisper in the hurricane of Fox News et al. One of the most interesting and least talked about aspects of political debates as far as I can tell is the collapse of the Republicans as the party of business. They seem to be less able or willing to cater to business' real needs and instead seem to have become the short-sighted and pale imitation of what a working class person thinks he would need to do in power to please businessmen. Or maybe the deepest, darkest id of the businessman. But government shutdowns and credit downgrades do not help private businesses. Though American business has been spectacularly incompetent, corrupt, and short-sighted in the twenty first century. At least at the top, these business leaders seem incapable of doing anything more than buying elections and stealing from the public to pad their enormous salaries. Maybe I'm wrong, it doesn't seem to be a topic of much interest. 

Democracy is messy, always has been. Democracy is hard, it is a continuous struggle. In an ideal world, democracy allows the best among us to compete for the honor of serving the public but we don't live in that ideal world. That is the play-land of an educated, secure, middle-class society that is both informed and active in politics. What we have instead is a frightened, angry, ignorant, and insecure mass of people barely making ends meet who are often falling prey to the worst among us. So, anyone reading this that cares about democracy and building a just society where extreme inequality is a relic of the past has their work cut out for them. But the future starts now. We can make the "good old days" the reality instead of the aberration but it is going to take sustained effort

Monday, January 25, 2016

Readingcomprehensionmatters

As of 1:15 pm on January 25 this post by something called Americanlivesmatter had 8,725 "likes" 31,091 shares, and 1,200 comments. Every time I think we have reached peak stupid, something like this shows up. The comment above the picture had this to say:


The man who had in the title of his political movement 'socialist' actually proved himself to be a fascist when the young people of his nation gave him the reigns of power. Of course, the man who advertised that he was socialist proved to be a fascist. Yet the best that this generation can hope for is socialism in the hopes that the man who says he is a socialist really is a socialist. The lamest generation is the one where 'enlightened' Americans embraced socialism over the Constitutional Republic which was created by the Founding Fathers of the United States of America... as long as you add the word 'democratic' in front of it.

I can't even anymore. These are the same morons who claim to have read Orwell's 1984, you know, the book that laid out how totalitarian governments name things the opposite of what they are? This meme is so stupid my only conception of how it is getting around is that the morons who shared it understand that the logic displayed here defies imagination. It must be a put on, this must be just another way of sticking it to the liberals. Otherwise, how do they even manage to cross the street without stopping in front of semi trucks to lick the pavement?

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

We have been here before. Part III



I became somewhat distracted yesterday by the Cruz/Trump feud, it is just so delicious that two of the most despicable "politicians" in America have finally found each other and started doing the only thing conservatives [sic] do well, destroy everything. So, to return to the 1928 presidential campaign between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover we also return to detailing the city/rural clash. (pp. 229-232)
Until the 1920s, city and rural values had not clashed head-on in the national political arena. For more than a century, American politics had been dominated by the country; no asset was greater than that of birth in a log cabin. Even when, in the years after the Civil War, the United States moved rapidly from an agrarian to an industrial nation, its chief political figures were cut from the familiar mold. They were farm boys, or men from the small town, or, if they came from the city, they had not cut their ties with rural America and were as acceptable to the crossroads town as to the metropolis. In the 1920s, for the first time, a man who was unmistakably of the city made a bid for national power; in the career of Alfred E. Smith and the campaign of 1928 all the tensions between rural and urban America reached their highest pitch. "For the first time," wrote the New Republic, "a representative of the unpedigreed, foreign-born, city-bred, many-tongued recent arrivals on the American scene has knocked on the door and aspired seriously to the presiding seat in the national Council Chamber."
Born in 1873 in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Smith lived the life of a boy in a great city. Instead of currying his pony or shooting squirrels on a smokey October afternoon, Al climbed among packing crates and boxes along the waterfront. Instead of playing one o'cat in the old apple orchard, he cuffed handballs against a warehouse wall.... 
Smith personified the desire of the sons of urban immigrants to make a place for themselves in the world, and politics was one of the few avenues of social mobility open to them. Smith was not the first to discover this. He was part of a tradition at least as old as the election of the German immigrant John Peter Altgeld to the governorship of Illinois in 1892, a tradition that embraced in the early years of the century Irish boys like David I. Walsh in Massachusetts and Joe Tumulty in New Jersey. But he was the first to ask acceptance by the people for the highest office in the land. It was for this reason that Smith was taken to heart by the Irish of the Northeast; he was a test case of how far an Irish Catholic boy from the big city could go, and how soon. "Al Smith," wrote William Allen White, "must rise or fall in our national life, if ever he should enter it, as our first urbanite."
One of the ablest state officers in American history, a man with an impressive record of electoral success, four times chose governor of the most populous state in the country, Smith was the logical candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1928. Despite lingering bitterness over the Madison Square Garden convention, even many of the old McAdoo supporters recognized that if Smith could not win in 1928, no Democrat could....
 When Coolidge announced laconically, "I do not choose to run," the Republicans turned to Herbert Hoover, born in Iowa, as their presidential candidate and named Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas as his running mate. For the first time in history, both candidates of a major party hailed from west of the Mississippi. After a rewarding career as a mining engineer and promoter in every corner of the earth, Hoover had first caught national attention in the war years as Food Administrator and administrator of Belgian relief. John Maynard Keynes observed that he was "the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation," while Justice Brandeis remarked that he was "the biggest figure injected into Washington life by the war." As Secretary of Commerce, Hoover epitomized the new capitalism, with its emphasis on efficiency, distribution, co-operation, and "service." Smith could make the appeal of a humanitarian and a friend of business interests at the same time; it was his misfortune to run against a man in 1928 who could make precisely the same claims and did not have Smith's liabilities.
The Democratic party faced a dilemma. If it attempted to compete with the Republicans by showing it was just as conservative, it had little chance of success, because the GOP had established itself too firmly as the party of business. On the other hand, if it attempted to take a more radical line, it ran smack against the circumspect mood of the decade. Either way, it was licked. It could hope for success only through a change in the national temper, something it could not bring about on it's own.
What can we make of this excerpt? To start, we have our own tradition of the country dominating the city in the spirit of outsiders coming to Washington to mess with the establishment. Since at least Jimmy Carter's improbable rise to the Democratic nomination in 1976, the narrative has been of a white knight riding in from the provinces to tame the nest of vipers in the Capitol. And governors have been the prime farm team for the parties to out provincial the other side. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of 2008, when both candidates were sitting Senators, that the mold was somewhat broken. But even then Barack Obama was a first term Senator and many commentators framed his rise to contrast that of Hillary Clinton as a man in touch with the people.

