The real reasons to despise the right

It's time for the left to get over Jared Loughner, the assassin in the Tucson murders. It certainly would have been easy and convenient if investigators had found a diary or letter in which he acknowledged that "hate speech", or Sarah Palin's "crosshair" map, had convinced him to start shooting at people. But that was not the case. The brief hope for some on the left that this terrible affair would somehow discredit the Tea Screamers or the right wing, or Republicans, has not been realized. In fact, the persistence of claims for the connection has, in fact, further damaged the credibility of many who were pushing it.

This is, in fact, not necessarily a bad thing. The argument that the right wing should be rejected because it encourages political assassinations is not only very difficult -- even impossible -- to demonstrate, but it obscures the really important reasons to reject what passes in America for conservatism. The right wing and its Tea Screamer and Republican agents should be rejected because its philosophy is a bad one, and its policies have proved to be wrong many times over.

First of all, the conservative arguments -- especially those related to economics -- turn out to be empirically incorrect. The key word here is "empirically". Economics is not really a science since its claims, even when expressible in strictly scientific, numerical terms, can not be tested by experiment. You simply can't take two fairly large, directly comparable yet independent economic communities, and try two different economic policies on them. However, you can take a particular society -- say the American one -- and analyze the effects of the various economic policies that have been tried. This itself is not, of course, an exact proof or disproof of the effectiveness of the various policies, but it can give some indication of the correctness of the claims made for these particular policies.

When you judge the effects of various policies that have been referred to as conservative, you can see, by-and-large, that they have not delivered on the claims made for them. The traditional "responsible" policies of "fiscal prudence" and pay-as-you go of old-style Republicans such as Coolidge andHarding, turned out to be ineffective in dealing with capitalist failures like the Great Depression (not that any policies except wartime spending did much good either). Protecting the banks from inflation didn't help the banks on balance, because they were themselves guilty of outrageous speculation; meanwhile traditional deflationary policies boosted unemployment and made things worse. Later, after the Great Depression ended and regulation forced some responsibility by the banks, the conservative approach shifted to across-the board tax-cutting and deregulation (all couched in anti-government rhetoric). This marked the newer phase of right wing economics. Throwing money at their favorite recipients, the military-industrial complex and fat-cats in general, easily served two purposes: transferring middle class taxes to rich friends and creating deficits that they cynically hoped would "starve the beast" of a government at least partially committed to protecting all citizens.

A significant step in bank deregulation took place with the repeal of the Roosevelt-era (1933) Glass-Steagall Act -- see my blog on this. (The repeal was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by then President Clinton in 1999 -- surely at the request of his many Wall Street advisors.) This act had prevented banks from speculating in securities with their customers' money, and had prevented disastrous bank implosions for a half-century.

During the Clinton administration, the tax rate for wealthy people was higher than it is now, mostly as a result of the succeeding Bush II tax cuts. Yet, the economy grew much faster under Clinton in spite of that, the unemployment rate was far lower, and Clinton left office with a modest budget surplus. (Balanced budgets have been the demand of Republicans for decades, yet no modern Republican president -- including Reagan -- every submitted one.) There was a small recession early in the Bush II presidency, but by the time Bush II left office, the economy was in true crisis mode. The unregulated banking and securities industries, absent the Glass-Steagall Act, had created a massive international speculative bubble based on subprime mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. (Insurance giant AIG was choking on the disastrous credit default swaps it had sold to insure the values of these CDOs.) When this bubble burst, during Bush's second term -- with all three branches of government controlled by Republicans, including their Supreme Court appointees -- the country fell into the worst depression since the Great one.

(Note: I'm not even getting into the Enron collapse, which is another tale of deregulation disaster. Enron's president, Ken Lay, was a particular friend of Bush personally, and of right wing economic ideology.)

So, after the Republicans had had carte-blanch to institute huge tax cuts, mainly benefitting the wealthy, and widespread de-regulation, the result was not prosperity and economic growth as their "theory" had predicted, but economic disaster. The very same conservatives who had created this problem in the process of transferring wealth from the middle class to big business and the already-wealthy, still have the gall to declare, in Reagan's words, that "government is the problem."

