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Creeping Morgenthauism

[ 0 ] January 26, 2010 | davenoon

There’s a passage from Henry Morgenthau’s diaries that has been a staple of right-wing New Deal denialism over the years. In it, FDR’s Treasury secretary describes a meeting with the House Democrats on Ways and Means Committee in which he bemoans the supposed failures of the New Deal to lift unemployment and restrain the balloon of national debt.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…. We have never made good on our promises….I say after six years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!

As I noted, this is a popular quotation among people who believe that all taxation is theft and all spending draws the nation closer to full collectivization. But Morgenthau was, quite simply, wrong. The New Deal did work, albeit erratically and despite the fact that Roosevelt could never quite jettison the fiscally conservative instincts on which he based his 1932 campaign. But sure enough, between 1933-39, real GDP rose by nearly 50 percent, while private, non-farm unemployment dropped from just above 30 percent to a shade above 15 percent. Morgenthau can be forgiven for not realizing how dramatically unemployment had been whittled away, since he was relying on BLS statistics that have been dramatically revised over the past 70 years. The debt he alludes to was — as a percentage of GDP — roughly equivalent to the levels the US would later reach during the 1980s, and they were nowhere near the levels (e.g., ~120 percent of GDP) that the US raised during WWII. The US could have avoided those debts by not fighting, but regardless, the debts were paid off, in true Keynesian fashion, by the 1970s.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that Morgenthau — whose anti-Keynesian views put him at odds with most economists in the Roosevelt administration — would have overlooked the data. His obsession with spending cuts and balanced budgets (and FDR’s willingness to listen to him in ’37) helped produce the disastrous recession that marred Roosevelt’s second term and inspired Morgenthau’s wailing about how the New Deal “does not work.” As well, Morgenthau was one of the key figures who successfully persuaded FDR to modify his own advisers’ proposal that Social Security be funded from general revenues rather than (regressively) from the paychecks of workers themselves. The result was a social insurance plan modeled differently from those of every other industrial democracy — a plan that was less generous and more exclusionary, and one that (at least initially) bore no sense that economic security for the aged was at all a “right.”

It’s no surprise, therefore, that conservatives would celebrate a quotation from someone whose analysis of the economic situation in 1939 was — as we now know — wrong on the facts as well as the theory. And we shouldn’t be shocked that these same folks would continue to propose ideas that will, if implemented, assure that the US economy fails to recover before my kids are teenagers.

Why the Obama administration would provide any solace to those who echo Morgenthau’s 70-year-old error is, however, an enormous mystery.

Dial an Asshat

[ 0 ] January 22, 2010 | davenoon

What Ari said.

I realize there’s an element of hyperbole to the analogy I’m about to draw, but I just finished one of several lectures on Reconstruction that I give at the beginning of my post-Civil War survey course, so my thoughts on health care reform have a contingent, curricular shape to them today. The greatest failure of Reconstruction, of course, was the white republic’s inability to perceive that the political liberty of freedpersons as well as the overall decency of their existence was undermined by the scarcity of their economic opportunities — a scarcity that was replaced in quite short order by an enduring, multi-generational gulag of debt servitude. The economic needs of emancipated slaves were abundantly documented and entered into the public record in a great variety of ways, and yet a Congress overwhelmingly comprised of Republicans decided in relatively short order — by 1869, really — to scale back its efforts, operating on the mistaken belief they’d done enough. Reconstruction fizzled, and the rest of the story hardly needs reviewing.