And like the raucous campaign of 2008, the back and forth increasingly dirty exchange between Obama and Clinton, the Democratic Party was a chaotic mess in the 1920s. The Democrats were divided on how to be a national party, who's interests it should represent, what the ideal party leader looked like, and what the platform should be. The Republicans were, as Leuchtenburg notes, the party of business and therefore could put up any successful businessman and remind the voters that they were the grownups who did not represent the crazies down south and would not lead the country on a foolish, idealistic crusade like Woodrow Wilson. The actual status quo was pretty good for the people who were the base of the GOP, the only people in America who were suffering during the Twenties were immigrants, minorities, women, farmers, workers, and so on. Not "us" so they could be ignored and disregarded.

Al Smith may have been as close to the ideal spokesman for the city, and for the beginnings of the more diverse America that grew steadily into the present and beyond. But Smith was not good for anywhere else, and without a platform that could really differentiate him and his party for the voters, they were "licked." Today the disproportionate electoral power of rural America is an annoyance that the minority GOP has used to great affect, but in the Twenties the battle was still being waged. The Democrats of that era had nothing like the gerrymandering, messaging, or sheer audacity to abuse public offices for partisan gain. Sure, they may have been just as corrupt but without manipulating districts and voters the way today's conservatives do, combined with the fact that government did much less that could be sabotaged or stolen, meant that the minority party of the past was simply that, the minority party whose ideas rarely had a chance to shine. This story will be continued as we learn more about the key this election will be played in. The way that present rhymes with the past is cloudy, certain elements may look relevant now and be meaningless in a few months.


Friday, January 15, 2016

We have been here before: Part II

  

Here is an excerpt of the book (p. 226) above. I have always found the rivalry between rural and urban America fascinating. What a happy coincidence that the Donald Trump/Ted Cruz dust up is occurring just as I was reading about the nearly peerless awfulness that was the presidential election of 1928.

The city made no effort to conceal its contempt for rural mores. [H.L.] Mencken contended that the farmer was not a member of the human race. The New Yorker, founded in 1925, the epitome of urbane wit light-years removed from country foolery, boasted that it was "not for the old lady in Dubuque." In Dorothy Parker's epigrams at the Hotel Algonquin, in the joyously raucous nasality of Al Jolson, and in the Manhattan provincialism of [Mayor] Jimmy Walker and Texas Guinan, the city created a world in which traditions of small-town America were almost unrecognizable.
Rural leaders in turn attacked New York as the modern Gomorrah. The Broadway theater, expostulated the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was "naked, profane, blasphemous and salacious." The city, rural traditionalists expounded, harbored hordes of aliens indifferent or hostile toward fundamental American values. "New York," wrote the Denver Post in 1930, "has been a cesspool into which immigrant trash has been dumped for so long that it can scarcely be considered American any more." New York was, as Bryan had long ago said of the East, "the enemy's country." It was cruel and impersonal, the abode of the rootless, a place where, as one writer noted, "nobody seemed to have parents."
So what does it mean today? Would it be unfair to assert that most if not all of the attacks on President Obama and Democrats today stem from this conflict? New York City is the stand-in here for all big cities, but would you be the least bit surprised to hear "Chicago" inserted in Gotham's place by some republican blowhard on the news? Today's rural folk have been neatly branded into "Real Americans" by con artists looking to exploit them. In the 1920s the split was real, there were liberal populists in rural America and liberal Progressives in the cities, and there were conservative bible-thumpers in the hinterland with conservative businessmen in the city. The parties were more or less split into regional concerns with a Republican North against the Democratic South. The fault lines were not as concrete then, but the conflict was still real.

