Why We Probably Best Be Getting Psyched About The Partially Shitty Health Bill

It's 2010, stupid:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Clinton suggested Obama wants to move health care off the table so he can turn his entire focus to the economy by January — in time for 2010 elections.

“What he focused on was how important it is to move this year. And I think there is a general sense is the clock is ticking," Wyden said. "That certainly in terms of the president being able to focus on the economy next year at the State of the Union that getting it done this year will in effect clear the tables and allow the focus to be on jobs and education and infrastructure.”

I dunno how the President helps the jobs picture without an aggressive and politically suicidal govt jobs program, but, shucks, he's surprised me before.

A Rare Thing

It's rare that a little, teeny, petite blogpost about a blogpost (Klein, "Krugman on Krugman") can be so accurate a summation of (what Doug Henwood calls) what the people at The New Left Review call "the current conjuncture."

We began with an economic crisis that looked a lot like the Great Depression. But due in large part to the massive efforts of the Federal Reserve and the government, we pulled out of it, or seem to have pulled out of it.

Of course, I think people do understate the political work done by this administration simply to keep a Depression-ish financial collapse from sucking our entire society into a squalid crater. But the question for the people who govern us is: now that we have (maybe) "hit bottom," how, then, will we re-emerge? How long will it take to begin gaining ground again? And will we be a fairer society when we emerge, better-hedged against the asset bubbles and demand-side shortfalls that occasion these recurrent crises?

If the answer to that last question is "yes," I want to know how demand can be stimulated without rising wages, increased government investment in human welfare (i.e., government entitlements and government jobs) and, by extension, increased taxation of the wealthy? Will Democrats come to see that it is in their political self-interest to open themselves up further to charges of socialism, big-government, blah-blah-blah, if said charges arise while they are delivering actual benefits to voters?

Chris Matthews and Foucualt are both always right when they say that the burden of governing is heaviest on the 20th/21st century Left. If Ds win on the discourses of "health care" and "jobs," they can afford to lose on "socialism," because at that point, socialism'll be* just another (bleeping) tree falling in the (bleeping) woods.

*Actually, socialism already is a (bleeping) tree falling in the (bleeping) woods: at least in the northwest hemisphere. Go ahead and blame it on the whole previous century, or Stalin, or Mitterand, if that makes you feel better.

For the Conservative Populist Monetarist Xenophobe Set & Glenn Beck

[pilfered from Doug Henwood's 10/9 Radio Commentary. Henwood begins every episode of Behind the News with 5-7 minute blurbs of economic notes that are a) required listening, and b) now compiled in print form over here.]

As Ken Rogoff, the IMF’s former chief economist who’s back teaching at Harvard, told the Financial Times, “The financial crisis probably has brought forward the day when the dollar is no longer dominant—but maybe from 75 years to 40 years.”

Crap/Not Crap: CBO qua Scoreboard

If it's true that the country is paying unusually close attention to the sausage-making vagaries of health care legislation, is it any wonder that CBO "scoring" has become a focal discourse throughout the health care debate, and an effective bludgeoning tool of the deficit hawks? It's, like, the closest thing to a "scoreboard" available to political news consumers, right?

Fraad Wolff is....wait for it.....Right Again

At this point, the only thing annoying'er than MJ elegies're snobbish, lazy expressions of outrage re: the MJ coverage. But that doesn't change the fact that some way more serious shite is afoot then MJ's being dead -- even if, like MFW below, you think that MJ has become a symptom of the national anxiety re: the clearly worsening economy:

In these times our cable news system truly becomes irrelevant all the time. I will not pretend to know or understand exactly why Michael Jackson suddenly means so much for so many. I don't doubt the feelings are real and intense. I haven't the faintest idea why and how Jackson became the symbolic icon for national grief. But I do know that many missed a few very, very real news stories over the last two weeks.

The "green shoots" theory about imminent or arrived economic recovery has withered under the pounding rain of actual data. Last Thursday we learned that wages are completely stagnant, hours worked have fallen and 467,000 net jobs were lost in June 2009. Since December 2007 approximately 7 million Americans have lost their jobs and the total number of jobless Americans is just under 15million. Four and half million Americans have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. Male unemployment is officially at 10%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics broad unemployment measure U-6 includes marginally attached workers and involuntary part-time workers. The June measure of U-6 unemployment stands at 16.5%. The average American work week declined to 33 hours in June. This is the lowest number recorded in the 45 year history of the measure. It is fair to think of the falling number of hours worked as another form of unemployment impacting millions. Perhaps this is part of the reason millions are interesting in grieving?

