A priceless book on Thomas Friedman of the New York Times by Belén Fernández

If you are a fan of columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times,  then you will want to read this interview with the author of a book on Friedman titled “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” by Belén Fernández, published by Verso this year (2012). An interview with the author appears in Truthout. In this book, one that surprises me simply because it should have been written long ago (but let’s be grateful to Belén Fernández for putting this together), the author masterfully documents the incomprehensible inconsistencies that are a regular feature of Friedman’s column and his life’s work. Friedman’s objective is to make you happy that you are part of a glorious American Empire and that Free Trade is the wave of our future and the golden key to our past. Agonizing as those narratives may be, the most frustrating part of Friedman’s articles are that few people check his facts. But no one has done that better than Fernández. Here I give you just one of the stories about Friedman from the book. If you have read Friedman you know that he likes to summarize the feelings of an entire nation, even though he talks to very few citizens of any country and apparently gets most of his information by talking to cab drivers.

• [Taken from the interview with Belén Fernández in Truthout: link above]

• “People often joke that the only normal human beings Friedman converses with – outside his usual circle of CEOs and national leaders – are cab drivers. In fact Friedman has a certain insistence on speaking on behalf of the world’s inhabitants without actually speaking to them first. Readers are instructed to “just ask any Indian villager” for confirmation that U.S.-directed globalization is desirable, and are informed in 1999 that it is “stupid” to oppose globalization: “The [anti-WTO] Seattle protesters need to understand that. The people of Sri Lanka already do.” The latter insight is gleaned from Friedman’s chat with the owner of a Sri-Lanka based Victoria’s Secret underwear factory, who obviously does not qualify as “the people of Sri Lanka.”"

As a corporatist newspaper, the New York Times and columnist Thomas Friedman fit each other like glove and hand and the fact that politicians, like Barack Obama consult with Friedman, gives him panache, swagger and sufficient celebrity status to keep doing and saying what he has been doing and saying all along. Whether this book by Fernández changes the conversation about Friedman remains to be seen, but it’s a good start.  Friedman is a Minnesota boy. He is very popular in this state, though at least one citizen of this community never reads him because his articles are vacuous, nonsensical and very misleading.  Perhaps his best work is achieved with the titles of his books, but then again “The World is Not Flat.”

RFM

Aftermath of Joplin MO Tornado 2011

It is innately human for us to recall and assess this past year’s major events and review the memories, as the end of the year winds down to the last few days. After that, the new year starts up and we supposedly have something to look forward to, as we turn our heads and point to the future, though not quite putting last year’s memories in a lock box. Whether this transition is cultural or more subtly linked to the events like the Winter Solstice, the transition we make on or about New Year’s day is a change from looking in the rear view mirror for a few moments, to catch a few fading memories and then switching to focus our eyes on the road ahead. Barack Obama will have to do that as he prepares for his re-election campaign. Right now, resting in Hawaii, he is probably soaking up the impact of his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas and trying to estimate how effectively it went down with the Millennial crowd, those for whom it was designed. I agree with other assessments that he will benefit more from the Millennial generation in the coming election compared to any other age group and that’s why his Osawatomie speech was so important. He currently holds a 25 point lead over Romney among Millennials–they alone will hold the key to his re-election and I think he finally knows this–they are strongly in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but he will have to make a few more left turns in order to convince them and keep his big margin, enough so that the millennials will massively get out and vote in November 2012: they went missing in 2010.  This is an historic election coming up. Let’s hope that this election proves to be the year that we put the Republican Party, at least this iteration of it, in our rear view mirror on a more permanent basis.  On the other hand, for the older crowd, those that are in the pre-Baby Boomer generation, many of whom are members of the Tea party,  Obama trails Mitt Romney by a 54-41 margin, a very wide gap. Perhaps he can whittle away and gain a few points with this group, because as soon as Romney gets the nomination, he will shift his focus towards cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare and eliminating the new healthcare bill he refers to as “Obamacare.” Those are issues that touch many of the Tea Party members–what they are actually mad about is not their benefits, but the idea that illegal immigrants and lazy young people will step in to get a share of the American pie while their own is increasingly at risk–that’s why they are conflicted with Romney’s candidacy. At the very moment Romney gets the nomination, many Tea Party members might be uttering “Hell hath no fury like a former private equity manager running for President.”

Not only do we as individuals assess the recent past, but it makes sense that our government agencies  try to do the same; one assessment among the U.S. government agencies stands out: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tallied the cost of the many weather disasters we have been through in the past year. Justin Gillis reports on this in the New York Times: as he describes it, a typical year in this country for weather disasters usually has three or four incidents which reach the threshold of $1 billion or more each. But this year NOAA has done the math and, while the agency has not yet finished adding it all up, the final cost is likely to exceed $ 50 billion. It includes wildfires, floods, heat waves, dust storms and several deadly tornadoes, the likes of which have not been seen before.  According to  a weather expert who co-founded the website called “Weather Underground,” a search of the historical weather patterns going back to the late 1800s did not reveal anything comparable to 2011 for weather disasters. Though most climate scientists are certain that the heating of the earth from greenhouse gases accounts for many of these catastrophic events, right now it isn’t possible to say which events are global-climate-change-related and which are not. Climate scientists know that we are changing the scale of atmospheric events, because we are putting more energy into the atmosphere. This additional energy has to be dissipated in some way and more frequent and violent interactions with the Earth’s surface, whether over water or land, are about the only options. But things like tornadoes are hard to pinpoint in terms of their genesis because they are relatively small on a global scale and seem random. However, less random is the fact that funnels in some of the recent tornadoes, like that in Joplin Missouri, were a mile wide and touched down for much longer stretches than one’s experience would indicate. This was a violent tornado, destroying virtually everything in its path. Right now climate scientists are retooling climate models to deal with smaller regions and study more effectively the impact that global climate change has on these events. But there is some doubt about the accuracy with which these more refined models can be predictive and with public interest in global climate change at such a low ebb, and the economy in the tank, needed research resources to address these kinds of problems are not available.

In case you were thinking about serious mountain climbing this coming year, you might want to check out what has been happening to the large mountains on the planet, those with glaciers on top, most of which are in full retreat. One climber even reported seeing running water near the top of Mt. Everest, something never reported before. You might want to visit Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa before its glacier completely disappears, perhaps as early as 2015. Glaciers on major mountain tops have had serious erosion during the past few decades and because snow and ice have been the glue that keeps loose rocks and boulders bound together, hiking in many places has become more dangerous. While some climbing can be more accessible, it is often longer and more treacherous. To top it all off, a new report indicates that emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had the largest increase ever recorded, with an increase of 5.9 percent in 2010.  This contrasts with  the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession generated a significant drop in the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate scientists agree that we have reached a tipping point in the sense that we will have to live through a significant period of  impact from global climate change and that our planet is likely to change in irreversible ways as this century progresses. Here’s hoping that our fondest memories each year are not related to the weather patterns we enjoyed, but may never see again.

