Mickey Kaus claims Democratic strategists may have known that firing up the leftist base would also fire up their opponents, but failed to realize that it would also alienate the Democratic middle. “It’s not just that rousing the Dem base also rouses the GOP base (which can hardly be roused more than it already is anyway). It’s that rousing the Dem base alienates the middle.” It made the publicists resort to brutal, unvarnished, socialist appeals that were unmistakable even to those wished to avert their gaze.
The middle hated welfare. But Dems could always soft-pedal and hide their cash-dispensing programs in the fine print while pretending that they were requiring work—and then relying on other issues to mobilize the base. On immigration, it seems as if the only way to rouse the Dems’ Latino base, Obama-style, is to shout your support for an immigration amnesty from the rooftops, where the middle can also hear it.
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The other problem that Kaus may have forgotten to mention is that once a politician start pandering to the Left, it goes all confrontational and strange on you like it can’t help it. The Washington Post‘s accounts of Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity makes for interesting reading. “But with its Capitol backdrop, exuberant crowd and clever placards, the Stewart-Colbert rally began to look like an ironic version of the political theater it sends up. At some point, do those mocking such hubris actually exhibit hubris?” Translation: at what point is all this counter-cultural stuff offensive? At what stage does an event featuring Yussuf Islam look less than mainstream?
With all the trouble it took to get to the Mall, some attendees chose a more unusual mode of transportation: a 70-foot-long, 30-foot-tall copper-colored dragon on wheels. The vehicle, favored by anti-nuclear-weapon activists from the counterculture festival Burning Man, echoed down Irving Street. Along 14th Street NW, people held signs reading “Free the Gays” or “The Sky Is Falling.” Scores of people dressed in wigs and costumes, in part because the rally coincides with many Halloween celebrations. One man dressed as Abe Lincoln. Another went as a tea party activist (tea bags dangling from his hat’s brim).
But if this fails to appeal to working class, what choice was there? The turn to the Left, as Rich Lowry notes, came far earlier, during the Health Care vote. For Nancy Pelosi’s “cannon fodder” it is too late back out now, although they are trying. “Since Labor Day, the Democrats who have included health care in their advertisements have tended to be the ‘nay’ votes touting their opposition.”
Vulnerable Democrats can’t run away fast enough. Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi says he won’t vote for Pelosi for speaker again. Neither will Rep. Jim Marshall from Georgia. Even Bill Keating, a Democrat running in a heretofore safe district in Massachusetts, doesn’t want to say whether he supports her or not. Taylor complains that the speaker “veered” to the left, but if Pelosi were really to veer to the left, she’d end up in the Socialist Workers party.
Well, why not? Posters at sites like Firedoglake are arguing the President has failed because he hasn’t gone far enough Left. Paul Krugman regards a possible Democratic loss not as a turn away from the Left to the middle, but as a swerve to the extreme right. He warns, “if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
The subject of this Left turn, AKA “energizing the base”, will be the main topic inside the Democratic Party after the elections. It would be ironical if the 2010 election was less about Republicans vs Democrats than about the future of the Democratic Party itself.
One of my favorite quotes from Freud is, “Every exaggeration carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.”
And one of the favorite sayings of my own invention is, “When is a zebra white with black stripes and when is it black with white stripes?” In other words, when is the Democrat’s agenda center-left with some far left features and when is it a far left agenda with some center-left fig leaves? It seems that the fig leaves are wilting and drying up, exposing the true nature of the BHO agenda.
As Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Faster, please.”
Video of the Burning Man dragon here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/10/30/VI2010103001483.html
The costumes (particularly the hats) are a piece of work too.
John Locke had the Dems’ motto: “Hell is truth seen too late.”
Come to think of it, I guess that’s ours, too.
Bonfire of the vanities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OSC3BgmUA
How base are they?
What we need is more Party hacks making dumb proclamations on both ends of the spectrum. The Nation is not polarized enough, and until the people on the + side (tax payers) can repel the people on the -side (Medicare, WIC Food Stamps Sec. 8 housing and SSI) we need less Party hack of either party. Unless something reducing spending to levels supported by reality the will some day be class warfare between those that pay and those that take. What could happen to the politicians that caused the rift? Think French Royalty during the French Revolution.
“It’s that rousing the Dem base alienates the middle.”
It’s about time that the “middle” got a clue. The “middle” has acquiesced to the socialist/fascist takeover far too long without nary a whimper. It may be that the Dems have gone too far and exposed themselves to the common man as the enemies of the American way of life that they are. The “middle” has perhaps finally woken up from their deep political sleep and is willing to take a stand.
On that note, its seems to me that many Tea Party types are just common folk that don’t usually get all worked up about politics, but all the crap Obama, et al, have pulled has got their attention. And the “middle” doesn’t like what they see at all.
Japanification:
Aimed at reducing deficits, the [Japan] tax increase instead quickly snuffed out the fragile recovery, pushing Japan to the brink of a financial meltdown and thrusting the nation deeper into the economic morass from which it has yet to emerge even today.
[snip]
American policy makers have long been confident, even during the darkest days of the current financial crisis, that the United States could avoid the fate of Japan and its two lost decades.
But now, with growing signs that the United States might be a lot closer to a Japan-style slump than previously thought, that confidence is waning.
[snip]
“There has been a political and intellectual arrogance in the United States that it won’t happen to us,”…
[snip]
Japan has remained trapped in this spiral despite the equivalent of trillions of dollars in stimulus spending, more than a decade of near-zero interest rates and even unconventional steps by the central bank similar to those now contemplated by Mr. Bernanke…
[snip]
“The danger is if the U.S. plunges into policy paralysis just like Japan in the 1990s,” said Shumpei Takemori, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo. “Ideological divides and political divides can make bold policy action impossible.”
[snip]
Leading Japanese economists also said their nation’s many failures — like the 1997 tax increase — yielded one crucial lesson on combating the aftereffects of a financial panic: the need to avoid policy flip-flops.
“The lesson is that there is a proper sequence for pulling a nation out of a financial crisis,” said Heizo Takenaka, an economist who was the architect of the successful cleanup of Japan’s banking system in the early 2000s. “First, you restore growth before worrying about deficits.”
However, Mr. Takenaka acknowledged that while the banking problems have been largely fixed, Japan has yet to come up with a strategy for restoring growth, which he says is the only way to end deflation.
…………………………………………………..
Little wonder that all we get is posturing and propaganda from both sides of the aisle.
The point being that the obsession with left-right political maneuvering during an election year (aren’t they all) is not coincident with middle class concerns re workable policy and legislation. Sticks and stones, if you will, when the public is in more of a brass tacks mood. (Brass knuckles more like it but we’re all civilized here.)
Apply pressure – continuously – until the country course corrects.
I have been arguing since before the 2008 elections that political realignment i.e a breakup of both major parties is going to occur. What will emerge is still a little hazy but the GOP of social conservatives. economic conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and libertarians packaged up with some RINO rent seekers who sport the label only because their fathers did or because it is more opportune in their neighborhood is fundamentally as unstable as the collection of special interests and hard core socialists that passes for the Democrat Party.