Today it feels like the rural versus city values are more a matter of ideology than physical location. So many authors on liberal blogs have biographies that sound like "a blue American trapped in red America." How many liberal teachers, professors, librarians, etc. put up with being trapped in small towns where they are surrounded by ignorant rednecks? How do real ranchers and farmers put up with urban cowboys with their spotless boots, hats, and pickup trucks?

Of course the biggest mystery is how do the hateful rednecks and hillbillies who show up to Trump rallies not instinctively recoil from this embodiment of New York City and all of the "cesspool" images that that city still conjures in their minds? How does Trump not burst out laughing at these people whom he holds in such contempt and would never let rent one of his luxury high-rise apartments? Is the authoritarianism among "leader" and followers so strong that they are each willing to tolerate the others' faults in pursuit of sticking it to the liberals?

Then there is Teddy boy Cruz nakedly yukking it up with the other grifters of Duck Dynasty by pretending to go duck hunting. The scraggly head of the Robertson clan lies right into the camera for Teddy boy claiming that this  Canadian-born product of elite Northeastern universities is one of "us." I guess he is trying to succeed in this con where John Kerry failed by getting his face dirty?

The battles may be different, the players more slick, the parties aligned slightly more consistently, but we have been here before. It did not end well then, so far it isn't going so well for us either.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

We have been here before



I recently picked up this book because a troll on a comment thread made the bold claim that the post-WWI recession was quickly ended by cutting taxes and government spending. "Huh?" Troll headquarters is getting more sophisticated in doling out the day's talking points. Putting that aside, it certainly is convenient that every problem can be solved by the liberal application of fundamentalist right wing policy prescriptions. It may be absolutely useless to try and argue with someone that delusional, they admit nothing and never surrender, but it dawned on me that despite taking a senior level undergraduate course on US History 1921-1945 I did not have the answer readily available in my head to even have an internal discussion on the end of WWI. That is the entire point I suppose, the troll was trying to make a "point" about something and brought up the post-WWI recession simply to obfuscate the discussion, derailing the thread while dissembling about his real reasons for inserting himself there. If you scan just about any news article on social media you see the same thing.

William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of this book, doesn't specifically have a chapter or section on the recession of 1919-21 but I was able to piece together the narrative amid the fight over the League of Nations and the Red Scare. As usual, it is the opposite of the troll's claim, Leuchtenburg writes that the government rolled back wartime controls on wages and prices too soon and all at once so prices skyrocketed while wages plunged. So people were squeezed and could not consume the products that the economy produced, when demand falls so does everything else. This led to mass layoffs, squeezing spending even more. Then government immediately ceased purchasing war material, removing still more spending from the economy. Then finally farmers, who had been encouraged to take out mortgages to more buy more land saw markets for their produce evaporate and prices for farm goods fall so banks foreclosed on them. Basically what Keynesian economics says will happen when there is a sudden and sharp drop in demand. The nail in sealing the recession was the government's brutal response to labor strikes that were in turn caused by the government's actions in withdrawing from the economy. Suppression by violence, arrests, replacement workers, and other anti-labor measures crushed working people on suspicions of "foreign extremist" ideologies at work, i.e. Bolshevism. This sent a clear signal to business that the good times of exploitation and profits while government turned a blind eye were back and corporations had nothing to fear from the liberal, "progressive" Wilson administration.

So much about this country's involvement in the Great War provides a textbook examination of how not to conduct a war. But that is a subject for another post. I started this book with a specific question in mind, I found so many more and the answers to them. Above all, this book in particular (the first edition was printed in 1958 and this edition released in 1993) says so much about where we are now, where we were then, and what not to do in dealing with all manner of political, cultural, and economic problems. Leuchtenburg wrote from the perspective of a professional historian during times of recovery from wars, upheavals, and financial peril. I think we can learn a lot from revisiting his work. I plan to spend a little time posting passages from the text and attempting to analyze and apply the examples of how screwed up the United States has always been. Hence the title of this post. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and we would be well-served to learn from events in the past so we don't have to deal with this particularly embarrassing era of American history again today.