RFM

OWS Transition?

For an update on the status of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and perhaps learn something about where it is going, you can visit last Friday’s  Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, where excerpts from a panel discussion can be viewed. The panel discussion was sponsored by The Nation and held in the New School University in New York City, with the title “”Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power.” The participants include film maker Michael Moore, author Rinki Sen, Patrick Bruner (“veteran” OWS organizer), economic journalist William Greider and author Naomi Klein, with moderator Richard Kim. The video consists of excerpts from the discussion of what the movement has accomplished, where it is headed, what it needs to do for future growth and what needs it must fulfill if the bright promise they have aroused, that of changing the world, can gain any more traction. To begin with of course, the latter issue is not trivial and no one comes close to seriously expressing the magnitude of the problem. But so far, the incremental  steps that have been taken, such as the “99 percent” deeply resonate with all ages, and have created thirst for action that is more than just “occupy.”   Historians often express the view that the historical record of public arousal and activism against social injustice are not directly related to hard times per se, but emerge when the narrative that kept people down runs out of explanatory power. When hard times first come, people think they have to double down and work harder to get by (or maybe in the case of many Americans, they align themselves more clearly with God and religion–it’s their fault for not being a better provider–their faith hasn’t been strong enough to be rewarded by God) and finally, when multiple iterations of this strategy have failed, groups are formed that begin to articulate a better vision of tomorrow and coalesce into a more nationally identifiable  movement. That is what the OWS movement has brought to our door–they articulate the long-standing grievances we have with how our civil society has been structured and run in the last several decades.  And, they emphasize that the richest country in the world can afford to do better, can afford to do the things that they are talking about. The most boring among us have become the most rich and powerful and they have their boot on our neck. They want to establish an aristocracy so they can pass on their wealth to their offspring (no more inheritance taxes for one thing). The OWS movement is addressing issues that, economically, began in the 1970s, if not earlier. Let’s face it, at the moment, OWS is the only game in town;  after a little more than two months, the movement seems safely launched: it will surely oscillate a bit with the seasons, but one expects to see a process of growth and continued renewal and the “99 percent” is already a permanent member of our national lexicon. It’s a beautiful cutoff. The movement has already had detectable success in the November elections, particularly in Ohio. Patrick Bruner emphasized that by following Google Trends, the words used by the OWS movement have been sharply on the rise.

Other than recommend viewing the video, reading the transcript, or downloading the podcast,  I will emphasize one point from Naomi Klein’s contribution: it is one that I have been emphasizing for some time as many of you know from previous postings. Klein’s point is that the OWS movement must find a way to integrate into their language and template, the environmental movement while emphasizing the fragile condition of our planet, including the fact that we are at the beginning of a new mass species extinction (I added that last point). For this one, we have no doubt who is responsible.  The Republican party is into denial on these concepts, because, according to Klein, the business model they have for our future cannot exist if substantial effort is going to be put into saving the planet and reducing greenhouse gases; that would be giving up too much control, make us too socialized for their comfort. Furthermore, and perhaps more critically for them, they fear it would reduce their profit margin. Yet, for the OWS movement, fusing their anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal message with a “save the planet” motif will be the only source through which millions of new jobs can be generated to help create a badly needed new economy. A labor shortage needs to be created in America, such that wages will be driven upwards. To do that you need a scale of jobs that only a newly empowered movement can demand–one in which saving the planet generates new kinds of jobs through new investments, if necessary forced onto Wall Street.

Corporatists see the current crisis in some ways as a success, because it has created a labor surplus and a decrease in wage demands.  America needs to start making things again and applying our most creative instincts into this new mode of production. It’s all about infrastructure and the green economy. We cannot export the infrastructure needs of this new economy. The cities and suburbs we built after WW II were put together with long paved roads and big interconnecting highways, but this expansionary  lifestyle was based on oil at $20 a barrel or thereabouts. We should have known this would have to end once we reached our own “peak oil” condition in the 1970s. This suburban sprawl we currently have does not work when oil goes to $150 a barrel and yet, at the moment, it seems you have to practically be a visionary to see the magnitude of this looming failure. Most  believe they can still get by using automobiles and airplanes. With the explosion of the Asian and Indian economies, it is hard to see how gas prices are going to get any cheaper.  In rebuilding our urban and suburban living, we will need much better public transportation, including high speed rail and more electric cars, with electric power coming from sources that do not add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and we will need local markets, including food that do not require massive transportation. Some of these attributes of change, such as local farm markets are already being developed and increasingly available through local “farmers marlets.” Of course, by adopting an environmentalist strategy, the OWS movement will lose all possibility of any corporatist Republican support–but they don’t have that anyway. To convert the Tea Party members to the OWS movement, you have to convince them that government is not the source of the problem, that there is no such thing as a trickle down economy, and that government can actually serve to solve some of the major problems we face. This of course is just the reverse of what they believe now, but the “99 percent” is a catchy phrase. The advantage of the OWS movement over that of the Tea Party, is that the former promotes longitudinal thinking or long-range planning, engaging the frontal lobes of our brains. Repetition may be the best way to reach the frontal lobes of Tea Party persons and eventually things like the threat of global climate change coupled to a closer examination of their children’s future,  may become part of a newly refreshed Tea Party Engram. At the moment, expectations like this seem like a pipe dream, but the Tea Party began in harmony with the OWS movement–it’s just that they then blamed the government for the problem, not the corporations, though for a while, they were in their gunsights until they got co-opted by the Koch brothers.

You might also be interested in reading Michael Moore’s ten suggestions for where the OWS movement should go in terms of being more specific in their demands. When your through reading that, look down at the comments to see a whole bunch of additional suggestions made by readers. Perhaps you have one or two of your own. There’s probably room for something about neoliberalism.

RFM

“What a game-changing few months it’s been. Occupy Wall Street has inspired 750 events around the world, and hundreds of (semi-)permanent encampments around the United States. In so doing, the protests have wrestled the national discussion on the economy away from austerity and toward gaping income inequality (the 99% versus 1% theme), outsized executive compensation, and the plain buying and selling of American politicians by lobbyists and campaign donors.”

More from his piece:

“Mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October, according to the website Politico — an increase of nearly 450%. In the second week of October, according to ThinkProgress, the words most uttered on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were “jobs” (2,738), “Wall Street” (2,387), and “Occupy” (1,278). (References to “debt” tumbled to 398.)”

I subscribe to Andy Kroll’s theory–that the surprising election that took place earlier this month was energized and perhaps even converted from austerity and fear to a public mood more oriented towards social justice. If the OWS movement can find a way to energize the country, the election of 2012 could be a game-changer for a more sensible turn away from economic injustice to recognizing that the traditional social policies we installed for the last depression, must be maintained and our economic system must turn away from the neoliberal constraints that have hollowed out our culture and narrowed our economic opportunities. It is not right that the very people who brought on this financial collapse still receive huge bonuses and display no shame.