The frictions within the Democrats party has been fairly well known for some time but papered over by electoral victories in the last couple of election cycles. Meanwhile the congressional parties both of them really but especially the Dems under Pelosi operate like rival outlaw motorcycle gangs demanding that their members put on suicide vests and storm the razor wire for the good of the club as defined by the leadership and to hell with your own convictions or the interests and convictions of your constituency. That operating model is now resulting in an electoral tsunami and what is left of the Left after the waters recede will have to figure out how they are going to fit in with some possible political majority in this country or end up like the Wobblies, the WTCU, the WHIGS, and the Federalists as historical footnotes.
When 2012 rolls around I suspect the electorate is going to be just as angry as it was in 2008 and 2010. Our political system is brokem but we haven’t really realized it yet. It won’t be fixed by sending new Democrats or new Republicans to Washington. It needs a new politics and a new set of political rules or this country will wind up exploding.
Maybe we are at the limit of fiscal and monetary policy where no combination of taxation and spending will pull the plane out of the stall. But regulatory relaxation is one thing that still holds potential. You want to increase productivity. And this can be done at low immediate cost by letting people make choices based on incentives. You can drill, let parents choose schools, reduce the required number of permits, etc.
To deal with the objections from the superfluous regulators, create a “Department of Deadwood” at every level of government where all redundant regulators, hopeless teachers and the like can report to office and be paid, indeed required, to do nothing. Newspapers, cards, coffee, donuts and video games will be supplied. They’ll be paid to get out of the way. Or perhaps if they are so inclined, they can take online courses in engineering or sweep the street for exercise. Why should they object?
ybr @ 8:
I’ve never actually studied the Japanese meltdown.
fta: In 1999, Mr. Bernanke, then an academic, tartly criticized Japanese officials for mishandling their 1990s financial crisis, saying Japan’s plight was “self induced.”
Mr. Bernanke, now the world’s expert on self-induction, babbles sweet nothings in the ear of the US Resident.
–
It occurs to me late in the game that perhaps Japan’s real problem then is the same as the US’s real problem now: China. All our job belong to them, no growth, no recovery, all them genius financial types, the same as just popped a six trillion dollar (and growing) bubble in real estate, CDOs and CDSs, never notice the real situation on the ground.
–
Different (and even further from the thread topic) article also on CNBC, as long as you’re over there:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39924284
Government files brief against the patentability of genes.
I actually approve of this, though no doubt others will see this as a green/Obamamaniac attack on big pharma. The patent system is as out of control as other parts of our government.
“At what stage does an event featuring Yussuf Islam look less than mainstream?”
A more interesting question would be “at what point does featuring Yusuf Islam, a known financial supporter of Hamas and other terrorist organizations, prove the moral bankruptcy of the left?”
wretchard, I thought the key to riches in online blogs is the selling of t-shirts. along the lines of your Department of Redundancy Department, perhaps we can have a Belmont Club t-shirt with cute phrases like, “I’m a shovel-ready project”?
I thought the unions had already created the “Department of Deadwood,” those individuals who keep getting a paycheck for doing nothing, such as the substandard teachers sitting around day after day, year after year, as the city/county tries to fire them, but the union keeps supporting them.
Let’s just see how many on the left decide to continue to try “gaming” the electoral system on Tuesday, and what the DOJ (or the media) will do about the obvious fraud that will occur in many of these tight races (remember Sen. Franken?).
Removing ANY of the regulatory BS that is holding back companies from hiring should unleash a flood of work, and therefore new hiring…except that, with the political wrangling going on between the politicians and ALL the special interest groups, no company can PLAN ahead, and rely on the numbers. The uncertainty is what is stopping the economy from moving forward.
If the “new” congressional delegation cannot get support for legislation to pass quickly that will relieve the pressure, that pressure will cause things to get nasty…probably before the 2012 race has a chance to galvanize the “disenchanted”
A quote from Political Wire provides some insight into the crisis within the Left:
This of course means Hillary. There may now be two blazing rebellions, one within each political party. Inside the Democratic Party it is an elite contest between Clinton and Obama, and through them the various factions within: the not so Left and the really, really Left. The other is within the Republican Party which features a grassroots insurgency versus its establishment. Don’t kid yourself: the Republican establishment’s animus towards the Johnnies come lately is real and bitter. There’s a real fight.
But the old system is unquestionably under challenge. There must be some significance to the fact the two largest political rallies in DC were run by a talk show host and a comedian respectively. One pundit recently wrote, ‘where once the jesters came to the king, now the king comes to the jester’. Or maybe he meant the joker.
Washington in December will be like a city awaiting a great event, of which the consequences of the election is a part but only a part. Its whole universe appears to be crumbling. Fear at losing careers, uncertainty over the future, the possibility of supply — all of these add to the atmosphere of suspense in the capital. 2010 was only the opening. The game really gets going in 2011.
…[Bernanke] babbles sweet nothings in the ear of the US Resident.
Just a note, the Japanese admit they mishandled the situation. Twern’t just Ben, who, like all of us, was young and full of bluster at one time. Bernanke’s critics miss the point, imo. The story to me is – now – Congress.
If Charles’ post on the health care treatment commissions inserted by Congress into the stimulus legislation are true – and I have no reason to believe they are not – then the future of this country is very dire.
The game really gets going in 2011.
As I said, so busy running for office …
Brass tacks be damned.
with cute phrases like, “I’m a shovel-ready project”?
You’re asking for burial, Josh.
Ironically, the “New Dog” Democrat representatives from right-leaning districts who were elected to replace Republicans in 2006 and 2008 were supposed to be doing just what the Tea Party says it wants to do. They were supposed to turn out the scoundrels and restore sanity, and balance and bring a man-on-the-street sensibility to Congress.
But what every last one of them did was salute and say “Yes, Maam, oh, I mean Yes, Mrs. Speaker, oh, I mean Yes, Ms. Speaker” and go right along with Pelosi, who went hard left with a side order of nuttiness. And more than a few of them were as arrogant and disgusting as Florida’s Allan Grayson. So now they pretty much get shown the Exit door for the same reason they got shown the Entrance door.
They hide beneath the threadbare leaves of figs
They hunker down in golden DC digs
While elephants are dancing merry jigs
Dem grins are now a frown
The left is screaming madly “We are right!”
The non-left Dems have given up the fight
The Dems are done this coming Tuesday night
They’re all run out of town
A massacre is what we have in store
It’s time the people evened up the score
Cry like the fearsome raven, “NEVERMORE!”
And kick them while they’re down
“Maybe we are at the limit of fiscal and monetary policy where no combination of taxation and spending will pull the plane out of the stall. But regulatory relaxation is one thing that still holds potential. You want to increase productivity. And this can be done at low immediate cost by letting people make choices based on incentives. You can drill, let parents choose schools, reduce the required number of permits, etc.”
Or maybe it’s not about finding policy that works. You can only cede so much to faulty policy or outright incompetence.
What if this administration is in fact a weapon intended to destroy the Republic? With premeditation and malice aforethought?
Has anyone stood off to the side and thought that one through?
Revolutionaries are always one revolution short of utopia. These clowns are no different than the punks they were back in their dorm rooms in the eighties, smoking dope and damning The Man. Better dressed, maybe, and definitely sponsored… but they are where they dreamed of being, and are on the verge of Bringing Down The Establishment.
Cheers. Have fine Halloween.
Come January it will be fun to watch establishment Repubs one-by-one flutter down from high perches and learn a lesson in humility, a lesson they need to absorb well and quickly, else it will be of no avail to them in 2012.