Quite simply, the failure of Reconstruction amounts to the greatest domestic policy fuck-up in US history; a fuck-up so grand and apparently satisfying that subsequent generations of white Congressional and Presidential leadership were pleased to repeat the error, if only (for the least malicious, at least) by ignoring the problem or by dismissing remedies as too difficult or controversial to actually enact. And as it happened for so many decades, there simply weren’t the votes in Congress to flesh out the 14th and 15th Amendments, or to pass anti-lynching legislation over the yowls of white supremacists. The blame for this rested largely, but not exclusively, with the Senate, where the Dyer Act or the 1957 Civil Rights Act were either asphyxiated or drained of any real force by filibusters that demeaned the entire nation. Sure, House conservatives joined in the nonsense as often as possible, but while the House might help enact terrible laws or avoid taking up decent causes, reform efforts never — at least so far as I can tally it — went to the House to die.

Until now, apparently. Now, there’s no sense in comparing the tens of millions of uninsured Americans with the condition of emancipated slaves and the three or four generations who followed them. At the same time, however, I would suggest that the century-long inability of the US to adequately develop a comprehensive system of health insurance does rank in the same elite class of policy fuck-ups that includes our shameful, century-long avoidance of meaningful civil rights legislation. Now obviously, the Senate bill that’s currently being drowned in the House bathtub is inadequate on so many counts that hardly bear repeating; it’s not the analogue of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in other words. But neither is it the analogue of the 1957 bill, which accomplished virtually nothing other than establishing a precedent for more elaborate federal action a few clicks farther down the road. The Senate health care bill seems rather to be something in between, and for the life of me I can’t believe it’s the House that’s blowing this.

So anyway, again — what Ari said. Call your representatives. I’m even going to give Don Young’s office a futile ring tomorrow, if for no other reason than to entertain myself. Your mileage, however, may vary.

Unteachable Moment

[ 0 ] January 21, 2010 | davenoon

So I spent an entire quarter in the fall of 1999 tryin’ to learn something to future UFC behemoth Brock Lesnar, and this is how he repays the effort:

Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight champion and former WWE superstar Brock Lesnar has slammed the Canadian health care system, referring to it as being like a Third World country, in a press conference announcing his return from diverticulitis Wednesday.

Lesnar had felt unwell for some time when he was struck down in a hunting lodge in a location he refused to disclose, only to state it was three hours from the nearest medical facility.

That unnamed medical centre, which is said to have been in Gimli, Man. (population 5797), wasn’t up to the fighter’s standards.

“I love Canada,” said Lesnar. “Some of the best people and best hunting in the world, but I wasn’t in the right facility.”

“They couldn’t do nothing for me,” he added. “It was like I was in a Third World country, I just looked at my wife and she saved my life and I had to get out of there.”

. . . “The only reason I’m mentioning this, I’m mentioning it to the United States of America because President Obama is looking for health care reform and I don’t want it … I’m speaking on behalf of Americans, I’m speaking on behalf of our doctors in the United States that don’t want this to happen and neither do I.”

What’s hilarious about this — aside from the known link between steroid use and perforation in diverticular disease, which I note for no special reason but rather in the way someone might randomly mention odd facts gleaned from Harper’s Index — is Lesnar’s apparent belief that socialized Canadian medicine interferes with the efforts of the private sector to construct Mayo-sized facilities three hours west of places like Gimli, MB.

If Brock Lesnar’s diverticulitis supplies an argument against Candadian health care, Brock Lesnar’s attendance at the University of Minnesota supplies an argument against the Morrill Act of 1862.

Deep Thought

[ 0 ] January 21, 2010 | davenoon

The verdict of the people is clear. If they want to avoid further backlash, Democrats should resist the urge to take rash legislative action before a Republican Congress is seated next January.

A Question

[ 0 ] January 19, 2010 | davenoon

If — and I’m pessimistically assuming when — Scott Brown wins tonight, how long will it take before a member of the Senate Democratic caucus announces his or her intention to reject “Plan A” (i.e., a quick wrap-up of negotiations and a full vote on final passage before Brown is seated) because it would presumably “flout the will” of Massachusetts voters?