RFM

Zucotti Park First Aid

Last weekend, November 12th and 13th, my son and I went to Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan New York,  where the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement had established its epicenter. We were lucky to get a hotel room just around the corner from the park and spent a good part of two days mingling among the occupiers, talking to them about the movement and learning more about the people involved. The first thing you noticed when you came around the corner from Nassau Street towards Broadway and Zucotti  was the huge array of police that surrounded the park. It seemed likely that there were more police than park mainstream OWS residents, though by then the resident population of the park had reached about 1600 (see Jeff Sharlet below). The police had huge communication trucks and many different kinds of squad cars; I couldn’t  tell if Homeland Security was there, and while I didn’t see any cars bearing that label, there were many unmarked cars in the police car mix. In the post-9/11 world, getting Homeland Security involved means that the movement (like the events we saw for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008) had reached threshold for a national security threat, but so far, it didn’t seem like that had happened. Of course, as we know, Homeland Security funds and trains police departments to serve as their proxy and many police departments have paramilitary squads that are prepared to carry out lethal assaults.  It was clear that the huge police presence surrounding the park was not going to allow the OWS movement to get up and walk towards Wall Street without a serious confrontation.  Two days after our visit, the police shut the park down, evicted the occupiers and confiscated or destroyed their belongings. Last night (Thursday, November 17) a crowd estimated at 32,500 by the NYPD occupied major blocks of the city, including the Brooklyn Bridge and simply overwhelmed the police. This morning Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be wishing he had left the movement in Zucotti Park where it seemed joyfully contained and a picture of industry.

I had a hard time thinking of Zucotti Park as a park when I first saw it–it is tiny. Located one block from the World Trade Center, it is currently owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a commercial real estate firm, headquartered in New York. When the building was first constructed in the 1960s by US Steel, they built a 50 + story structure at One Liberty Plaza.  They agreed with the city to provide a publicly accessible space, available 24/7  (this was one of those trades where the corporation gets to add more floors to a building and create a park to compensate the city).  Originally it was named Liberty Plaza Park, but later renamed Zucotti Park after John Zucotti, former chair of the City Planning Commission and current chair of  Brookfield Properties. It was badly damaged in the 9/11 attack and served as a launching site for the cleanup.  The renaming came after they remodeled the park, post-9/11. But because it is not actually a public park, it doesn’t carry with it the restrictions of public parks in New York, one of which bans tents without a permit. You can read more about the history and dilemma of Zucotti Park here.

How it all began: Jeff Sharlet of Rolling Stonehas written a fascinating account of the OWS movement and its early history. From the first paragraph of his article:

• “It started with a Tweet – “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule” – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, “Democracy, not corporatocracy,” and some advice that did: “Bring tent.“”

The OWS movement members often refer to this space as “Liberty Park.” At first glance, the park looks like a wall to wall space of a crowded  tents,  some of which were made by joining colored plastic sheets, while others were of the small conventional variety that you use for backpacking or camping.  Many people stay all night and some people are invited to spend the night, either as a small group or as individuals.  At the time of our visit, many were talking about the need for a well-insulated winter sleeping bag and a much better tent to replace their makeshift plastic sheets;  most were confident that public donations would solve that problem (the site where I donated had already raised over $500,000 for the cause). Police did not allow generators to be used, claiming that the noise level would be too high. But, to charge batteries, the Zucotti Park residents used stationary bicycles connected to an electronic arrangement that allowed recharging of computer and cell phone  batteries and those willing to peddle for a while for their contribution to the workload were always welcome.  In general, it was a very friendly environment and if you entered the park with some apprehension about your compatibility with the protestors, you could immediately relax. After all, just about everyone is a member of the 99 per cent and thus a colleague to those in the movement. And you are generally treated in that way. This group wants to grow.

Around the periphery of Zucotti, there were a few quacks, hyping some distorted vision of the World, but they were not members of the OWS movement.  I stopped to talk to one person who seemed very bright and articulate, but when he started advocating that the people in Zucotti were too lazy to work and then began quoting from the Bible, swearing that the earth was only 6000 years old and that evolution couldn’t be true because turtles always seemed to be turtles and if anyone needed to evolve it was surely turtles. As I politely parted company with the young man, it occurred to me that he was a victim of Ronald Reagan, or Reaganism, because it was Reagan who first advocated that creationism should be taught alongside science in the public school system (OK, we have the Scopes trial, but that was long ago and culturally far away: Reagan brought the issue back into our living rooms).  Our culture has been dogged by this creationism/intelligent design/science dilemma ever since and this young man sounded like an unfortunate victim, not unlike what’s still going on in much of the country. Education is critical for a modern, civilized society and we seem to be losing our grip on this requirement. This too is part of the neoliberal plan designed to reduce the cost of labor, but it has reached a runaway toxic level of intrusion.

Library in Zucotti Park

Once you begin to move from the outside periphery to a more central region of Zucotti, you are more likely to run into people who have stories to tell and sensible solutions to propose. The OWS movement has been criticized for not articulating a set of demands and many within the group have tried to inject a demand strategy. But the movement has rejected such pleas and prefers to remain a group that is growing and is certainly content to say “hey if you want to announce your objections to the system, go ahead, you are part of the 99 per cent and we don’t intend to speak for you. We encourage you to speak for yourself.” It is a group that largely emerged from the arts and communications fields rather than from progressive academics or union types. In that sense they do not carry the traditional leftist point of view, though some individuals do harbor that sentiment. The OWS movement represents, in effect, a perfect democracy where everyone has a legitimate view and the right to express it. There are many who feel that the lack of a cohesive set of demands by the group will eventually be their undoing, but right now, they have a growing sense of confidence that they have tapped into a vein running through America and they intend to pursue what has so far been a successful strategy. It is quite astonishing to recognize that the movement is only two months old.  Every person is allowed and even encouraged to express themselves. I saw one sign denouncing the communications giant Verizon for its corporate practices, but in Zucotti, there is more of a focus on Wall Street and the banks. Many in the park had signs specifying specific reasons for change and some cited historical events to make their point. Those that made specific points (the need for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not people–surprisingly I think that that one might actually get through) are generally well informed about the subject and eager to converse. And everyone is talking and communicating and arguing. Virtually everyone was approachable and polite. I found that a common theme among those that have attended college is a heavy debt from student loans. In this respect, they have all been victims of corporate greed. But this is a group that has respect for education and many want to return to complete their degrees or get into graduate school. This is especially evident if you go to the wearethe99percent website and read the statements submitted by individuals. Members of the movement have also started a newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, which has received high marks for its journalistic quality.