They must either learn to adapt or they will face an overwhelmingly crippling third party push in 2012 – one that strangely appeals to the currently disenfranchised of both parties. Who, following the MSM only, could have seen it coming? The fallout from that fiasco will likely sound the death knell for “journalist-activists” for generations. Good riddance, IMO.
Congress IS a Shovel Ready project.
Maybe a picture of the Capital Bldg and that phrase would sell T-shirts.
Actually I thought up a real winner:
Picture:
Wash DC about to drowned by a cresting tidal wave, which can be seen to be made up of angry people carrying signs.
Caption underneath the picture:
SERFS UP!
YBR 8, regarding Japanification:
On 18 December 1998 (more than a year before the Y2K major top), the S&P 500 closed at 1188.03; almost twelve years later on 30 October 2010, even after rebounding about 70% from its most recent major low, it closed at 1183.26. Furthernmore, afaik Harvard MBA George W. Bush is the only two-term President who left office with the index lower than when he entered[1]. (Source: finance.yahoo.com)
And the Ruling Class’s Pundit Division is starting to wonder whether Japanification might afflict us, especially if the elections preclude “bold policy action”? (Presumably, per Krugman, Firedoglake et al, Obama/Pelosi/Reid governance has not yet been “bold”.)
Out of respect for this blog as an oasis of decorum, I stifle my instinctive reaction.
***************************
[1] At the time, I worried that the “Mission Accomplished” incident implied that he had no overall strategy for the conflict he was waging. The other shoe is dropping in subsequent years: he did not implement an economic policy that would pay for maintenance and upgrading of the hardware he misused as a photo-op prop.
Wretchard #16: Inside the Democratic Party it is an elite contest between Clinton and Obama, and through them the various factions within: the not so Left and the really, really Left.
Contest may be heating up: Teh Won got heckled at a rally in Connecticut:
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2010/10/obama-heckled-at-connecticut-rally.html
The jeering starts around 2 minutes into the video.
YBR @ 17 “Charles’ post on the health care….”
Could you please insert a reference or a link to this post?
gs: And the Ruling Class’s Pundit Division is starting to wonder…
Yes, gs. It’s more a matter of how much and how fast the reality is reaching the middle class – or the average voter, call us what you will. We’re a little slow but we’re hitchin’ up our suspenders.
From 159. Charles on previous post: ObamaCare
This of course means Hillary.
I dunno, she already had her shot, and more importantly she is not really an alternative to the Obamanation, other than the pant suits.
I mostly avert my eyes to any Democrat anywhere, but there must be some other potential challengers, I mean, all they need is 5% more qualification than the Obasmus had when he entered the fray and went on to win, and that’s probably 99% of a thousand or so sitting elected Democrats nationwide.
–
blert, yeah I realize that’s the alternative interpretation of “shovel ready”. I just hope it doesn’t apply to the whole US economy.
1. Haven’t said it here for a while: Krugman is an Idiot.
2. I have always considered Stewart-Colbert self-parody and wholly unwatchable because they don’t know it.
Wretchard #16: Inside the Democratic Party it is an elite contest between Clinton and Obama, and through them the various factions within: the not so Left and the really, really Left.
While Bil Clinton may represent the not so far Left I am not so certain about his wife. In fact I don’t think there is an iota of difference ideologically between Hil and O. After all she was the actual protege of Alinsky. The hard Left cannot deliver to the collection of special interests the goodies those interests want. If a party led by the Left cannot do that then the Left either has to accept more centrist leadership (unlikely) or the party is going to fall apart.
Presumably, per Krugman, Firedoglake et al, Obama/Pelosi/Reid governance has not yet been “bold”.
A continuation of the bailout policy initiated by Paulson under Bush about which there was little debate. Stimulus part didn’t work.
Bold in terms of stimulating economic growth? No.
Two words: Health Care.
Bold would be suspending payroll taxes for two years.
Bold would be raising SS eligibility a year or two.
Bold would be eliminating mortgages as a tax deduction.
Bold would be restructuring the tax code.
ybr:
Bernanke is bold, printing money by the trillions and accountable (!) to nobody.
Obambus is bold, in the way he runs his mouth. And I wish he’d stick with that rather than legislation, man’s got to know his limitations. Burma Shave.
YBR 33,
Per Wretchard 11, bold would be a multiyear abeyance of (most) economic regulation. It worked for the West Germans after WW2. My concern is that we may have so many fast-buck artists in our economy that it wouldn’t work for us, but I still think it’s worth trying.
Wretchard @ 11: “But regulatory relaxation is one thing that still holds potential.”
Yes! Yes!! Yes!!! Shout it from the roof-tops.
Unfortunately, the regulatory apparatus has been building since Nixon started the EPA, 40 years ago. And a lot of the real problem lies in loosely-written laws that allow leftist groups to sue endlessly.
As everyone recognizes, the Federal Government after Nov 2 will be a Mexican standoff where no-one can accomplish anything in the way of legislation. A dedicated House could withhold funding for regulatory agencies (no policeman, no law). But that relies on a majority of Congress being happy to ignore what the New York Times and the Alphabet Networks are saying about them. Could happen, but let’s not hold our breath.
FWIW, I pretty much agree.
Bureaucracies have reached operational optimums. At a minimum, a time-out is needed. For assessment.
22. TmjUtah said:
“What if this administration is in fact a weapon intended to destroy the Republic? With premeditation and malice aforethought?”
From where I sit, this “administration” looked like that from day 1, with lots of hints dropped during the 2008 campaign. Note, it is the “enactment” arm; the enablers have been at it for a lot longer. The enforcers wait quietly, but not invisibly, in the wings.
Someone else said:
“You are not paranoid if someone really is out to get you!”
@1 Batman.
Dear Batman,
I had thought it was Michael Ledeen, not Prof. Reynolds, who coined the phrase “Faster, please.” In either case, from their lips to G_d’s ear.”
32 Joe Hill
“I don’t think there is an iota of difference ideologically between Hil and O”
I can see, with only a little provocation, Hilary declaring war on Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah et al, nuking Mecca, locking up Muslims a la Roosevelt and the Japanese. She has things to prove. Anyone will look good in comparison to Obambi; Hilary wants to do a better job than Bill.
Obama may face primary challenges from both the right and the left– if there’s any right remaining in the Democratic pary in 2012.
Outstanding column
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8098632/US-midterm-elections-Barack-Obamas-world-turned-upside-down-as-Democrats-face-electoral-disaster.html
By abandoning his own rhetoric of bipartisanship, President Obama divided America and set the course for a heavy Democratic defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
key line (a bit off the headline topic):
The problem was that his world view was that of a conventional liberal Democrat but he was president of a nation that was centre-right. His victory came from those who wanted him to change Washington, not America.
I’d quibble he is not a “conventional liberal”, he is waaaaay out there, but the point is he’s well away from the center of the nation and utterly misread (sic) his “mandate”. His major mandate (sic) was to not be Hillary, and to be younger than McCain. Also to be black, and have a Muslim name. Not necessarily in that order.
And an excellent piece by John Fund as well:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303284604575582320752384384.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
Requiem for the Pelosi Democrats
Veteran Democratic Rep. Brian Baird says that job creation should have been priority ‘number one, two and three.’
well, with those two pieces above, I suggest that some in the media, both the authors of these two pieces and the editors who published them, are starting to come clear on just what we got with the Obamanation.