Before I Give Myself a Well-Deserved RugBurn

I'm in a horrendous mood: EFCA's fucked, fntsy bsbl is off to a false start, and my worst pangs are wholly unmentionable for the moment. Suffice it to say that the soothing, sleek seal that is the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm isn't even enough to calm my shit down. Whatever, I'll spin it again....

Anyway, all this shit makes Dean Baker's shit-talk-y, sardonic Beat the Press blog even more appropriate than it already always is. No matter how far we've all contorted ourselves in the service of sanctioning and/or "giving a pass" to these or those of the President's this and thats, I think we all do well to keep the raspier raps from Baker, Henwood, Frank and Reed close at hand --- even if it means my recycling new iterations of what're closely-held, nearly 'goes without saying'-y premises.

Par example:

The media are busy perpetuating a myth that the United States has been a beacon of "free market" capitalism. This is a lie. The United States never had free market capitalism and certainly the system in place over the last three decades hardly qualifies.

The U.S. put in place policies designed to transfer income from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. This is most evident now with the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent bailing out the banks. For the last three decades, the banks and their top executives, made vast fortunes using a free government insurance policy called "too big to fail," under which bond holders and other creditors could lend money to the banks knowing that the government would honor their debts if they ever got into trouble.

It is an outright lie to call this a "free market." This is a huge government handout. This insurance policy is enormously valuable and the banks did not have to pay a penny for it. The banks are ardent opponents of free market capitalism. None of them have advocated that they be allowed to collapse.

Krugman on AIG

full article here:

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

Absolutely Essential Viewing

A highlight of 2009: CNBC's Rick Santelli on the floor of the NYSE, confusing himself and his trader colleagues with "regular folks."

Robert Gibbs' recent reference to the Santelli blast's also a hoot:

Gibbs gleefully went after Drudge's favorite CNBC reporter at today's briefing, casting his position as the view that "the adage that if it was...good for a derivatives trader it was good for main street."

Agnosticism Even in Our Anti-Capitalism

(h/t: fellow twitter-er and Edwards/Dean/Jerry Brown strategy guy Joe Trippi)

Spiegel Online re: Davos...

Davos can deliver insights it doesn't necessarily intend.

The key messages that seemed to flow from four days of speeches, panels, "bilaterals" (i.e., chatting with someone), cocktail parties, and press briefings were these:

1. Everyone stupidly failed to see the financial calamity coming except roughly four economists who now must be heeded in everything they say and all they predict.

2. The private sector has ruined the global economy and can no longer be trusted.

3. Government is ascendant, with regulation closest to godliness.

4. These conclusions are correct and will stand the test of time.

What I took away instead was this: Beware conventional wisdom and groupthink. Be skeptical of tidy explanations for complex past events. Be even more skeptical of confident predictions of future human behavior. Don't fight the last war.

All true, my "non-ideological" friend. I fear for those among us who are too hopped-up about:

1. New Deal 2.
2. "More public, less private" as an end in itself.
3. The fallacy that somehow favoring industrial capital over financial capital is an intrinsically good (or always necessarily meaningful) decision.
   

Brass tacks: be it in laissez-faire or mixed economy tones, the state always "regulates" the economy under capitalism (read your Dean Baker, or Poulantzas on the theory side.)

And to put a theoretical bow on things: on a political-cultural level, the 100% socialization of assets might somehow make our society 100% "public"...but it's not enough to undo the public-private binary that shapes the ideological playing field for social actors, social movements, etc.
Not to sound too lapsed-Catholic, but there's no getting out of the desert until the Original Sin of public-private discourse is undone, transgressed, defaced, profaned, overturned. Of course I'd rather the state administered/guaranteed my health care, and I'll go to as many informational pickets as you want in favor of it. But the state's still the (capitalist) state, in that instance.