A few paths through the park interior allow people to move through in single file, but most of the paths are all so narrow, that to me, they looked more like a  representation of the extracellular space of the brain. In the middle of the park, there was a big food line. Food is free for anyone who enters the park and it mostly comes from donated food sources, manned by dedicated volunteers, many of whom have just arrived and are anxious to contribute. There was a library at the Broadway end of the park, consisting of a large tent with plastic boxes filled with donated books. You can check a book out and don’t need a library card. And because the area has no real public library facility nearby, neighborhood parents came to the library and checked out books for their children. It was a picture of industry and the OWS movement was proud of this additional effort for the cause. When the police came in and destroyed the Zucotti camp, early Tuesday morning (November 15 at 1:00 AM)  the library books were confiscated or destroyed and the OWS movement is trying to get them back, as they look for a place where a new library facility can be established.

RFM in Zucotti: proof of presence

At the other side of the park, but still on the Broadway end, meetings are held in which discussions take place on matters brought up in the General Assembly of OWS, where meetings take place regularly, at which time they try to resolve issues about the focus and direction of the movement. They are also very big on behavior and want this movement to be non-violent. Once the General Assembly meetings are over, people gather in the park to deliberate on the issues that have been raised in the meetings.  The police did not allow the protestors to have microphones and loud speakers, so they developed the art of the “people’s mic,”  which is that when a single person raises an issue, they speak in short segments of a sentence and then wait until the entire group repeats the words, so that everyone understands what is being said. Very good if you’re hard of hearing. It works very effectively, with a couple of moderators standing in front of the crowd to help coordinate the effort. It’s a mechanism that seems to provide a bonding experience and errors for complex statements that were hard to repeat generally evoked laughter. It is through the General Assembly meetings and discussion of the ideas through the “people’s mic” where deliberations are made; anyone can speak, though it generally makes sense that you already attended the General Assembly meeting. They have hand position rules to reject, accept and listen to a speaker who has the floor. Sometimes contentious issues come up and various suggestions made at the Assembly are rejected by the group. The interior also has a First Aid tent and has some internal security. In addition, there was a large blue plastic tent that served as the communications center where people were broadcasting live feeds that you can watch on the OWS site.

Originally, the group only numbered about 60 people when they first met on September 17, 2011 and it was hard to see that they were going to get anywhere. V for Vendetta masks  were quite popular but seemed to convey a more violent confrontation when what the protestors wanted was a non-violent beginning. Drugs and alcohol were not allowed in the park, though you certainly knew that pot was on the menu. Today the OWS movement has spread not only in America, but throughout the World. About 1600 different OWS movements are flourishing globally. By the time we went, OWS was serving more than 3000 meals a day and something like 1600 people were bedding down in the park each night.

The 99 percent versus the 1 percent is a very catchy and simple phrase. It also has meaning in terms of wealth distribution. According to Joseph Stiglitz, published in his article in Vanity Fair, the top 1 percent of our society bring in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and in  terms of wealth, they own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the numbers were 12 and 33 percent, respectively. Few would deny that we have a wealth distribution that is completely out of control and the neoliberal system we have been living under for the past forty years has proven to be too toxic and too radical for our cultural survival, and it is incompatible with the mounting threats we face for a healthy future for the planet we live on.

Tent City in Zucotti Park, November 12, 2011

After being evicted from Zucotti Park, the OWS movement in New York and many other cities, created a massive turnout that overwhelmed the police, whose intentions were to brutally block the demonstrators from taking over things like the Brooklyn Bridge. I have heard a rumor that the OWS library was re-established on the Brooklyn Bridge, though it’s unlikely to have permanent residence there. This movement is strikingly different than anything I have ever seen. Though they do not have demands per se, there is little doubt that they will have an impact on the coming election of 2012 and they already have sent both political parties scrambling to come up with approaches that might ameliorate them and that, in and of itself, could have a powerful transforming effect on the future direction of our economic policies and our social safety net. These are people who shun the neoliberal emphasis on individual liberties and instead promote the idea that we are all in this together–we must create an interdependent society and move away from what imprisoned and impoverished most of us for the last forty years. It will get worse before it gets better, but the OWS movement has started the spirit of revolutionary excitement that may now be impossible to contain. That is what many of us are hoping for.

RFM

William Blum

No matter what you believe about the objectives and methods used to conduct American Foreign policy, especially since WW II, you need to check in periodically for an oil and filter change with author William Blum, whose most famous book is “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II“; I didn’t know the full scope of our outrageous foreign policy intrusions around the globe until I read Blum’s book. Americans were not supposed to know about these things. Thanks to a few insightful journalists, we have slowly assembled the story of our past. When you mate Blum’s book with Chalmers Johnson’s Trilogy, including “Blowback,” it is hard to feel good about what we are doing, in almost any region of the globe. Conducting America’s business abroad you say?  Granted, American Imperialism is not the old fashioned colonialism that we lightly denounced; what we have is a military imperialism in which we establish bases and “com” divisions that are responsible for maintaining American Hegemony throughout the world, including North America. Indeed, we are hoping that AFRICOM, which is currently centered in Stuttgart Germany, will find a base home in Libya once the dust settles down.  We discovered a long time ago that the easiest way to exploit a country is to make sure you have an obliging dictator in charge (if not do the installation work yourself), allow him and his entourage to accumulate some wealth and then grab all you can until some revolution comes along, which you then denounce as anti-democratic or communist, or nowadays, theocratic. That mobilizes forces at home and buys you some more time to pursue your exploitation in God-granted perpetuity. Does anyone really believe that we will be out of Iraq or Afghanistan in our lifetime? We have already committed ourselves to “the long wars” and not even a serious recession/depression can prevent our military from maintaining a global commitment which rhymes with support of the global economy and the Neoliberalism that got us there. In the meantime, we march ever more steadily towards a theocracy ourselves, as the Republican slate for the Presidency is shaping up to be dominated by fundamentalist wackos.

You only have too look at our astonishing record in Haiti, including this story if you believe we are out to improve the lot of some other country. If you’ve forgotten the rules or the history, Blum maintains a blog at www.killinghope.org where you can access much of our past Foreign adventurism since the close of WW II and, in his most recent blog, he challenges your understanding of what we are doing in Libya. If you are not fully informed, be prepared to see a long list and since we cannot fully access the involvement of the CIA, whose actions are largely outside the scope of conventional journalism, we can expect that the list Blum provides, if anything, is shorter than the real thing. Fortunately,  Wikileaks seems to be filling in at least some of the gaps. Blum’s most recent blog describes an alternative view of our engagement in Libya. One of the statements on his blog is the following that summarizes the disparity between what we say we are (to ourselves and others  who will listen) and how we actually behave when the rubber meets the road:

• “It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was ‘to be as rich and as wise as an American’. What happened?”