It seems pretty safe to say that, based on results, right-wing economic ideology has proved to be simply wrong, wrong, wrong. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

But there's more. By demonizing government, the conservatives (What are they conserving?) have made it extremely difficult for the government to fulfill its entire mandate, as spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In particular, the government is enjoined to "establish Justice" and "promote the general Welfare." Justice, for conservatives such as Antonin Scalia, is interpreted as establishing enough of a police and militia and court system to protect the property of the privileged and of the corporations, newly designated as citizens by the Court. The "general Welfare" to them means a "trickle-down" prosperity. They have never outgrown the old European notion that poverty is the fault of the poor, to be dealt with by the poor-house and the debtors' prisons. Their view of nature is still full of red claws and teeth -- survival of the fittest -- with only mockery for the genuine human qualities of sympathy, help, and sharing. In their view, universal healthcare is an affront to liberty (the right to bar alms, if I may be permitted). They also believe that basic rights have to be separately legislated for each subdivision of humankind: the landless, women, gays, immigrants. Theirs is the small, mean conception of mutual human respect and kindness; they consider those who take a larger view as suckers and bleeding hearts. (Ever listen to Rush L. ?)They are never in favor of a program that specifically creates jobs, yet view any law restricting what businesses may do as "job killing." They consider universal healthcare as job killing, as well as replacing oil and agricultural subsidies with environmental and infrastructure programs. (Such transfers have long been believed by most economists to be the most efficient creators of jobs.)

While both Parties kowtow to the gun lobby, it is the right-wing which has made ownership and carrying of guns a fetish. One of the questions recently asked of the candidates for head of the Republican National Committee was "How many guns do you own?" (read this here.) The Republicans have blocked a renewal of the ban on assault rifles. They have opposed similar bans on cop-killer dum-dum bullets. The NRA wants fully automatic weapons (machine guns) to be legal, and the folks on the right never say no to them. The right opposes any sort of effective control on gun ownership, including deep background checks conducted by the police and FBI, and registration of all weapons. The fact that they are not concerned about madmen obtaining deadly weapons is part 1 of their real connection with the murders in Tucson; the second part is their reluctance to provide subsidized mental health treatments for those unfortunate enough to have psychological illness -- a corollary of their opposition to universal healthcare (as an illustration, see this story, forwarded to me by Alison).

OK, time to cut this short. The point is that the truly bad policies of the right need to be pointed out, and that we should not be diverted by silly charts with cross-hairs and talk-show babble. Unlike the right, which has patiently propagandized for its causes over the years, the left wastes its time grasping for opportunistic straws such as the murders in Tucson.

Exactly right Mr. Krugman

Paul Krugman's column in today's NY Times says it exactly right. It's not a "lack of civility," it's the pervasiveness of right-wing "eliminationist" rhetoric that lies behind the terrible murders in Tucson a few days ago.

I can add nothing to what Mr. Krugman wrote so concisely and accurately.

Shootings in Tucson

The Tea Screamers' rhetoric has come home to roost. Yes, there has been wild rhetoric from all sorts of political groups, but left-associated groups tend to be pro-gun-control, while the Tea Screamers have many times explicitly advocated gun violence if the ballot-box didn't produce the results they desired.

Sarah Palin's crowd has denied that her infamous bulls eye map was to be literally interpreted as "targets", yet this was belied by a Tweet in which she herself described them as exactly that. For copies of the map and the tweet, click here.

Giffords' Tea Party opponent from the last election advertised:

"Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Can't get more explicit than that.

Here's a letter I wrote to the Globe:

The U.S. Justice Department is going all out to build a case against WikiLeaks leader Julien Assange. This includes putting Bradley Manning into very coercive confinement in the hope that it will force him to implicate Assange in the theft of the documents. The government has yet to find one person harmed as a result of the leaks -- except through embarrassment.

On the other hand, the harassment of Democrats by followers of the Tea Party has gone from name-calling and threats to outright murder today. It can't be emphasized too strongly that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was one of the crosshair targets in Sarah Palin's map of Democrats. If Giffords survives it will be no thanks to Palin and her Tea Partiers who loudly proclaim that Democrats are enemies of the country. The fascists and brownshirt thugs said the same sorts of things in Germany in the 1930's about liberals and Jews.. Oh, by the way, Giffords is Jewish.

Hey, nice map Sarah Palin

One of the targets of the crosshairs on Sarah Palin's map of Democrats to eliminate was, indeed, shot today. She is Representative Gabrielle Giffords from Arizona.

Need we say more?

So how is Obama different?

The Obama Justice Department has served subpoena(s) to Twitter to get all sorts of info (addresses, credit card numbers etc.) about Julian Assange and several others associated with the WikiLeaks publication of semi-secret U.S. documents. Only one of the targets, Bradley Manning, has been charged with a crime; two of the others are computer programers and one is actually a member of the Icelandic parliament.

The Obama administration is more concerned about secrecy than about any actual harm the leaks have caused. In fact, in spite of the wild talk about potential assassinations of "outed" agents, many of these people had their names x-ed out by either WikiLeaks or the news outlets (e.g. NY Times, Der Spiegel, etc) who published the leaks. To my knowledge, there is not a single case of anyone being injured -- except through embarrassment -- by the leaks. Recently, Mike Mullen, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked if he could name anyone so far who suffered serious harm from these leaks. He was unable to do so: here is the interview (video) from Face The Nation.

Just like the Bushies, the Obama folks don't like any invasion of their official privacy. I suspect that they are far more concerned about protecting the privacy of their gossip than the privacy of the folks they think might be guilty of , well, anything they don't like.