Was it ever everything the libturds made it out to be, transformative and post-partisan and redeeming and all that stuff? What ever happened to even a dollop of cynicism, especially when, y’know, politicians are involved? I mean, seriously folks.
But maybe some voters did take this seriously, and the last two years will be a “teachable moment” for the body politic.
But what does Obasmus know about jobs? Never had one in his life, never created one before being president, and now has created a few by dispersing (ha – dispensing, but dispersing is the more appropriate term) tax dollars, which doesn’t especially count.
That was then:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/rally-to-restore-sanity-roots-six-hitler-references_n_770605.html
This is now:
http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/101030-sanity-hmed-10a.grid-6×2.jpg
Josh…
There is knowledge.
There is nonsense.
There is anti-knowledge.
The Resident picked door number 3 decades ago.
America needs job growth which comes almost exclusively from new business formation — new SMALL business formation.
Following his nostrum chart he has accordingly gutted this sector of the economy. All of his priorities strike directly and fulsomely against sole proprietors and two-man partnerships.
——-
The Resident is not for turning. He’s for doubling down. Martindale, indeed.
——-
As for taxation, it can take many forms. Like bleeding seniors with ZIRP so that the money trust can buy down their Ponzi paper.
It is becoming vividly clear that Bear Sterns and the rest were engaged in full scale RICO frauds. Critical records were routinely shredded — the very ones required to record the security interest of the note holder: the mortgages!
Now the ‘industry’ is fabricating out of whole cloth their mortgage evidence!
MERS sole reason for being was to cheat on taxes and make Moody’s, S&P and Fitch happy. However, it proved to be the perfect mechanism for Ponzi issuances. The money trust was going Zero Mostel on the investors. The play was being oversubscribed — quite massively.
Beyond that, the Trust then shoved the risk onto pension funds dumb enough to purchase Syn-CDOs or sell Credit Default Swaps outright.
This way the Trust screwed everyone else eight ways from Sunday.
Taxman
Investor
Borrower
Title Insurance mono-lines
Pensioners
Man, it was sweet.
It the next phase the entire American economy gets to pay off on the paper taken in by
Freddie
Fannie
FHA
AND
what’s stuffed at the Fed.
But there’s more: the thieves are STILL at the till paying themselves bust-out bonuses!
Such Goodfellas!
Watched a little of the take on the rally by the Geraldo show. Their take was overall positive, as expected. Even one of the conservative analysts was remarking how the rally was enjoyable, that it had some real comic moments, and that is was, overall, non-political. That in fact echoes the stated intent of the rally’s organizers who did express strongly that the rally was non-political by design.
The thing is this: the progressive analyst reflexively took great offense with the conservative’s position. Of course it was a political rally, the progressive argued. She accused the conservative, who was older, of not “getting” the millenial generation, the kids during 9/11, to whom Jon Stewart retains an indispensible and outsize place in how they view the world and how they form their political views.
The old conservative made the mistake of taking the rally at its stated face value. To the hipsters a hidden inner-value attained underneath it all. What’s interesting is that this was obvious to many who’d give it thought the minute they announced the rally as a “response” to their hated boogie man, Glenn Beck.
The trouble is that if you really do believe the face value intent, if you do not understand that it is a lie, then the whole project risks being seen as a trivial event. If you’re not in on the lie, then the spectacle of the guys up there playing Simon Sez with the crowd seems, well, kind of childish, actually. And that won’t do because this thing must be seen as a big deal full of all this inspiration and meaning.
So, the progressive in a Catch-22 position felt compelled to stop the charade and set the conservative straight on where all the lies were. Ah, what a tangled web we weave!
Wretchard 16
How would a democrat challenge Obama without upsetting the black vote? Obama would play this card as disgustingly as everything else he does.
#11
we have been suffering from the victory disease for the last 60 yrs,and it’s just about time to pay the bill.while the left is more out of touch than the right, neither is truly prepared to deal with our arrogant attitudes about our place in the world.until the people are prepared to live within their means, it doesn’t matter which side is in power.
The Wave is rising. The Great God Murphy is once again poised to kick down the intricate anthill that mankind has built. As to what shape or form the new anthill will be no one truly knows.
The country club Republicans see the populist uprising as represented by the TEA party folks as a mass of useful fools. The left, now in disarray and retreat, is trying to figure out a way to turn them into their useful fools.
What neither chunk of the current political ecology seems to understand is that the prey may have evolved to the point where they have both the power and means to exterminate the ones that prey upon them. Not, as in the past, where they got to choose which predator gets the right to eat them, but one in which all the predators and their spawn can go the way of the T. Rex down to extinction.
Will that happen? Who knows?
Liberty is the birthright of all mankind. So precious in fact that it is almost universally stolen from infants before they have the power to grasp it and take it for their own.
or in other words, what do you plan to do with the car once you’ve caught it?
#48:
How would a democrat challenge Obama without upsetting the black vote? Obama would play this card as disgustingly as everything else he does.
That’s one reason why I think a third party is the only viable option for dissident Democrats.
Right now, the Clinton and Obama factions may be fighting against each other, but both factions are stale and verging on moldy. Yes, Hillary Clinton may be waiting for 2016, but by then she will be so closely associated with Barack Obama that it will give her problems – problems similar to the ones faced by Hubert Humphrey in 1968…
Alexis…
Hillary’s problem is Hillary. Period.
NOT good on the stump.
Not able to speak in the manner of Bill, Reagan, Kennedy, Obama.
NEVER did the spade work even when she was young and vital.
Now that’s she’s extremely wealthy — and menopausal — can she maintain the sheer energy required to climb over rivals to the top?
She’s already proved that she can compete in a one-person race: an anointing.
The only competitive race she ever faced left her flat on her face having a head-start of epic scope and funding!
Hence, a terrible executive.
For her vanity it is wonderful to have the illusion that the big chair awaits — but she’s really a Dilly — and unable to handle executive decisions. Don’t ever think otherwise.
She couldn’t even keep the Clenis in tight.
She’s no Maggie, no Indira, no Carly…
Whereas the Resident is a Gonnabee…
She’s an Oughtabee… as in I oughtabee the first female American President.
Re: China and our “lost” jobs. Bottomline money flows to the lowest costs. If it is less cost to manufacture a widget in China when all the costs are added up then guess what? There are going to be factories manufacturing widgets in China. Seems to me the focus should be on “how do we lower the costs of making widgets in the USA”. Might take relaxing regulations and taxes on said activities. Might take labor realizing it can’t command $20 an hour to make a widget and stay competitive with the Chinese who are willing to do for less. Might take all of things. But more importantly we as American have to come to grips that we are not entitled to or owed our jobs and industry. That we have to earn them every single day. We taught the world how to build automobiles and now they school us on quality and cost. We taught the world many things and took it for granted that somehow we would always be first forgetting that the only reason we became first was because of the sacrifices our grandfathers and fathers to achieve that. We have as a nation have forgotten that prosperity is build on hard work and sacrifice. Instead we have is “Where’s mine?” attitude. Perhaps we need a good long depression where over 25% of the people are out of work and rest worry about the jobs. Maybe only then we will wake up that to fact that there is no easy way, no givens in life.
Re: Tuesday. Pray for an epic blow-out. Only way the Establishment will wake up.
Wretchard @11: relax the grip of regulations? Yes, if that were done we would see quick large positive impact on economic activity –IF people believed the change was lasting. Otherwise, paralysis due to fear of flip-flop.