Stretching for analogies

[ 0 ] January 17, 2010 | davenoon

Though I can appreciate critiques of Obama for being too willing to accommodate the more conservative forces within his own party, and while I’m hardly enamored of the direction that some of this administration’s big ticket items are heading, comparing Barack Obama to Booker T. Washington is just about the silliest progressive critique I’ve yet seen.

Though it’s possible to submit a brief in defense of Washington’s address at the Atlanta Exposition — e.g., in the face of a regional wave of violence in the 1890s, and in the absence of any federal interest in promoting racial equality and defending black lives, it’s hard to imagine precisely what a Southern black educator was supposed to argue in 1895 — the overall arc of Washington’s career was profoundly conservative. He was a nativist whose opinions of Asians and new European immigrants were marked by bog-standard chauvinism. Rather than simply argue that blacks should adapt to political exclusion and social segregation (while arguing that whites should offer them a gradual path out of tenant farming and sharecropping), Washington went even further and argued that Congressional Reconstruction was misguided and foolish; his account of the period in Up From Slavery reads like a milder rendition of a Thomas Dixon novel, or perhaps a rough draft of what we’ll find in the next generation of high school history texts. For Paul Rosenberg’s analogy to hold, then, we’d have to expect that Barack Obama will soon be lecturing us on the follies of the New Deal or the aspirational errors on display during the March on Washington. Obama is no CLR James, but neither is he a collaborator with reactionaries, which is the (I think oversimplified) intent behind Rosebnberg’s analogy.

Move over, Feith…

[ 0 ] January 16, 2010 | davenoon

Wow. I mean, Schilling has reprehensible political taste, but the guy helped thwart two terrorist plots against the homeland Yankee World Series runs during the last decade. The next time Martha Coakley experiences brain patterns that even remotely orbit the world of baseball, she really ought to consider staring at a fixed point on the floor as a substitute for speech.

From the Dept. of False Equivalence

[ 0 ] January 11, 2010 | davenoon

There’s not much to add to what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about the false equivalence between Trent Lott’s segregationist nostalgia and Harry Reid’s linguistic incompetence.

Still, it’s worth remembering that Strom Thurmond’s bid for the presidency was not simply animated by a general opposition to Harry Truman’s civil rights program based on the possibility that it might at some future date alter the “customs and institutions” of the South. It’s true that Thurmond played upon Southern white fears of a multiracial dystopia and — in one of his more restrained fits of hyperbole — insisted that Truman, if re-elected, would create a “super-police force with power to rove throughout the states and keep our people in constant fear of being sent to a federal jail unless we accepted the decrees turned out by a bunch of anti-Southern bureaucrats in Washington.” But Thurmond and his South Carolina colleagues were motivated more immediately the fact that the racial caste system in their state was already eroding. Among other concerns, the herrenvolk of South Carolina were enraged by J. Waties Waring’s ruling in Elmore v. Rice (1947) that the state’s primary system ran afoul of the Constitution, despite all efforts to pretend the Democratic party was a private, unregulated organization with no formal ties to government. In April 1948, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case on appeal from the Four Circuit, which had upheld Waring’s decision; three days later, the Mississippi Democratic party’s executive committee announced that they would nominate Strom Thurmond for president.

In other words, to state an obvious point — one that the New York Times among other media sources nevertheless usually fail to mention — South Carolina mattered to white supremacists in 1948 because it was there that the rights of African Americans to join in the political process were being acknowledged by Southern white judges like Waring. Strom Thurmond, while not the most radical of his state’s white brethren, was nevertheless celebrated as a regional savior because he was willing to “fight to the end” (as he so often put it) to roll back rights these rights. And noted friend of the Confederacy Trent Lott, by praising Thurmond’s Lost Cause over and over through the decades, was announcing quite plainly that he believed the country would have been better off if such a rollback had actually taken place.

The death of self-parody

[ 0 ] January 9, 2010 | davenoon

Jonah Goldberg looks to Domino’s Pizza to explain how the GOP might renew itself in 2010 and beyond.