While Europe itself doesn't have a great record on human rights, let's hope that Sweden and Iceland at least have enough independence to say no to American fishing expeditions.

More "elitism" nonsense

One of the conservative buzz-words is "elitist." This is often, in the right-winger's lexicon, a synonym for someone in the knowledge-based community. If you are an economist, especially one who doesn't subscribe to the trickle-down theory, you are an elitist. If you like poetry or painting or music or literature that requires a bit of concentration and maybe even study in order to appreciate, you are an elitist.

When I see an article with a title containing a word derived from "elite" I am immediately suspicious of right-wing know-nothingism. (T0 be fair, the left has had its share of this kind of mud-slinging, though much more in its socialist past than in its feeble modern incarnation.) Thus, when the Boston Globe ran an Op-Ed by critic and biographer Neal Gabler entitled "The end of cultural elitism" my B.S. detector began blinking furiously. See what you think: click here to read the article.

Here is my response which I sent to the Globe, though it is too long for them to actually print.

Ah, another attack on the "elites" which supposedly rule us (Neal Gabler: "The end of cultural elitism", 1/6/11). The first sentence is nonsense, and it doesn't get any better. Gabler writes: "As anyone who has ever wiggled in his seat at a classical concert or stared in disbelief at a work of conceptual art can attest, culture in America has usually been imposed from the top down." In fact, the vast majority of people who attend classical music concerts or "conceptual" art exhibits do so quite willingly, enthusiastically, and with the intent of appreciating the art being presented.

We Americans read lots of reviews of movies, art, literature and music. These reviews, which don't by any means all agree, present opinions of people who read, look and listen carefully to lots of artistic material. Obviously some of these reviewers rub us the wrong way by being arrogant and condescending; however, in most cases we learn something that affects our receptivity to the work in question. Sometimes we are persuaded to read, listen to, or watch the work in question, and sometimes not.

Gabler is simply wrong in most of his examples. "The Social Network" received generally favorable reviews but not uniform accolades. It had pretty decent success but was neither a triumph nor a bomb. Similarly for Franzen's "Freedom." In fact, in spite of mixed reviews, it "soared to the top of bestseller lists", as acknowledged by Gabler in apparent contradiction to his own conspiratorial thesis.

So what other news does Gabler bring us? That "The DaVinci Code", a page turner like the James Bond books of a half-century ago, and many others, was popular in spite of many critical pans. This is surely more of "dog bites man" than insight. Critics don't tell us what we should or will enjoy, they simply report on the comparative craftsmanship of the works.

Or, maybe, Gabler thinks that any expertise is elitism or "commissar"-ship? Are doctors the "medical elite" and chemists part of the "scientific elite"? Is Oprah Winfrey an elitist? Is anyone who studies and learns part of some "educated elite"? Do parents and teachers have elite expertise that they force on poor children? Would he have any argument at all if he didn't keep repeating loaded words like "elitist", "commissar" and "ordinary folks"? Overall, this reminded me of the teenager's complaint: "Aw, do I have to learn all this Stuff?" or, more ominously, of the fascist dictum that we should "think with our blood."

(How many people still remember what "commissars" are or were? Not a word you hear a lot these days.)

Herbert says it in a nutshell

Bob Herbert, writing in today's Times, wonders how we could have forgotten what the Republican party is all about, and what it has been doing. Read it here.

I hope to get back to fairly regular blogging now that the new year has begun and the congress will be back doing its thing(s).

The talk of "bipartisanship" floating around just before the winter break was, of course, just more chin music. We'll soon see the Party for The Rich, now controlling the House, doing its best to transfer more money from the middle class to the wealthy -- most likely by cutting spending for programs that the rich have no use for (Social Security, healthcare etc) and making sure that those people who caused this recession by their greed get even more forgiveness and tax breaks. Will we see any spirit in the Dems? In the President? Lots of luck on that.

The most outrageous claim I've heard recently is that taxing hedge-fund managers at the rate that everyone else pays is a "job killer." As if these guys who made and are making millions would stop what they're doing if they had to pay regular taxes instead of the phony "capital gains" 15%. If that were the case, why would anyone paying regular taxes do anything? Furthermore, helping speculators get rich by trading securities has absolutely nothing to do with investment in new ideas, plants and machines -- it's simply enabling a debilitating and unproductive form of social parasitism.

This claim is as phony as the one that says big execs have to make millions a year because their skills are irreplaceable and they wouldn't work for less. Who actually believes this stuff? With few exceptions these guys get the big bucks simply because they and their pals on the boards of big business have been able to perpetuate this myth.

(Note: In fairness, some people who lead companies do so because they have good creative ideas which create useful products and services. Such leaders are in a tiny, tiny minority. Remember Enron's "smartest guys in the room"?)