Beliefs Against Even Self-Interest
Given the glaring factual howlers (which, needless to say. err on the Pain Caucus side the paper’s editors have long favored), none of the claims in this WaPo story can be taken at face value. And yet, unlike the statements about public opinion, I find the assertions that the deficit is “resonating more powerfully in Congress” than unempoyment or economic growth depressingly plausible. And especially Democratic members of Congress who believe this are complete idiots. Not only are such priorities bad for the country, they are bad for their own political futures. If they think that massive unemployment can constitute a favorable political context as long as there’s some perception of deficit control, they deserve to lose.
I’m sorry, but this is not about reducing the deficit, it is about preemptively blocking future tax increases on the wealthy. If it were about deficit reduction, the first thing on the chopping block would be the defense budget. The other priority would be returning tax rates to their pre-Reagan levels. Nobody ever mentions defense cuts in this context or suggests that we eliminate the deficit by increasing revenues.
I think it’s more the “if it tastes terrible, it must be healthy” syndrome. (Of course, the “social spending stays on the books, war/defense spending stays off the books” doesn’t hurt, either…)
How does punishing the poor “taste terrible” to wealthy congresspeople and their corporate donors?
Certainly much less so than raising taxes on the rich.
it is my long-standing contention that the median intelligence of the congress is below the median intelligence of the country, which takes some doing.
it is my other long-standing contention that too many members of the democratic party don’t actually stand for anything other than that they want to be in politics and are scared to hang around the right-wing thug party.
[...] Beliefs Against Even Self-Interest : Lawyers, Guns & Money [...]
I’m sorry, but the links to aforementioned factual howlers doesn’t actually link anywhere.
Part of it is that the elite in Washington want to protect the interests of their fellow elites, and to be in their good graces. Thus, if Pete Peterson or Jamie Dimon are telling David Broder or Robert Samuelson that the economy is recovering and there is no need for further stimulus, ergo the economy is recovering and there is no need for further stimulus. (That Krugman guy just hated Bush so much, so he obviously doesn’t know anything about economics.)
Then there is the other sad reality, i.e. the desire of so many pundits to want to appear “tough-minded”– the “burdens of power”, “to govern is to choose”, “making the tough choices”, etc. Pundits naturally gravitate toward those politicians who reflect and reinforce their own prejudices, especially when it comes to “entitlements”, meaning, above all, Social Security. Tim Russert was beyond obsessed with destroying Social Security; Fred Hiatt & Co. equally so. You won’t get anywhere as a Serious Person if you state publicly that the long-term outlook for Social Security is pretty good, but the real fiscal time bomb is health care costs, and that the ACA represents the first serious step in the direction of getting them under control.
A friend of mine, pulled me aside at my birthday party on Friday and laid this on me. He is 60, in management for the past 30 years and was fired from his job running a small division of his former company. He has been out of work since April of ’09. He had an employment agreement that called for a years pay (175k base) if he was let go, company sold, etc. The company offer him 20%, had the check ready and told him if he refused the check they would tie him up in court. He took the check. His unemployment runs out next month, he has been getting the California maximum of 950 every two weeks. He has applied for over 200 jobs, is willing to go to work 50-60k and has had zero luck in getting a job or even an interview. How much pain does this guy have to suffer? Does a highly successful person have to take a 10 dollar an hour job to satisfy the fucks in DC? Does he have to lose everything he has spent almost 40 years working for? I have no answers for him, does anyone else? He thinks and I agree with him that companies have been taking advantage of the “situation” and unloading, good people simply because they make a high (well earned) salary. I read some where that 50-64 year college educated men have the highest unemployment levels after black men 18-24. This is a new front in class warfare, isn’t it?
As that demographic is among the most likely to vote Republican, it may produce some interesting changes–or at least some opportunities for a rueful “told you so”.
I attended a conference last week, on one of the panels were two “industry leaders” giving advice and making predictions on the future. Both had recently taken their companies through ‘controlled chapter 7′s”
one asshole burned the stockholders for 700 million. The bastard had the balls to announce that his company was back and ready to expand. A pal of mine and I left the conference and proceeded to get smashed in two of the finest bars in Manhattan. My buddy said that if we hadn’t left he would have rushed the stage when one of the fat fuck investment bankers started rolling his bullshit!
Really? What odds will you give on Ben Nelson or Maine’s Bobbsey Twins suffering any political consequences whatsoever? Any given House Blue Dog matters much less than any member of the Senate Hypocrite Caucus.
Obviously we don’t control Congressional Democratic behavior. But we do control our own political behavior.
How many more things does this party need to do that properly earn them defeat for progressives to decide that the Democratic Party either needs to be fundamentally reformed of to simply be abandoned?
For the moment, progressive Democrats still seem locked into codependent behavior with their party of choice.
While I agree with your analysis, my question is, what is the alternative? It seems fairly clear that the institutional barriers are simply two high to create a viable third party in this country. Likewise, the party establishment seems impervious to efforts at reform from below and consistently ignore the base in favor of the corporate interests who supply most of the campaign money.
One possibility would be simply giving up on electoral politics and focus on non-electoral political work: e.g., rebuilding the labor movement, engaging in environmental or antiwar activism, and so forth. Politics isn’t all elections. And we don’t do ourselves any favors pretending that elections aren’t a total waste of time once they’ve become a total waste of time.
Frankly, I do not see how that would help, since it will enable the political establishment to ignore us even more than they do now since there are neither votes nor campaign contributions at stake. It is also clear that we cannot make any progress on labor, environmental, or other progressive issues without support from the political establishment. The demise of EFCA shows that all too clearly, as does the failure of financial reform and climate change legislation.
If you’re a union member, you have some control over a sizable source of campaign contributions; expand your union and increase that source; increase your activity within your union and increase your control over where that money’s spent.
If you’re a stockholder, you’re not reading this. But if you are, you do have some small power, and you can increase that power by organizing other stockholders, most of whom merely offer proxy votes.
If you’re a voter, and you do anything not approved by the DLC, you’ll get excoriated in these precincts, so vote your conscience and tell no one unless you’ve a thick skin.
Sorry. Above screed was mine.
I do not disagree with any of that, but that requires ongoing engagement with the electoral process, which was my point.
The problem is that liberals did that in the 1970s – gave up on electoral politics and fell into advocacy, social justice initiatives, and other liberal causes. The Democratic Party told the liberals they weren’t wanted and the liberals listened and went off to do other things.
And then we got the 80s, the 90s, and the aughts – politics dominated by “conservative”, “more conservative”, and “holy-fucking-god-there’s-no-adjective-available-to-describe-how-conservative-these-guys-are conservative”. “Liberal” these days almost means that you’re fighting for the status quo – to preserve Social Security, to preserve Medicare, to preserve the things that our grandparents’ (or great-grandparents’ in come cases) generation fought hard to get. That’s not liberal – fighting for the status-quo is what the definition of “mainstream conservative” is supposed to be. But our politics got so fucked up by the mass exodus of liberals from our political dialogue in the 70s that “liberals” in the US have to do the work that “mainstream conservatives” do in the rest of the world.
Liberals (or “progressives” if you prefer) who do that again show that they are just as incapable of learning from history as the conservatives are. The last thing that liberals need to do these days is check out of electoral politics again – we need to get MORE involved, not less, or things are only going to get worse. You want to see the window shift even more to the right? Encourage another mass exodus of liberals out of electoral politics and see liberals in another 30 years seriously fighting battles to keep concepts like a “40 hour work week” and a “minimum wage” the way we have fight these days to keep Social Security from being gutted.
Agreed.