Monday, January 11, 2016

A Student's Loan

Around here the Powerball lottery certainly has been in the news a lot. The estimated jackpot of the 36 state-spanning drawing is $1.3 billion at the time of writing. That's a lot of happiness the players are trying to buy. I will save the long-winded indictment of the system, everyone knows or should know that state lotteries got going in a big way during the awful Reaganomics years where the states tried to raise revenues to pay for public expenses and satisfy the often vicious backlash against property taxes. The very rich were trying and succeeding to become the super rich by pulling Reagan's strings for massively regressive tax cutting, deregulation of all sorts of industries to massively expand corporate power, and huge cuts to social spending. As a sop to the working class that has ever since been slipping from middle class status to working poor, someone came up with the idea of pooling the peasants' money so once in a while one of them could become somewhat rich. Not by coincidence the stigmas of gambling and greed were fading as fast as the idea of community and the public good. In effect, people traded (or more precisely, were scammed into trading) a decent, dignified, and stable economic system for the roller coaster casino of massive inequality we have today. But, as long as there is some little hope of striking it rich through the lottery people seem to tolerate the disintegration of our nation. What if we created a new system of a "public good" kind of lottery?

The lottery is not the only of anti-social institution that has led to our present reality of Donald Trump as front runner for the Republican Presidential nomination despite no experience for the job, but it is a piece of the puzzle. For every Joe Schmoe that feels justified in loathing his job and his boss or coworkers because some day he will win the lottery and leave it all behind, that is one less person willing to fight for reform. Before I was finally downsized and outsourced out of the working-class manufacturing community we had kind of an on again off again tradition of pooling some money for Powerball tickets with the understanding of sharing any big prize we might win. Our foreman was promoted to the job out of our ranks so we trusted him and he would voluntarily collect the money, buy the tickets, and then photocopy them as proof of the numbers. Now my coworkers were really into pools like this and organized little drawings for everything from fantasy football, other sports, and even the cents on our paychecks. We did piecework so our paychecks were slightly different each pay day. I never participated in those but it gave me an idea that I have kind of run with for a while. But it wasn't until the YUUUGE Powerball jackpot became news that I am finally motivated to write about it.

What if we had a smaller scale lottery with a more progressive, socially-minded goal? The Occupy Wall Street movement had an idea to pool their money and pay off members' student loans and other debts. I am not a tech-savvy web design kind of sea monster but with technology the way it is now and getting more impressive every year, I cannot imagine this kind of association would be impossible. Why not start a little website where members can buy in with a small subscription, say two dollars a week, and have a drawing each week to make a payment on student loans, or credit cards, car payments, etc. This would require a degree of trust that most people do not have anymore thanks to con artists and scammers, along with pervasive media propaganda about con artists and scammers. There has to be a way to give an online collaboration enough transparency to get off the ground. Would you pay eight dollars a month for a chance at retiring some debt? I am pretty sure I would.

Here's how I imagine it running. Most sensible people would agree that debt of all kinds has reached a level that is a genuine social problem. Even from the plutocracy's point of view, student loans in particular have surpassed their purpose of social control and become a real drag on economic growth. Therefore the plutocracy may not crush an independent initiative like this the way they would actual union organizing or cooperatives. There may even be individuals in high places that would be sympathetic to a mutual aid organization. Perhaps someone high up in a credit union, or alumni association, or even a progressive church could donate server space or start up capital. Again, I don't know how these things are done, this is just a brainstorm.

A plain website where you create a unique account and subscribe with your credit card or pay pal. I would think people would have to commit to a full year or they might just cancel after winning once. You enter in an account and designate or authorize the site to make payments on your behalf. Then choose numbers for the drawing. You have to choose numbers each week. Then there will be plenty of space on the landing page so you could put an ad or two in to defray some of the expenses, though some of the revenue will have to go towards administrative and tech costs. Then a random number generator can determine the winner(s), it would be more in keeping with the idea to have one large pot and then several smaller prizes. That way a chunk of a members principal can be retired while others can get their payments made. If the cost of subscribing is low enough it won't hurt anyone's living expenses but do some real work towards liberating people from the burden of debt. And give members the experience of gambling without the peril of blowing the winnings on crap.

Of course, the people who most need restraint in managing money will not be interested in this idea. There are numerous articles floating around social media since the jackpot was announced discussing not only how bad the lottery system is for society but that most winners are crushed by the prize in various ways. I think this system I described is a more healthy alternative but I used to feel that way about Internet poker and that was banned. 

If something like this lottery won't work then we need to think of something that will. Something that won't be as easily demonized by the trump crowd as occupy or black lives matter has been. But I won't hold out hope, if a group of people whose major goal is "please don't kill us" and a lot of people say "no" what chance do we have?