Also, hard to relax regulations for the reasons given by Kinuachdrach @36, i.e. deadlock at political level, GOP being too timid and Barack being too ready to veto, and bureaucracies –with obvious self-interest– being only too ready to slow-walk and play stupid.
Main obstacle, though, IMHO, is the “moral” component of regulation. These were all passed for “some good reason,” e.g. unless we regulate every last gram of CO2 the planet will DIE, yesterday. For the government now to say, “never mind,” advancing only an economic stimulus rationale, will not be too persuasive to the electorate. A lot of groundwork will have to done.
If it can be done, it would be most gratifying and deeply interesting, because it would put the public on a different intellectual and moral footing with the Regulatory State. Its main presence –regulations– would be admitted to be contingent and indeed arbitrary, based on how much throttle the free market would tolerate at any given time. Wild!
blert:
You’re right about Hillary, of course.
I think a real problem for the Democratic Party is that it lacks a viable second team. If Bart Stupak had had the nerve to stand his ground, there’s a chance he could have been a rallying point for dissidents. It appears that no prominent Democrat has the nerve to oppose Obama.
I see the rivalry between the Clinton and Obama camps to be mere palace intrigue; I think they will have little relevance six or ten years from now. The fact is that the Democratic Party has not been a unified political party with an overarching ideology for most of its existence; it has been a loose confederation of factions unified by not being Federalists, Whigs, or Republicans. In contrast, the Republican Party started out as ideologically principled and it has been known to revert to principles and ideas on occasion.
I think the Clinton machine and the Obama machine have effectively been hollowing out the Democratic Party, and given how the Democratic Party historically tends to gravitate from one strongman to another, there’s probably a limit to how far the Democratic Party can be reformed.
Hence, a third party to eventually replace the Democratic Party is probably the most viable (if improbable) option.
Jon Stewart’s so-called “Rally to Restore Sanity” should be retitled “Rally to Restore Yusuf Islam”. Now, why didn’t Jon Stewart invite Salman Rushdie to speak at his rally…?
Yep, and in a lot of cases, there’s even a kernel of truth at the heart of the “good reason.” But like an oyster with a piece of grit inside it’s shell, the kernel of truth gets coated in layers of pearl. Only it’s the other way around, with a slight pearl of wisdom wrapped in a mass of abrassive regulatory grit.
You’re right that groundword needs to be done, and I think a valuable bit of groundwork is to hammer away at the “how” of regulation rather than the “how much.” The biggest economic problem with our current regulatory scheme is not the sheer amount of regulation, but the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of it. Wide powers are delegated to bureaucracies which, typically, are “captured” by one extreme or the other of the issue (e.g. it’s either the eco-naughts who want to ban everything regardless of cost, or the industry trade association that wants to create a two tiered regulatory scheme – none for the insiders and Mt. Everest for any potential upstart competitors). The captive bureaucracies then bide their time until they have an opportunity, then they ratchet things as fast as they can without any real interest in responsible regulation.
And then there’s the courts, where an increasing percentage of regulation actually occurs and where outcomes are simply unpredictable.
The result is a regulatory scheme that can pull the rug out from under a business with no warning.
Hammer away at the flaws and poor results of how we currently go about regulating, and point out the improvements we would see – both in the economy and the “moral goodness” at the heart of the regulation – if we reigned in the discretionary powers of the agencies and the courts. If we required elected officials to cast roll-call votes on the regulation and restricted court cases to criminal trials – no “public interest” civil suits allowed.
A lot of hammering will need to be done, but the benefits would be tremendous, and would return accountability to the regulatory scheme, which is the only way we can – over the long run – have regulation without it growing to choke the economy.
Concerning the black vote. Anyone remember Ed Rollins and his claims about how he helped Christine Todd-Whitman get re-elected in 1993? If not, here’s a reminder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Rollins#1993_Gubernatorial_Campaign
***Rollins worked as the campaign manager for Christine Todd Whitman in her 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial race. After organizing a campaign that led to Whitman’s come-from-behind victory, Rollins claimed to TIME magazine that he secretly paid black ministers and Democratic campaign workers in order to suppress voter turnout.
“We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, ‘Do you have a special project?’ And they said, ‘We’ve already endorsed Florio.’ We said, ‘That’s fine, don’t get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. We know you’ve endorsed him, but don’t get up there and say it’s your moral obligation that you go on Tuesday to vote for Jim Florio.’” After public outcry and calls for an investigation, Rollins partially retracted some of these claims telling People magazine that his comments were “an exaggeration that turned out to be inaccurate.***
I doubt this has changed since 1993. Political operatives of one party can pay opinion leaders to get out the vote and operatives of another can pay to suppress it.
I suspect that nationwide there are fewer than 1000 such opinion leaders of the kind mentioned above that need to be bought this way–fewer than two dozen in each of about 40 major cities. Assume an equal number of other opinion leaders and an average of $25-40K per “special project” and you can ballpark the cost of getting that vote–maybe $20-30 million. But what if money is harder to raise in the next cycle and no one shows up with the “donations?” Answer: support will be soft.
A second group of opinion leaders that needs to be bought is the CBC. They are proving problematic as they give every indication of being ethically challenged if not endemically corrupt. If they refuse to play ball in the next Congress, they have their own ways of softening support for the current administration or firming it up for potential contenders. The cost of their support could alienated mainstream (read “white”) voters.
Finally, it’s important to recognize that black support for the current administration has some soft spots. The cumulative effect of the failures of the administration are weighing heavily on those that want to get out and sing its praises. However, they are getting exhausted; they have been forced in the position of having to defend rather than extol the administration’s record.
“Quite Frankly, I’m Exhausted. I’m Tired of Defending You.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHv1ENYAulY
It’s not a position in which they feel comfortable or feel equipped to handle. This is no mean feat and it’s about to get much tougher. Many are going to give up being advocates and when challenged enough, will give up entirely. They might still vote the same way–assuming they vote at all–but it won’t be done loudly and proudly.
The key to remember is that Obama can still get 80-98% of the black vote, but if it’s a markedly smaller black vote–say 25-30% smaller– he’ll lose both an intra-party challenge and the general election if he makes it that far.
To summarize: (1) if the support of many opinion leaders can be bought, it can be bought by one faction as well as any other (2)if the support of the CBC is conditional on glossing over their ethical problems, the administration loses more “mainstream” voters and (3) the vanguard is becoming exhausted and demotivated and much of him base could follow soonly thereafter.
Alex
Did he sing the Piece Train?
Tarnsman @ 54…
Our lost jobs disappeared into the integrated circuit.
Pop open your PC — if it’s not a laptop — and see how 45 chips have become ONE.
That’s where Silicon Valley high tech jobs went.
Once done: forever done.
As if that dynamic could go on and on and on….
———
That vicious inhuman efficiency is ever with us.
The BIG PICTURE is hard to see when you’re in it’s frame.
Digital/logical control ultimately leads to MASS replacement of human labor.
Our polity has NOT come to grips with that.
Mass labor replacement means that not only ditch digging is lost as the bottom rung on the ladder, ( I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932 ) but that our very humanity as an economic lynch-pin is gone: an ‘intelligent’ device has ruined our economic merit even if we are willing to work at slave incomes.
Robotics means that that day really is at hand.
There are millions of humans supporting their families from efforts MUCH more easily provided by intelligent machines.