That is my impression–going fresh into countries in which we had a good reputation, based on the history we have composed about ourselves, a sense of replenishing idealism,  the movies we made and the books we wrote about our history and aspirations. But when idealism clashes with corporatism, you know who wins and that’s what happened to America. So, once the true nature of our policy was known–to exploit resources and install and support dictatorships, one after the other, without ever supporting conditions more favorable to a democratic government, it becomes much easier to understand why so many in the Middle East and around the world hate Americans and distrust our intentions.  There is an additional element to all this: what the Michele Bachmann’s and her ilk have given us is the complete absence of those that hate us making a distinction between the actions of our government and the American people. Thanks to them foreigners hat us and our government!  The Arab Spring surely aroused American sentiments in their souls towards those seeking our idealistic sense of freedom. I think the Arab Spring had something to do with the ignition process in Madison. But the polls show that we are deeply mistrusted throughout the Middle East. Why, if going after Gaddafi was to protect civilians, haven’t we done the same for Syria, where the brutality of Assad seems to be far greater and has been carried out against peaceful demonstrators, not revolutionaries? As for Libya, it is a general principle, as Blum points out, that a country leader has the right to overthrow an insurrection. You can never eliminate the oil factor and what about finding a home for AFRICOM?

I have quoted Blum previously on his alternative message to the inductees into our Armed Forces. Who can argue? Do we have a mercenary army recruited out of the economic despair we create in neighborhoods where there is little hope of regional employment and unemployment is generational?

While you’re at it check out the faces of those protesting against the Canadian tar sand oil pipeline. It’s still going on. You are welcome to visit DC and get arrested, meet Bill McKibben (350.0rg) and Naomi Klein, who will help lighten the load. This looks pretty significant to me, but what will Obama do? It’s his call and his alone. I imagine the decision is already made, don’t you? And, if so, which way will Obama move? Many of the demonstrators were staff members for Obama’s 2008 campaign. He has already relaxed the tougher clean air standards that the EPA was going to implement.

RFM

Fig. 1 Quartile divisions of wealth accumulation: Country A is fictional, Country B is Sweden and Country C is the United States

If you were hoping that Americans were well informed about the increasing disparity in wealth distribution in America, this posting will disappoint you. Perhaps you’ve heard the story already. A few nights ago on the PBS News Hour, financial correspondent Paul Solman gave a little quiz as he walked through Times Square, interviewing different people and asking them questions based on the pie chart illustrated in Fig. 1. The three pie charts are divided into quintile (5 x 20%) sectors based on the percentage of total wealth of the country by each quintile (see wealth definition below); yellow is the top 20%, blue the next 20% followed in order by red, green and orange at the bottom 20%). Three different countries are represented by the three different pie charts. The first of two different questions Solman posed was: suppose the country’s wealth was divided into the quintiles represented by the colors–in which country would you prefer to live? The majority pointed to either Country A, which is a fictitious country, with total wealth shared equally among the five different sectors, or the Country B, which is represented by Sweden. Among those interviewed, very few selected the bottom pie chart, Country C, which is in fact the wealth distribution for the United States, in which the top 20% of the wealthiest Americans own 84 percent of the total wealth. That question by itself suggests that the majority of Americans in Solman’s sample would prefer to live in a country that has a more equitable distribution of wealth, which for them, doesn’t exist. But then the more obvious question was put forward when Solman asked, which among these three countries do you live in–which one is America? The majority of those interviewed pointed to Country A or Country B and very few selected Country C. Yet when Solman presented the pie charts to nearby entry level workers, they had no difficulty identifying the United States as  Country C.                                                                                                                                                                                          

Solman’s little quiz would hardly stand the test of statistical scrutiny because his limited sample was certainly skewed, undersized and biased in many different ways. He was actually interviewing the crowd waiting to get into the Dave Letterman Show (except the entry level workers didn’t seem to be in that line). But in fact, he was merely echoing a more complete and extensive  study carried out by two academics, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, professors from, respectively,  the Harvard Business School and the Psychology Department at Duke University. The title of their paper “Building a Better America–One Wealth Quintile at a Time” was published on-line in Perspectives on Psychological Science. They had carried out a larger study asking similar questions, but with a nationally representative  online sample size of 5,522, with 51% female (mean age 44.4), randomly selected from a panel of more than 1 million Americans and completed in 2005. Median household income in their sample was $45,000, similar to that reported in the 2006 U.S. census data; in the 2004 election; 50.6% voted for Bush and 46% for Kerry, which was close to the actual outcome. All respondents had the same working definition of wealth which was read to them at the time: “wealth, also known as net worth is defined as the total value of everything someone owns minus the debt that he or she owes. A person’s net worth includes his or her banking account savings plus the value of other things such as property, stocks, bonds, art, collections, etc., minus the value of things like loans and mortgages.” Each respondent was told about Rawl’s expression of a just society: imagine if you joined this nation, you would be randomly assigned to a place in the distribution, so that you could end up anywhere in this distribution, from the very richest to the very poorest. So that instruction makes the study a little different than the simple interview that Solman carried out. Not surprisingly people overwhelmingly selected Country A or Country B. The actual numbers from their paper are shown in the shade covered pie charts of Fig. 2 ; equal distribution got 43%, Sweden got 47% and the U.S. got 10%; the comparisons between individual countries was Sweden 51/49 over equal; Sweden 92/8 over USA and equal was favored over the USA 77/23. These differences were robust across gender lines, political affiliations and personal income. The slight preference for Sweden over the equal distribution country implied that Americans wanted at least some inequality in the distribution of wealth. So the Norton & Ariely study was based on the idea that you had to decide which country you would join, when the economic strata you would occupy was randomized and you could be at the top or anywhere in between, but the decision would not be yours. When asked in this way, Americans chose a more equitable distribution than that found in the United States today.                                                                                                                                                                   

The next part of the survey will surprise no one. The general strategy is displayed in Fig. 3. The upper horizontal bar graph shows the actual distribution of wealth in America. Notice that on this scale, the fourth and fifth bottom quintiles (purple and light blue) are so small that they cannot be represented adequately on the graph scale.  If you find this shocking, then you should read Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book “Nickel and Dimed: About (Not) Getting by in America“ to see how problematic it is for people who do not have sufficient stability in income to keep afloat in America. We do not pay enough for entry level positions, such as maids, janitors, waitresses and WallMart employees. Today, one in six Americans gets food stamps. But, back to the graph. The middle bar shows the estimated wealth distribution in America, projected by averaging the results of all those surveyed, as they attempted to gauge the wealth distribution of America.  For this bar, each person had to estimate the relative wealth distribution for each of the quintiles. It is apparent that the group way underestimated the amount of wealth owned by top quintile  You will also notice that on this bar, all quintiles have representation, meaning that the average American doesn’t know that the lower 40 percent of Americans do not have enough wealth to have representation on the scale of the top bar graph. The relative wealth of the lower 40 percent of Americans is invisible graphically as well as invisible to most Americans. The very bottom bar, shows what those polled would like to see in “perfect America.” In that non-existent state “perfect America” looks very balanced, with a progressively smaller percentage of wealth assigned to lower quintiles of the wealth scale, but every quintile as a more robust presence. So, here too Americans want to see the “wealthy” better off, but compared to the society we currently have (top bar), they would like to see a far healthier America, with wealth distribution more equitable.

