Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

From Jane Smiley:

The Blog | Jane Smiley: Notes for Converts | The Huffington Post: Notes for Converts (218 comments ) READ MORE: Intelligent Design, Global Warming, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jack Abramoff, Dick Cheney, Supreme Court, Hurricane Katrina

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's faith-based reality seem, right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference. There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side, you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an absolute inability to learn from experience.
2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by his handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to what you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about it. You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn't matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush, that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because...
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense of entitlement". Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He's never had to before this.
4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton" policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush. When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to swindle California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and ignored the links between Enron and the administration. When it was evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked and that State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the war and so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you continued to attack those who were against the war in vicious terms and to defend policies that simply could not work. On intelligent design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results to reflect ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the illegal redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the Terry Schiavo fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the destruction of New Orleans you have failed to speak out with integrity or honesty, preferring power to truth at every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.
5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980. Whenever I asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said "Mistakes were made". He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault, just as you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has created the world we live in today. You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might eventually "shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they are "shaken out", but according to the principles of the unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a sort of "culling". It is no accident that our government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good products, their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed, but you should know from your own experience that the unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was the biggest laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history of capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field to your own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even lots of American workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam Smith could have told you it wasn't going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of Lincoln and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and your resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help people in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get rich doing it. The US could have become a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and intolerant Christian right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were instituted by Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of them not because of some abstract distrust of power, but because they had witnessed the screw-ups and idiocies of unchecked power. You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in an effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign policy, reasonable domestic programs, a goverrnment that works, environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception, abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have disdained and denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons--I knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied over and over about your motives, for example, making laws that hurt people and calling it "originalist interpretations of the Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection or responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the world a better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of those who profess them.

1. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

John Harris wonders why Ben Domenech was hired in the first place:

'Wash Post' Political Editor Hits Domenech Web Hiring: NEW YORK: In one of his regular online chats today, Washington Post national political editor John F. Harris criticized the paper's Web site for hiring short-lived "Red America" blogger Ben Domenech, pointing out, among other things, his lack of credentials. Here is the entire exchange, kicked off by a reader's question.

Dayton, Ohio: Why did The Post feel the need to create a partisan conservative blog? It gives the appearance of pandering to the party in power. The criticism of Froomkin from within The Post gives the same appearance... that the editors at the Post are pandering to the demands of those in power. Is that responsible journalism?

John F. Harris: Lots of questions on this topic. From my vantage point in the Post newsroom--which is separate from washingtonpost.com--the Domenech hiring was unfortunate, even before the uproar over plagiarism allegations. I think getting some conservative voices over there is a good thing, but I did not see why they hired someone so young and without obvious credentials, journalistic or otherwise. I think the most useful opinion blogs analyze and comment on the news from some well-grounded perspective. That is what Dan Froomkin does, and Dan is a long-time journalist. There's enough people on the web already just popping off from a strictly ideological perspective. I don't think washingtonpost.com adds much value by providing a platform for another.

I have expressed concern previously about Froomkin's column on a different score. People often assume from the column's title, "White House Briefing," that he is one of the Post's White House correspondents. He is not. He is an opinion commentator hired by post.com, and one of the more popular features on the web site. We would not let a White House news reporter write an opinion column, which was why this widespread confusion concerns me. In any event, Dan Froomkin and Domenech are miles apart in their credentials, and the authority they bring as commentators. I write all this not to gratuitously pile on post.com, which has already moved on from the Domenech matter, but because I think readers should know that there are distinctions both the paper and Web site observe between news and opinion, and between the main newspaper and certain features that post.com carries independently.

Having said that, the paper and the web operation work together often and well. (These chats are one example) Jim Brady, the editor there, is the best in the business, to my mind, and the growing popularity of the Web site suggests a lot of readers agree. He and his staff believe in experimentation, and that means occasionally there will be an experiment that does not work out. I think they should keep looking to bring more commentators over there, including some conservative voices to add to several who (while not being predictable or dogmatic) generally tilt in a liberal direction.

But if employment is near potentioal, why aren't real wages rising more rapidly? Claims that the labor market is tight simply do not compute with a falling labor share of income.

macroblog: On Labor Markets: What, Exactly, Am I Talking About: Several readers have responded to my recent posts on labor markets by suggesting that I am -- I'm paraphrasing -- (a) a toady for the Man; or (b) certifiably insane. At issue is my assertion -- and those of some of my colleagues in the Federal Reserve System whose work I have been highlighting -- that structural changes in labor force participation rates suggest the economy is operating pretty near its potential.

I have to confess that I ask for it by occasionally throwing about terms like "strong", "robust", "weak", "normal", and so on. Not a single one of those words has any meaning independent of a coherent benchmark and, to the extent that I employ them loosely, I deserve all the abuse I might get.

To be clear, "potential" is a term without normative content. To say that job growth is near its potential -- or that the economy is operating at "full employment" or that unemployment has reached its "equilibrium" level -- is not to say that anyone expects you to be happy about it.

Here's an example I like. Suppose that your objective is to produce the maximum sustainable amount of coconuts. In Cleveland, we have pretty limited expectations about how big the local crop can be. While Northeast Ohioans might truly desire to produce copious quantities of the fruit, the conditions are simply not conducive to success -- potential output is low.

In any given year, we might find that by some stroke of good fortune we produce a bumper crop (which I guess would be more than zero). We would, no doubt, describe the output for that year as "robust." But the yield would still be pretty disappointing by, say, Hawaii standards.