This reality will ONLY expand with time.
We ALREADY have dark factories that only turn the lights on for the programmers and repair crews! I’m NOT making that up.
HOW does our society deal with the REALITY of major segments of society being too dumb to economically have any merit?
This is the challenge of our era.
#61 Blert.
There it is.
My oldest is a veterinarian. Cows more then poodles. He is not going to be replaced by a computer, although he uses a laptop. He isn’t going to get rich but he’ll never have to worry about making the mortgage or eating.
Those 35$hr. factory jobs are history. They have been replaced by 50$ hr computer related jobs. The problem for the unions is that it wasn’t a 1 to 1 replacement. Now you have 5 techs replacing 100 non-skilled labor jobs. So those 95 unskilled workers either get re-trained or flip burgers. Just how many burgers does a modern economy need?
Some think that unemployment is a by-product of the industrial age, based on the fact that back when everybody was either a farm worker or artificer unemployment was zero, or so close as to be unmeasurable. I don’t agree and I sure don’t agree that high unemployment is a by-product of the Information age.
I think that the free market just hasn’t found a way to put the unskilled to work. It will.
The RPV (remote piloted vehicle) campaign in Afghanistan will help a lot. In theory there isn’t that much difference between some teenager hunting terrs with a remote controlled robot and some teenager mining ore with a remote controlled robot. It will certainly be easier on the miners when the inevitable cave-in occurs.
I can see the manager at McDonalds controlling a robot wait staff. AS minimum wage goes up, it becomes inevitable. There go the burger flipping jobs.
How do you say “Super size that?” in binary?
Wretchard @ 11: “But regulatory relaxation is one thing that still holds potential.”
If there is one issue that needs to be worked, and worked hard, it is this one.
For the last two years, the Dems have very succeessfully transmuted the foibles and damage caused by a handful of Wall Street firms and large banks into a casus belli for microregulating every single business, regardless of size, in the U.S. The anger at the lack of regulation of the bad players was highly exploitable, and was used, in the most cynical and dishonest way, to justify regulation of all players. At any rate, as history has shown us, a regulation designed for large corporations with HR departments and on-staff lawyers can be deadly when applied to a mom-and-pop outfit. So much so that the corporations will favor said regulation because it gives them a competitive advantage vs the small guys. If you think otherwise, look at last week’s Bloomberg piece regarding the fear big financial firms have regarding the Tea Party.
However, recognition that lack of regulation of the local dentist or florist or painter or car-wash owner is not responsible for the meltdown is gaining ground in the public at large. As stories of federal, state, and local governments using the current crisis to increase regulation (and the costs) to small business start to filter into the consciousness of the public, expect that the backlash now forming will form its own tsunami.
#61 and #62
For years now, whenever someone within earshot asks what the minimum wage is, I make sure to tell them “whatever people on welfare receive”. You cannot imagine the consternation and confusion my response generates, despite its ultimate truth. Whatever we pay people to not work (think fish and farm subsidies) is the true minimum wage.
A good read on this subject is Nancy Kress’ book “Beggars in Spain”. In this near future tale automation has replaced essentially all the jobs that required an unskilled or semiskilled set of abilities. The problems caused by that are central to the plot of the book.
As the fragile systems upon which our economic and social cultures are predicated unravel, which they are clearly in the process of doing, the necessities of the moment will make most regulatory efforts — save those directly involved in maintaining the welfare of the general population — of such irrelevance that they will be ignored, laughed at, and sometimes attacked. Look for an “I’m Spartacus” moment when the powers that be become so overwhelmed that they’re rendered impotent.
No mo uro #63: differential burden of regulation can be, as you say, catastrophic to the littler guys and does, I suppose, create competitive advantage to the bigger guys. More accurately, “competitive disadvantage” because the regulatory burden across all businesses is deadweight to society. The bigger guys just take the 1000 pages of puzzlement and throw it onto the desk of some hapless lawyer (on staff or at a firm). I was one, I know. At one level it was “productive,” i.e. kept the client out of trouble. At another level it was “satisfying,” i.e. deciphering that gobbledegook into plain English and simple action plans felt like value-add. But at the fundamental level it was wasteful. It was just trying to take noise out of a signal that some jackass in Congress or Treasury or EPA or FDA had injected, for little or no reason and with far too little skill or thought of consequence. Those Federal Register notices of new regulations all come with a statutory declaration of “estimated compliance burden.” If you are ever short of a laugh, read one of them in an area with which you’re familiar. The underestimates are desperately funny.
I guess my point is, bigger firms may seem to gain an edge from regulation; they may even convince themselves that they do; but it’s all deadweight loss. And deep down, everybody knows it. As the burden grows, and as the Net makes it easier to see more quickly how that burden has become intolerable even to the largest firms, and absolutely crushing to the smaller entrepreneurs, the tsunami of which you speak will build and accelerate. “Tsunami” is exactly the right metaphor. In deep water it is a mere ripple, moving at astonishing speed, propagating the pressure change, the shock front, in a highly organized way. Only in shallow water near the shores where we all actually live, does it suddenly form up, racing in and over the pretty little structures of habitual comfortable life. These people have no idea what’s coming. And, frankly, we don’t either: we may know there is tsunami coming, and roughly where and when it is likely to come ashore, but how it will play out? Only broad speculation.
Wild times.
No Mo Uro #65:
What’s the last time you heard the phrase “Working for chump change” “We need a living wage” or “Stuck in a dead end job”?
Those where phrases born out of the Welfare Rights movement and the unions ever greater demands for higher wages. They were an excuse for not looking for a job.
But you don’t hear them much any more. Or at all. Not only are there people with master’s degrees working as supermarket bag boys but I think that even the Race Industry finds them rather embarassing turns of phrase now.
Stoichieon @ 62: “I think that the free market just hasn’t found a way to put the unskilled to work. It will.”
The free market has not been given a chance to find a way. That is the consequence of a surfeit of (generally) well-intended regulation.
Two centuries ago at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, unemployed English Luddites destroyed machinery in textile mills because it replaced their jobs. But human wants are infinite. A free market eventually created other jobs for even larger numbers of English workers, meeting previously unmet wants.
Will we ever see modern unemployed workers invade the offices of regulatory bureaucracies to burn files and wipe magnets across hard drives?
nmu @ 64: For years now, whenever someone within earshot asks what the minimum wage is, I make sure to tell them “whatever people on welfare receive”. You cannot imagine the consternation and confusion my response generates, despite its ultimate truth.
I’m afraid I think this is right.
And that we will be doing a lot more of it in the future.
Like European social democracies have done for decades, and like we see described in scifi future dystopias.
Don’t like it at all, but see no better alternative. The old ways are gone to automation and globalization.
I suppose there’s always war …
The worst part of regulation is that it doesn’t work. Greed will find a way. 100K regulators will NEVER outwit greedy 1,000K crooks. So all regulations do is punish the honest. ‘splain that to me Lucy.
Crooks will always figure out a new way to steal, or change the name on an old way. Regulators that are smart enough to figure out new ways to steal become crooks. That is where the money is.
but what about our Wall Street’rs?
Don’t we need much more regulation there now?
That, or much less, repeal the “too big to fail” doctrine?
But that will make quite a mess.
–
My reply is that we don’t need *more* regulation, we just need to enforce about half the laws already on the books, criminal and civil, but nobody is doing it. Then what?