There were other small differences in the outcome Of Norton and Ariely’s study, depending on whether they looked at the results by groups, based on salary differences, gender, Republican vs Democrat, but these differences were small compared to average, indicating that most Americans had similar views when making these kinds of judgements. My conclusion from this  study is that American citizens don’t know how skewed the wealth curve distribution is in their own country, but if they could design a different country, they would generate a more equitable society. So, in terms of wealth distribution, social policies, including health care and social security, the formation of unions and the value of public education, Americans consistently support a view that is to the left of the current President or most members of Congress. The reason why this view does not dominate our political and social philosophy is because our political system is not based on an equitable distribution of representation (imagine how utterly skewed it is that California and Wyoming get the same number of Senators) and the financial costs of running an election are so great that every candidate at the national level needs support from a sugar daddy who is generally from from big business and is generally far to the right of where most people are with respect to social policy. And, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling of three years ago, corporations can throw unlimited funds to sway our political system so that it subserves the interests of corporations–the bigger the better. Whether these problems can be politically solved or not, whether America can reach for a sense of economic justice remains to be seen, but so far the polarization in America, which is now being accelerated by paranoia and demagoguery, has yet to reveal any hint that we can avoid a train wreck in our future. The best we can do is keep plugging away, keep arguing as rationally as we can and hope that the quality of our drinking water improves so that a rational society can re-emerge some time in the near future. American business has failed the country. Perhaps we could rationalize their huge paychecks, if in return they met their responsibilities and provided good paying jobs for all Americans. But in fact the evidence is clear–the interests of big business is to remove more wealth from the middle and lower income classes and make additional profits for themselves. This cannot continue.

RFM

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Rupert Murdoch and his son James, together with former editor Rebekah Brooks of the now defunct tabloid News of the World, appeared before an investigating committee of the House of Commons (Home Affairs Select Committee) and claimed they knew nothing about the many phone hacking episodes that apparently ran rampant within the British version of the Murdoch empire. In addition, payments to the police and other employees of the tabloid who did some of the phone hacking are all claimed by Murdoch to have gone on at much lower levels of the organization, or when others were in charge.  Andy Coulson, who was the editor of the tabloid when payments to the police were arranged, became the Director of Communications hired by David Cameron when he became Prime Minister. He has since been fired and Cameron is trying to do a delicate dancing act that most males were not trained to do. So, we have the Murdoch empire in Britain, the closed Murdoch tabloid and the connections from the Murdoch empire to payments to police and other reporters, but Murdoch, his son and Brooks claim complete ignorance, despite the fact that they were running stories based on phone-hacked information (let’s see, did you check and double check your sources?). This problem is unlikely to go away anytime soon and if it spreads to Murdoch’s American empire, with possible action taken by the Justice Department and additional rumors about hacking into the phones of victims of 9/11, there is much more that will be played out on both sides of the Atlantic, but so far the scandal seems to be of entirely British origins. I think the rule of thumb is that if you square denial, you get approximately the number of new questions that need to be answered. I don’t think Shakespeare commented on this but he should have. As writer William Pfaff points out in his article today, this scandal is only getting started and we all need to stay tuned. Could it possibly, eventually reach into the ethics of Faux News reporting techniques?

RFM

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession were are currently in began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, making it almost double the length of the average post-World War II economic downturn. It has been a severe recession: during this period the GDP contracted by 4 percent and the unemployment rate doubled, with nearly nine million private jobs lost, wiping out an entire decade of job growth. This was coupled to $ 14 trillion in household wealth evaporation–an entire year’s worth of economic production. What’s worse is that our future economic engine, which must be based on education and innovation, the key elements needed to pull a country out of a serious recession, are less apparent in this Great Recession than they were during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  So the government theme that was high on the economic stimulus plan of 2009 has now flip-flopped to view our current public debt as a menace that prevents economic growth and limits job creation. Everyone seems to have swallowed that line, led by Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission. But history tells us otherwise. Indeed any attempt to further reduce government spending will delay and impede job formation: this is Economics 101. Yet, some economists (and of course the Heritage Foundation–the source of Ryan’s economic plan) have argued that we should be worried about the debt to GDP ratio and if that number gets too large, like 90% being the rabbit number pulled out of a hat, the nation is finished and will take forever to recover. Believe it or not, according to this fuzzy concept, reductions in government spending will create jobs. Proponents of this view, who have argued for a magic ceiling on public debt, have no long-term memory and should not be trusted to do anything. The wrong people who seem to be ever present at the loudspeakers of our economic planning are merely passing wind and making noise. They are not serious people, but impostors, posing as if knowledgeable about the national finance issues, while advocating policies that will make our weak economic recovery much worse. They hope that as the economy weakens further because of their policies, the Democrats will get the blame and, unfortunately, that is often how it works.  The truth is, we need a new economy, with new protections for workers who lose jobs and we need good paying jobs, those that can support a family, purchase a home, own a car and contribute to the new needs of a country badly in need of a fresh start.  Minimum wage jobs will not do and jobs without benefits are unacceptable and should be considered that way by all Americans. We don’t just need the unemployment rate to drop, we need it to drop by creating quality jobs with good pay, benefits and assurances of a future, something missing for the last thirty years of our Reaganomic policies.

Immediately after the election of 1936, still in the Great Depression, FDR tried a budget reduction strategy, which included raising interest rates and cutting government spending, as a concession to the banks. This caused  unemployment, to shoot up (from 14.3 % to 19%) and it forced FDR to increase government spending to create more jobs and this effort led to a reduction in unemployment, though it remained unacceptably high until WW-II began. The Lessons derived from 1936 come along only once in a century,  so it behooves all of us to pay attention and understand the meaning and significance of the experiments that come out of our only national laboratory for economic policy,  which has historically served as the testing ground for widely different economic theories. And only the Keynesian experiment worked for everybody. In short, FDR tried debt reduction and got enhanced unemployment. The Republicans know this; they are not interested in unemployment numbers, they simply want taxes cut together with budget reduction.  How unfortunate it would be to sweep such powerful historical examples away like a windshield wiper passing through our brains and wiping clean our engram. This is the other problem with the Republican philosophy–the lack of longitudinal thinking–no frontal lobe activation, a problem created by too little frontal lobe network firing. The Republicans have a Model T parked in their frontal lobe garage. How else could the Republicans straight jacket themselves in such a way that they cannot think on a slightly longer time scale. Maybe it’s because they want things to get a lot worse, so their constituents, the wealthy, will be able to rape and plunder the economy with less opposition. That must be it!