I have been staring at the computer for ten minutes now, trying to think of something to add to that. And, I fear, I cannot.

Dead Pool 2010

[ 0 ] January 6, 2010 | davenoon

Sadly, my best showing in four years of Dead Pool competition was not enough to assure victory. Though matched with a friend from CSU-Long Beach for the most stiffs overall, I lost the tiebreaker, which favors the list with the lowest cumulative age; Swayze and Fawcett were easy enough picks to make, though my friend’s prescient selection of Michael Jackson — a real forehead-smacker with the benefit of hindsight — pretty much assured her of the top slot.

Here’s my 2009 list:

  1. Patrick Swayze [14 September, age 57]
  2. Vo Nguyen Giap
  3. Claude Levi-Strauss [3 November, age 100]
  4. Ariel Sharon
  5. Eunice Kennedy Shriver [11 August, age 88]
  6. Edward Kennedy [25 August, age 77]
  7. Miep Gies
  8. John Wooden
  9. Farrah Fawcett [25 June, age 62]
  10. Fidel Castro

And my starting lineup for 2010:

  1. David Hasselhoff
  2. Seve Ballasteros
  3. Robert Byrd
  4. Art Linkletter
  5. Gloria Stuart
  6. Fidel Castro
  7. Ariel Sharon
  8. John Wooden
  9. Ronnie Biggs
  10. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi

As always, there were hard choices to be made. I knocked Giap off my list list this year because I’ve determined that he’s simply never going to die. And while I might come to regret the omission of Gies as he she approaches his her 101st birthday in February, the Dead Pool — as with life itself, I suppose — is no place for regrets.

If there’s a hell below, we’re all gonna go

[ 0 ] January 3, 2010 | davenoon

Well, this is encouraging:

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.

Of course, flat-taxer John Linder isn’t amused.

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

Yeah, that plan worked well the last time.

But this is the state of the GOP in 2010. Linder is one of many who would argue that the Bush tax cuts — which added $20 billion per month to federal budget deficits through 2008 — should be made permanent, even though doing so would cost an additional $4.5 trillion. Meanwhile, food stamps — which have greater stimulative effect than anything else we might think of — are perceived to be vastly inferior to the public virtue of asking people to scavenge their meals from dumpsters.

A collision of hacks

[ 0 ] December 29, 2009 | davenoon

What the hell?

It wouldn’t have been difficult to predict this, but the stupidity of Deborah Solomon interviewing John Yoo does indeed approach the density of a degenerate dwarf star. After describing Yoo’s new book as “an eloquent, fact-laden history of audacious power grabs by American presidents,” Solomon offers him the chance to set forth, without challenge, his usual fact-free assertions about how the Constitutional framers really wanted to recreate the British monarchy.

The idea is that the president’s power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that’s what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.

I continue to marvel at the willingness of self-described journalists to describe views like this as “history,” given that supporting historical evidence for them is in fact nowhere to be found. For Yoo’s interpretation to be even remotely plausible, we’d have to find something in the Constitutional debates proving that the framers imagined circumstances in which the middle third of Article 1, Section 8 would somehow be switched off. That would require as well that we discover some proof that the framers — operating on republican principles that far exceeded those existing in the British constitutional monarchy — suddenly decided that the president should enjoy greater war prerogatives than the dreaded king of England had at his disposal. And we’d have to overlook the fact that the convention of 1787 was primarily animated by concerns about the weak legislative authority of the federal government and not by some brew of anxieties about the absence of vague, emergency powers vested in its executive.

But hey, I’m sure Yoo’s book has a raft of eloquent, fact-laden ripostes to these small historical problems. Though I’d also imagine the book contains fewer dick jokes bout Bill Clinton, nor would it reveal the awkward fact that Yoo has no idea or interest in what his parents do for a living. Leave it to Deborah Solomon to produce something that actually makes reading John Yoo seem more appealing.

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