Here’s Linda Rhondstadt’s break up song with Governor Brown from back in the 70′s: You’re No Good. Linda is a pretty girl. She dresses up in the video as a good girl. But when you look at her lyrics–as I did for the first time–she ambiguously blames herself almost as much as she does Gov Brown–while giving the impression he’s the bad guy. Sounds about right. They were both on the flaky side so their relationship was bound to be star crossed.
Feeling better now that we’re through
Feeling better ’cause I’m over you
I learned my lesson, it left a scar
Now I see how you really are
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
I’m gonna say it again
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
I broke a heart that’s gentle and true
Well I broke a heart over someone like you
I’ll beg his forgiveness on bended knee
I wouldn’t blame him if he said to me
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
I’m gonna say it again
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
I’m telling you now baby and I’m going my way
Forget about you baby ’cause I’m leaving to stay
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
I’m gonna say it again
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
Oh, oh no
You’re no good
You’re no good
You’re no good
Baby you’re no good
Here’s a good visual of crowd size beck in august vs stewart on the mall yesterday.
Speaking of Jon Stewart’s rally–below are four causes of laughter as described in the Screwtape letters. Guess which one most aptly describes the laughter at the Jon Stewart Rally.
The Screwtape Letters (#11) ^ | 1941 | C.S. Lewis/Screwtape
MY DEAR WORMWOOD…I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy.
You will see the [Joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday…
Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us….it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field…The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction…it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame…
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.
Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.
If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.
It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.
Your affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE
Psalm 1:1 (New International Version)
Psalm 1
BOOK I : Psalms 1-41
1 Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
There’s an old saying among gamblers to the effect that “if you look around the poker table and can’t figure out who the mark is, you’re the mark.”
The middle class are figuring out that they’re the marks.
Josh #71: “But what about our Wall Street’rs? Don’t we need much more regulation there?” I’d argue that regulation is just a substitute for self-regulation. The more that a deal allows a party to capture upside and escape downside without retribution, the more regulation is needed. One reason the mortgage market used to work was that the supply of product (home loans) was not defective: borrowers had enough equity in the deal –skin in the game– that they were not usually going to take out stupid loans. When loans did go bad, they weren’t so frequent as to collapse the market with foreclosures on every block, so the borrower’s equity was a reasonable margin to enable the bank to get its money back. And banks had less incentive to offer stupid loans to borrowers, because they had to eat their own cooking. FNMA and FMAC did not underwrite crap loans. My point, obviously, is that when people have skin in the game they tend to behave better. Some of the problems on Wall Street are due to informational asymmetry: insiders who know more stuff sooner. That’s been regulated for a long time and I don’t see much need for more regulation. The other problems on Wall Street, like outright lying and cooked books, likewise have been regulated forever (well, since FDR) and the system works reasonably well. …The idea that we need a whole mess of New Regulation seems debatable to me. I haven’t looked closely at the Dodd-Frank “reform” regulation of the financial industry but after what those two clowns and their friends in Congress and HUD and FNMA and FMAC did to the housing and mortgage and financial industries, I wouldn’t trust them to organize a two-car funeral. I suspect much of their fancy new law is just papering over the mess they’ve already made.
Last point, generally, on regulation. It’s software. Every new line of code has to be reconciled with all of the others. As you add more and more code, the probability of contradiction or resource contention, open loops, bad calls, etc. goes up and up. Eventually you have to tear it all out and start fresh from the broad idea, writing it out at only so much detail as is absolutely needed to get it done. I say that as a lawyer not a programmer (and I’d welcome the perspective of those who code) but I think the problems and solutions are similarly situated.
oMan @ 77: I’d argue that regulation is just a substitute for self-regulation.
wull yeah, but isn’t it clear that self-regulation on wall street has utterly failed, I mean seriously epic failed, worse than in the 1930s era, quite possibly the worst in the history of western capitalism and western civilization back to pre-socratic times, in a way to warm the cockles of the hearts (if any) of your average Marxist not to mention sharia-loving jihadi?
now, did it fail because of the moral hazard of the government bailing them out, which has substantially been the case (except for bear stearns and lehman, but how many of the principals involved there suffered for it, I mean suffered appropriately, not just by losing their reserved tables at Le Circque?)
the guys that killed the golden goose did not do it because they had the moral hazard backing of the governor to do it, they were simply greedy and stupid.
oMan @ 77: Last point, generally, on regulation. It’s software. Every new line of code has to be reconciled with all of the others. As you add more and more code, the probability of contradiction or resource contention, open loops, bad calls, etc. goes up and up. Eventually you have to tear it all out and start fresh from the broad idea, writing it out at only so much detail as is absolutely needed to get it done. I say that as a lawyer not a programmer (and I’d welcome the perspective of those who code) but I think the problems and solutions are similarly situated.
Well as to that, the solution was invented about three hundred years ago, and it’s called double-entry bookkeeping. You calculate things two ways, and they’d best match. In code we have things like assertions to help make open-loop code more reliable, and should always pay more attention to error handling, issues of “data hygiene”, and auditing of results right down to going to the warehouse, counting the boxes, and even opening them up to make sure the purported contents have not been replaced by bricks.
A lot of code these days is not well written to utilize these kinds of tools for robustness and correctness, I could tell you stories from just last week. Sigh. People just chant, “SOX!” and tell you to put in all kinds of useless redundancies that have nothing whatsoever to do with a word in the legislation, nor concept.
Same for the financial system. Transparency is the fix for 99% of it all. Citibank should be shut down yesterday for even starting with the SIVs and what’s that other deal, the daily buybacks of loans, financing long by refinancing short every day? Of course that later has become legitimate now, all the banks are being encouraged to do that, living off free Fed money. OMG, that’s about all you can say if you understand this s*** at all, OMG. AIG should be shut down, burned to the ground, and the ashes dumped in the deep ocean.
Josh #78: I agree that Wall Street self-regulation has failed. If you haven’t read “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis, I highly recommend it as a dissection of the problem. It centers on the home loan mess but goes deeper/wider into the rise of synthetic instruments, the god-quants with their infallible computer models of risk management, the need and greed for ever-higher leverage, the way in which derivatives could be stacked on other derivatives to put (hundreds of) trillions in play. Lewis nicely bookends himself by referring back to his first book, “Liar’s Poker,” describing his early years on Wall Street; and he speculates that one of the reasons that self-regulation failed on Wall Street was because the banks were playing with other people’s money. The old partnerships, where the principals were exactly that, principals with their own capital and reputation at risk– became publicly-owned shops with highly-paid managers. They still “looked like” the old firms but the risk appetite was different. Bonuses went through the roof, the short-term thinking dominated, ever-more and ever-sexier products –understood by fewer and fewer– became imperative to continued competitive success. So it was doomed. But do we need a vast new regulatory apparatus? Or a return to first principles? Like: reinstatement of Glass-Steagall? Like: limitations on leverage? Like minimum capital requirements? I think we’re getting some of that (as I said, I haven’t read the new laws; too disgusted to go there) but I suspect we’re also getting a whole lot of micro-focus junk.
I also violently agree that the people who powerdived the banking and investment business have not paid the price they should; and it is the manifest injustice and corruption of the bailout and bonuses and bargaining that’s gone on, that has been a main driver of the Tea Party movement. The elites whimper that they’re misunderstood and sneer at the common folk for peaceably assembling to petition for redress of grievances…in fact the elites should be grateful that the reservoirs of civility and common sense and optimism in this country are so deep that there has not yet been a profusion of bankers dangling from lamp posts. Time will tell if they remain so lucky.