Looking for all the world like a group of unified Keynesians, the G20 met in June 2009, at a time when Obama had just taken office and had an imposing influence on the G20 dialog; collectively they declared “We pledge today to sustain our strong policy response until a durable recovery is secured. We will act to ensure that when growth returns, jobs do too. We will avoid any premature withdrawal of stimulus.” Yet, a year later, when meeting in July  2010 in Toronto, a very different posture was announced and everyone seemed to refocus their lens onto the issue of debt and the resumption of market economic forces to solve the global fiscal problem. What a difference a year makes. The new market force mentality of 2010 was somewhat easier to talk about, as the G20 thought the various stimulus packages executed the year before had worked, or were about to and therefore countries had to worry more about the debt that was created by the bailout and the fiscal stimulus, at least for those who had one. The conservatives were suddenly in charge and Obama went along, though you could tell he wasn’t going to lead in conducting that particular theme song. When conservatives worry about debt, you know job creation will suffer. Their allegiance is strictly to reduce taxes for the wealthy by reducing governments services for the poor and middle class–end of story. Entitlements too will be a big part of the budget discussion for 2012. Since Republicans typically handle debt by cutting government spending, the G20 switched to focus more on debt reduction than stimulating job creation and proposed government belt-tightening as the main course on the menu. And, in those countries where governments  transitioned from liberal to conservative, such as Great Britain, the cuts in spending have been onerous and fall on the poor and middle class, and, in the case of Britain, the cuts were coupled with tax reductions for the wealthy, something our Tea Party Republicans want to do to America. The Brits have achieved something similar to what the Republicans want to do here,  but in the U.S., the Republicans, always disingenuous,  try to sell their plan as a jobs program. They have yet to explain how cutting government spending creates jobs, especially when you are firing people as a result of cutting budgets. It has to do with the magical debt to GDP ratio, the non-verbal certainty of the new Republican strategy. And it’s not just government jobs that get lost, because the multiplicative downstream impact of less unemployment helps feed other mouths.

But still, some economists have argued that too much public debt can have a sweeping negative impact on economic growth and a number like 90% is viewed by them as the absolute ceiling, beyond which disaster lies right around the corner. That is approximately where we are today. It should be noted that other countries,  like Japan, have a far larger debt to GDP ratio: their debt number is at about 200% of GDP and will likely grow larger in response to the damage done by the recent earthquake and tsunami. The total cost for dealing with the Fukushima reactors could be astronomical and, like the United States, Japan’s policy is that the costs of meltdown containment will be met by the government, though the profits from the electricity generated by the reactors go to the power company, in this case Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. As something of an aside, it is very doubtful that without heavy public subsidies, the nuclear industry could not  survive and these plants are only going to get more expensive in the future (more about that issue later).  So further expansion of  Japanese debt is probably unavoidable and the rationing of electricity in Japan is already impacting the global economy.  I am not in favor of creating more public debt, unless such a step can lead to jobs during tough times, followed by debt reduction when boom years return. But our current,  drastic economic meltdown has reached depression-like numbers, especially for young people, and it calls for depression-like solutions to get our country back on track without losing huge competitive advantages. We need a new economy, preferably one where workers have more control of their work environment. Greening America to face our grim planetary future is the best thing we could do for ourselves and for the future of our children and grandchildren. We cannot turn our back on the millions who are currently unemployed.  But, can a government get healthy by cutting spending and reducing government debt as some have proposed or is it all smoke and mirrors with more job losses down the road? That’s the direction that England is moving towards and here in the states, the 2012 budget war faces Republican Tea Party stiffness in which compromising has to be all one-sided (Obama has to cave). If the Tea Party gets their way for the 2012 budget, we will look like a bad version of what England is going through and unemployment will shoot up again. We will see a double dip recession if severe budget cuts are imposed and by that time, the economy will have sputtered even further.

Recently Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson, both Senior Fellows at the Roosevelt Institute wrote an article on this topic “A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession,” (available at www.rooseveltinstitute.org), which sheds sobering light on the debt issue debate. Their article is in response to those who want to argue that the magic debt to GDP ratio can’t go any higher. But the message delivered by Ferguson and Johnson is that we will only do harm to our economy if we focus on debt instead of jobs and those are the only two choices we have. According to the authors, in the modern era, only two countries are relevant to this discussion due to the dominance of their currency and influence when each was at the peak of their power: Great Britain and the United States. Understandably, a much longer economic history is available for Great Britain.

Great Britain Debt to GDP Ratio

The accompanying figure illustrates the historic debt to GDP ratio (red line; scale on the left) for Great Britain’s economic history from 1693 to 2008. The blue line, based on the scale on the right axis, illustrates the economic growth as a function of GDP. What’s important here is that the GDP/debt fluctuates enormously and at times exceeds 250%, while during other periods, it dipped into single digits. According to the conservative view, once the 90% level is reached, the country declines economically and Britain should have gone to pot on several different occasions. But note that throughout these periods of great fluctuation in the debt to GDP ratio, the growth of the economy was far more stable.  Indeed, the first time that Britain showed a large debt load, coincided with the early 19th century as Britain developed and innovated the industrial revolution and engaged in the Napoleonic wars, eventually defeating France in 1815 at Waterloo. But for a long period after that, Britain had unusual prosperity and virtually cleaned the clock of all its economic competitors. Thus, through that investment and debt, Britain ruled the world for the rest of the 19th and early 20th century. They eventually discovered what we are about to discover–that the cost of empire exceeds the value of having one. Too bad empire is not traded as a commodity on the stock market. What do you suppose American Empire stocks would be worth today?

But here is another point that comes out of the Ferguson and Johnson article. Conservatives want to argue that the extreme excursions illustrated in the graph are the notable exceptions (the peaks of public debt for the wars in the early 19th and nearly half the 20th centuries) that must be given a free pass because they were periods of warfare. Conservative conjecture is that because the cost of war must occasionally be met, with substantial public sacrifice, mollified by loyalty to country, you can’t judge the impact on the economy by the excursions of debt seen during war. Therefore, the large debt  peaks are irrelevant because they coincided with significant periods of conflict and expenditures were critical for survival. So the conservatives seem to argue that huge public debt is OK when the country invests in high levels of military hardware and personnel during wartime, the residue of which is often often left lying in the sand somewhere. Doesn’t it logically follow that if debts exceeding the 90% GDP/debt ratio, are allowed for times of war and are followed by periods of peace and prosperity, then what do you imagine would happen to such a huge level of investment if the country invested in its infrastructure and implemented a new economy on the way to achieving energy independence? Why not allow huge debts to develop when you are actually investing in the country and creating massive numbers of new jobs, rather than investing in a bunch of hardware that will lie fallow when the war is over? Furthermore, conservatives cannot account for the fact that the U.S. public debt, which reached a high of over 120% of GDP during and after WW II, was followed by gradual debt reduction created by strong economic growth. Indeed, the post WW II period in America was characterized by strong economic activity in which all boats were raised, the opposite of what we see today. The second figure (obtained here) is the debt/GDP ratio for the United States, with an obviously shorter history (also lacking the economic growth illustrated in the first figure).  Conservatives who argue for a magic ceiling of Debt to GDP ratio and call for a limit of 90%, don’t have a leg to stand on and if their plan is implemented through significant budget cuts, it could force our economy into a much slower recovery and even a double dip recession. The Republicans who advocate this view are members of the group that we refer to a global climate change cranks and they need to become part of the historical fossil record. The time has come for them to disappear from history. The country badly needs a new set of politicians. The 2012 election will mean a lot more than the 2008 election, because this time around the country has sampled what each party has to offer. Which option would you choose? I would probably choose a third option, but then again, there are only two parties, so we’re stuck.