The revisionist take on labor markets is that "full employment" in the US is less than what we had been thinking. There are both negative and positive interpretations of this development. The negative interpretation is that the existing skill set of the labor force is not well matched with available jobs. The more positive interpretation is that individuals are pursuing other opportunities, perhaps associated with educational opportunities, perhaps associated with nothing more than a desire to stop and smell the roses.

The truth is probably all of the above, but the essential point is that the expectations about what monetary policy can achieve have, for many of us in the business, changed. Cleveland ain't going to be Hawaii, no matter how low we set the federal funds rate.

From "Facing South"

Facing South: Coretta a "communist"? There's a history here: Coretta a "communist"? There's a history here

The Washington Post's new blogger Ben Domenech, a staunch conservative brought on to "balance" the paper's "liberal" image, is being hammered on many fronts, including plagiarism. But the only charge he's addressed -- and apologized for -- is his bizarre claim ("joke") that the recently deceased Coretta Scott King was a "communist." Here's Domenech's equivocating apology today: "Some people have taken issue with an old two-line comment of mine on RedState.com where I referred to Coretta Scott King as a Communist on the day after her funeral. Coretta Scott King was many things, and her most significant contribution was the unflagging support of her husband in his own noble work to bring equality to all Americans.

"She was also a liberal activist on a number of issues, including same-sex marriage and abortion. The thread where my comment appeared discussed President Bush's attendance at Mrs. King's funeral, which was criticized by some for its political nature. My comment questioned the president's decision to attend the funeral after he had phoned in a message to the March for Life, the largest pro-life rally and a significant annual event. Mrs. King participated in many different political causes, some of which involved associations with questionable people, but referring to her as a Communist was a mistake, hyperbole in the context of a larger debate about President Bush's political priorities. Mea Culpa."

No, it doesn't make any sense to me either why being upset that Bush isn't sufficiently "pro-life" is any reason to have a Joe McCarthy moment.

But there's a history here, one which the WaPo and both sides of the bloggerati are missing. Communist hysteria like Domenech's outburst was one of the critical tools -- some historians say the most important -- that the Southern power structure and their national allies used to discredit the civil rights struggle and maintain white supremacy.

Days after Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his stirring "I Have a Dream" speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI went into overdrive to find a way to discredit King, who he saw as a "demagogic."

Realizing that King and the movement were gaining the moral high ground, the FBI desperately turned to two lines of attack to bring King down: exposing him as a philanderer and, most importantly, a communist. After learning that "200 communists" attended the 1963 march -- out of 250,000 total -- the FBI singled out King in this dispatch: He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism the Negro and national security.

It was then that Hoover approved his infamous COMINFIL-COINTELPRO program, which called for intensifying efforts to uncover "Communist influence on the Negro," which included wiretapping and harassment of King and others active in the movement.

The "red menace" and Cold War politics were used at all levels to discredit every measure of racial progress in the South. It was the pretext for Kentucky authorities to charge Carl Braden and recently-deceased Anne Braden with sedition in 1954 for merely selling their house to an African-American couple in segregated Louisville.

The idea that King and the movement had Moscow on speed-dial is, of course, total bunk and laughable to any informed observer (I don't include Domenech in this category). There were surely members of the left, including communists, who were deeply involved in civil rights, including King's close friend Stanley Levinson.

But most weren't communists intent on helping the Soviets: for example, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee that trained Rosa Parks and other civil rights figures -- and which the right wing still uses as "proof" of King's nefarious red ties -- was led by home-grown Christian socialists and pacifists. The Kings themselves were never members of any group.

That leads to another key part of this story that most bloggers are missing. If Martin and Coretta King "associated" with communists, it was for the simple reason that leftists were often the first and most dedicated defenders of civil rights. For example, the communist International Defense League was the first group to step forward to defend the "Scottsboro Boys," the nine black teens sentenced to death in trumped-up charges of raping a white woman (even the NAACP wouldn't take the case).

African Americans in the South did occasionally turn to white socialists and communists for support because liberal and "tolerant" whites often flaked out (read King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," directed at the white liberal clergy). Those further to the left were much more reliable and hard-working allies.

On the other side, civil rights leaders also saw that those who red-baited and whipped up communist hysteria were also those who most bitterly defended white racist rule. When the Red Scare right-wingers forced people to take sides, which do you think was more appealing to African-Americans in the South?

So let's be clear: Domenech's comment is more than unhinged howling (although it is that). It's part of the right's larger preoccupation with reliving the Cold War, and a larger agenda to resuscitate McCarthyism and validate the Red Scare.

There are two goals at work here. One is to justify today's crack-down on dissent, from illegal wire-tapping and surveillance of peace groups, to the harassment of "tenured radicals" the right fears are out to brainwash our impressionable youth.

But just as dangerously, it's also an attempt to re-write our entire history -- to cast as vicitims those who stood for racism, white rule and persecution (McCarthy suffered from a "witch-hunt," says Ann Coulter), and to portray those who stood most nobly for justice and freedom as irrelevant or diabolically un-American.

In other words, to change the very definition of progress in our country.

We need more than a good movie by George Clooney to win this battle.

posted by Chris Kromm at 9:15 AM | Email this post | Post a Comment

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Americans Idle: A Review of Louis Uchitelle, 'The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences'", New York Times Book Review (April 2, 2006).

Dan Froomkin points out the strange lack of establishment media follow-up to stories like this from Murray Waas:

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Insulating Bush (03/30/2006): By Murray Waas, National Journal: Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq. Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."...

Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons. For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons. For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."...

Is this "former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort" Colin Powell?