… regulation failed on Wall Street was because the banks were playing with other people’s money.
well but that’s what banks do, have always done, will always do.
yes on glass-steagall, yes on limitations on leverage, yes on minimum capital requirements (which is the same thing), yes on civil liability down to your last clean pair of skivvies, yes on criminal liability for fraud and failure of fiduciary duty down to life in prison without parole (if not daily public floggings), but also yes on saying that the rocket scientist quants are simply and entirely WRONG when they think they can safely separate risk, being the “skin in the game” term, from return. 98% of derivatives are simply unsound. let BAC sell naked call options on their own stock, but do not let them sell tranches of mortgages (or other imaginary items) at different rates, the first is visible, the second is untrackable.
(and I propose ALL purchasers of virtually ALL MBO since GNMA, have accepted far too little interest for their money, for reasons that utterly escape me)
No mo: At any rate, as history has shown us, a regulation designed for large corporations with HR departments and on-staff lawyers can be deadly when applied to a mom-and-pop outfit.
What people have failed to recognize is that the regulation game has become big business.
Those regulations are designed to help large corporation with the HR department and on-staff lawyers weed out the mom and pop and even medium sized competition. What’s the saying ” it’s a feature, not a bug”. That’s what has happened in the banking business since the panic. Haven’t you noticed the gain in market share and the bigger bonuses at the big banks? And it’s not just banking.
The regulation game over the last twenty years has created dozens of mega-law firms with close to a thousand lawyers, many at $500 to a grand an hour. Somebody has to pay for those guys. ( Eventually you and me) Those big law firms have taken some hits recently, but they’re still angling for truck loads of more impossibly complicated new regs that only a high priced boutique specialty lawyer can decipher. It’s the only way to build revenues, baby!
And then there are the thousands of quasi public and private consulting firms that generate the new regs and in end just happen to be needed as consultants to comply. And we’re not even talkin’ the enviro-nazi lobby.
This is a huge business with thousands of big time players who have the politicians on speed dial. It’s a very tall order to tackle and unfortunately, the bought and paid for Republican establishment is on the wrong side of this.
#79 Josh:
A lot of code these days is not well written to utilize these kinds of tools for robustness and correctness, I could tell you stories from just last week. Sigh. People just chant, “SOX!” and tell you to put in all kinds of useless redundancies that have nothing whatsoever to do with a word in the legislation, nor concept.
Interesting, and also I’ve noticed what I think is a related underlying phenomenon: the absence of rigorous discipline in all sorts of working systems, which in turn can affect anything from software code to legislation (to echo what you’re saying). There is a related habit in contemporary organizations — especially the government ones — to expect too much from too little effort or insufficiently allocated resources. “insufficiently allocated resources” sounds absurd within the context of enormous federal budgets, but there really are many underfunded mandates within government programs, which dramatizes the fact that vast amouns of money are both misallocated and even stolen.
Let me give you an example of this “magical thinking” at work: The space program. All talk about going to the Moon, Mars, or asteroids is bogus drivel, because not enough funding is ever provided to make any of these things a reality, yet that is the stated expectation of both Congress, the WH, and NASA. It’s a fraud, and there are many such frauds dotting the federal landscape. All those other frauds affect millions of people a lot more directly than does NASA.
DR @ 83: Utterly agree with you, the “magical thinking” is the cornerstone of our age. Even while technology continues to advance, the average level of understanding of it seems to stand still or even decline. That may be OK among the consumer, but it seems to be true even in our leadership.
It is right now the bain of the IT field. IT has expunged its own leadership. What it lives on is the sporadic success amongst its many projects that mostly fail. Failed projects limp along, probably giving bogus results, until the next replacement project, and the next, and the next. Now and then one succeeds. If you want to know the real reason we got into this six (or sixty) trillion dollar hole, I suggest that is it. Bogus quants. Bad numbers on spreadsheets that are taken as gospel. Until finally we have a president who I doubt is competent to make change for a dollar.
DR #83: “‘insufficiently allocated resources’ sounds absurd within the context of enormous federal budgets, but there really are many underfunded mandates within government programs…” That’s the truth. Every billion-dollar budget at which the public gasps is comprised of thousands of budgets of a few hundred $K, and so on down. And at every level there is slop and waste (by harried incompetents or by savvy players who pad their figures to build empires, cover against surprises, buy favors and hire pals, etc.). And at every level there is tightness and incapacity, because those budgets represent a plan, intentions, actions, bought things and spent funds which cannot quickly be redeployed or ever recaptured. So all the simplistic railing about “all that money should be enough to get the job done” almost misses the point. The beast must be fed. And the beast consists of millions of people, whose survival instinct is very strong and whose entrenchment is very deep.
Josh #84: I think it’s “bane” not “bain” but that’s actually a nice pun on the name of the consulting firm…Substantively I agree with you and DR, magical thinking was probably the bane of every age, but in ours, where most of us simply swap a piece of plastic from our pocket for a box at the store, without the least requirement that we understand anything much beyond how to open the box and insert the batteries and not grab the hot sharp parts, well, everything seems magic. Again Arthur C. Clarke’s great line comes to mind: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and what’s ironic is that we are supposedly the heirs and masters of this advanced technological civilization, but for various good reasons from retaining their control to avoiding lawsuits, the “real elite” has shielded us from the How of it all. Scarily precarious. “Idiocracy,” anyone?
83. Don Rodrigo
#79 Josh:
Let me give you an example of this “magical thinking” at work: The space program. All talk about going to the Moon, Mars, or asteroids is bogus drivel, because not enough funding is ever provided to make any of these things a reality, yet that is the stated expectation of both Congress, the WH, and NASA. It’s a fraud, and there are many such frauds dotting the federal landscape. All those other frauds affect millions of people a lot more directly than does NASA.
…………
An example of underfunding is water desalination research funding. Currently this research receives 50 million worth of funding annually in federal and private funding. This is down from a billion dollars annually in today’s dollars when this research was at its peak in the 60′s and 70′s. The IP from that work went overseas in the 80′s and 90′s and its spawned a huge international industry.
If the US made similar investments today using today’s technology–the results would be that the cost of water desalination would collapse to where it would economically possible to turn the world’s deserts green in 3-4 years. I think the cost of water desalination will still collapse in under 10 but it would go much more quickly with determined government help.
The big news from the moon and mars is that there is plenty of water there–though its likely salt water. But desalination on the moon will likely cost 50,000 dollars a bottle because that’s what it costs to launch anything to the moon.
imho the way to the moon is through the deserts because the skills developed to use all the parts of salt water cheaply can be applied in space.
I think I’ve found the Democrats’ secret pre-election communique to all party cadres:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/not_one_step_back.htm
#86 Charles
An example of underfunding is water desalination research funding. Currently this research receives 50 million worth of funding annually in federal and private funding.
Adequate supplies of fresh, potable water is an issue that is not just the province of environmental activists. To me it’s actually an element of the whole infrastructure issue.
One of the problems for America today is that governments, both federal and state, have added new funding constituencies almost exponentially, and therefore are robbing the general public of sufficient funding for major projects that ought to be done and/or upgraded.