RFM

In his speech, Obama carefully steered his budget proposal to gain support from his budget reduction panel (whose leaders were in attendance), but went beyond their recommendations by proposing new tax revenues. Obama’s plan to cut the Federal budget did not include attacking the major social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, though he did promise to reduce excessive spending on the Medicare Drug Prescription Plan (passed under GW Bush), by  using the largess of the Federal program to negotiate better drug prices for seniors, something forbidden in the original bill. He also emphasized that the healthcare bill passed last year will introduce significant cost savings in healthcare, something the Republicans do not agree will happen, but have yet to propose with any clarity, why they don’t adopt the fiscal logic–too painful I guess (or the logic came from that twisted logic center known as the Heritage Foundation). By the way, you might want to know that the fiscal expertise the Republicans are basing their budget on, comes from the Heritage Foundation, who can fabricate anything Republicans want, as nicely explained by Paul Krugman in today’s NYT.  Obama emphasized that his budget strategy was one for all Americans: it was designed to reinforce the American values we have (or perhaps those we want to start bringing back–that America we once knew, the one that disappeared under the forces of Reaganism and the impact of the GW Bush years), rather than smash the fabric of our culture, a promise that the Republican proposal is guaranteed to achieve. The Republican budget proposal is nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and poor to the already wealthy and the super-rich. The Republicans are aware that their budget proposal was really intended for Tea Party consumption; if the Tea Party group had their way, they would immediately tear up the social contract that the New Deal and Great Society programs put in place and make room for even greater corporate wealth and more income disparity. Many less radical Republicans hope that just about everyone gets it, except the Tea Party members themselves, so that when serious budget negotiations get started, Republicans have plenty of backsliding room, especially when they have to call on conservative Democrats to pass their budget agreements. Obama was emphatic when he said that under his watch, the social contract stays. He sounded firmly resolute and let’s hope he doesn’t cave, but instead uses this to kick off his 2012 Presidential campaign in which he desperately needs to find a way to bring back those 29 million voters that elected him in 2008, but stayed home in 2010. Obama needs to learn that polls consistently demonstrate that the country is center-left on issues like labor unions, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. As long as he can clearly articulate the message he delivered last week and follow it up with more than rhetoric, he can ride the Ryan budget proposal all the way back to the White House, with perhaps a Democratic majority in the House.

Obama’s budget proposal also included cuts in military spending, something completely missing in the Republican economic blueprint, though specifics were not given. It is more meaningful to think about our military budget, particularly since 9/11, as our National Security Budget, which is now at $1.2 trillion each year. If you doubt this number, I suggest you look at Chris Hellman’s article published in TomDispatch. Chalmers Johnson laid out the same numbers several years ago. What Obama proposed for the 2012 Pentagon budget is $558 billion, but you have to double that to understand the true cost of our huge military and national security apparatus. The military procurement system has been carefully ramped up over the years so that virtually every state in the union is contributing something to the manufacture of weapons systems. As a result, a significant part of our economy is military Keynesianism, which will be hard to unravel because it’s viewed as a jobs program. Cutting that budget will be challenging for any President, who will always run the risk of having a terrorist attack against the U.S. become a negative political ploy to undermine belt-tightening in the military/national security budget. We have to expand the concept of national security to be inclusive about the dangers of global climate change and the impact of world-wide poverty on environmental instability. Perhaps that is one way to get ourselves weaned from militarism, though it wouldn’t be my first choice of a solution get us off our global hegemony fix.

What is of dubious value in Obama’s long-range budget plan is his idea that if the deficit/GDP ratio hasn’t been significantly reduced by 2014 (right now it’s about 10% but the goal is to reduce it to 2.5% or thereabouts), then additional budget cuts will have to be made in spending above what he hopes will be necessary. This “triggered deficit reduction” promise runs the risk of cutting the Federal budget prematurely if the economy has not sufficiently recovered–and 2014 could be far too early for us to restore our economic vitality. Obama is banking on the idea that by 2014, midway through his second term, the economy will be robust again. But, if not, and the national debt to GDP ratio remains high, automatic cuts in spending get introduced and this could give rise to a dip in our as yet very anemic recovery. Of course, if the Democrats should win big next November, it could be time for another stimulus. Many good economists, including Paul Krugman, have argued that the country should go into a debt level sufficient to fund full employment, then let the economy begin ticking on its own and pay down the debt with tax revenues that come from full employment. The trouble with this solution is that we don’t have enough progressives in congress to get it through, or even to have it become part of our national dialog.

For decades now, since Ronald Reagan announced that government is not the solution– it’s part of the problem, Republicans have known how to make the government look bad and fulfill Reagan’s prophecy. By putting incompetent business leaders into sensitive regulatory agencies to run them, the fox was put in the hen house and Republicans have now adopted the mantra of small government with lower taxes to further the fortunes of their masters–big business. Reagan allowed these businesses to become much larger than they were before, through corporate merger/buyout mania, so they have exaggerated influence and wealth. There are no Republicans today who see things differently. While many of us have been disappointed in Obama’s lack of resolve and spine on many issues, I have come to appreciate that we have been asking too much of him. In the first place, Obama is not a progressive or liberal on many issues and he has already stated in his books that he seeks compromise. He compromised on many aspects of the healthcare bill, but still, we have something on healthcare that passed and something like 30 million uninsured Americans will get coverage, so that achievement gives us something to work with. It is not a perfect bill, as it might have been had we adopted “Medicare for all,” but it can be modified, provided that we generate the kind of political will that commits us to turn back the threats to our social contract and public safety net. Perhaps we will look back on the Ryan Republican budget proposal as the one item that finally convinced Obama he cannot compromise on issues that shred the social fabric of the country, something that was developed over much of the last century. So, my hope is that the Obama Presidency can begin to restore the concept that Reagan destroyed–and create a crescendo of electoral momentum that vigorously promotes the concept that government can do things well and that it’s not the problem. Among the many things that government can and should do well is that of facing the crisis that lies right around the corner–that of saving the planet!

RFM