What are you saying, Lex - Socialism or Barbarism? Well, of course I'm always at least implying that, I hope. But I'm also trying to make the more pragmatic point that there is a horizon - just a horizon right now, what with all of the totally necessary socialization/regulation/de-privatization we absolutely have to do right now - beyond which the socialization/regulation/de-privatization of capital will cease to be strategically viable aims for organized labor in particular, if not the "working class" in general. The work of agnosticism, which to me is also the work of democratic socialism, is to provide unflagging-but-contingent support for civil society, the public sphere and the state regulation of capital and capitalists, but without elevating those "empty signifiers" to the level of godheads or ends-in-themselves. These aforementioned are worthy socialist causes, but hardly the stuff of life-after-liberalism, let alone life-after-capital.

Any theologians out there interested in the question, "Is socialism capitalist?" It'd prolly make for good barroom talk if the company was right.

Krugman as Dean Baker

Interesting to see the times moving the Nobel Laureate into a left-er and left-er, snarkier and sardonic-er posture a la unconditional endorsee Dean Baker.

As the Obama administration apparently prepares to launch Hankie Pankie II — buying troubled assets from banks at prices higher than they will fetch on the open market — it occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be appropriate: under Bush, financial policy consisted of Wall Street types cutting sweet deals, at taxpayer expense, for Wall Street types. Under Obama, it’s precisely the reverse.

Update: Maybe I was too cryptic. The original joke was, “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the reverse.”

i hope that BHO is reading Kuttner and Krugman...

both "mere" liberals, i know. but truth told, "managed capitalism" or a "mixed economy" or whatever-the-hell else you wanna call it still seems ambitious enough (to me) for this first 100 days.

here's Krugman's pronouncement from a persuasive piece called "the Keynesian moment:"

To be sure, Keynes failed to foresee the postwar rise of the “marginal efficiency of capital” — the way that economic growth combined with inflation would create an environment in which interest rates were high enough in normal times that monetary policy was effective at fighting slumps. Hence the long era in which Keynes didn’t seem all that relevant. But his analysis remained as valid as ever, under the right conditions. Those conditions reappeared first in Japan during the 90s; now they’re everywhere... And in the long run, it turns out, Keynes is anything but dead.

"Detroit"/"GM" bailout Open Thread

Weaver's Way Co-op - Beyond Green Blog
h/t ezra klein

(Anybody expecting me to lay down an un-measured "not crap" or "crap" on this topic overestimates me. But let's read this article above - which looks it emanates from just the vantage point I needed to hear from - and hold forth, spew links, etc., in the comments thread. Or we can just pretend this post never happened.)

Volcker and Obama

story of the day, though I cannot link you to the actual WSJ content without all of us subscribing. Former Fed Chair Volcker (1979-1987), more than Reagan, inaugurated domestic neoliberalism in the USA as an inflation-fighting deficit hawk. Now he's presiding over what many are calling the "end" of neoliberalism.

Prisonship Politico GameDay

The importance of race and gender in the current US presidential campaign has, of course, been a function of the salience of racism and sexism—which is to say, discrimination—in American society; a fact that was emphasized by post-primary stories like the New York Times’s ‘Age Becomes the New Race and Gender’.1 It is no doubt difficult to see ageism as a precise equivalent—after all, part of what is wrong with racism and sexism is that they supposedly perpetuate false stereotypes whereas, as someone who has just turned 60, I can attest that a certain number of the stereotypes that constitute ageism are true. But the very implausibility of the idea that the main problem with being old is the prejudice against your infirmities, rather than the infirmities themselves, suggests just how powerful discrimination has become as the model of injustice in America; and so how central overcoming it is to our model of justice.From this standpoint, the contest between Obama and Clinton was a triumph, displaying, as it did, both the great strides made toward the goal of overcoming racism and sexism, and the great distance still to go towards that goal. It made it possible, in other words, to conceive of America as a society headed in the right direction but with a long road to travel. The attraction of this vision—not only to Americans but around the world—is obvious. The problem is that it is false.
-Walter Benn Micheals, Against Diversity

• Dean Baker on how we musn't be confusing the credit crunch with the recession. We have so many problems on so many fronts that even the Washington Post is wondering if "capitalism" is "dead."

• DLC Chair (la-di-da!) Harold Ford on McCain's full descent into Lee Atwater mode, and Ben Smith on the right-wing base's unwillingness to come back from the "mysterious" frame Palin et. al. have sought to set around BHO.

• Ezra Klein explaining why, despite all, I will miss being part of the vertically-integrated Kaiser Permanente "system."

• Good to see some actual sane people speaking up for ACORN, btw. If you're wondering what the Right's problem is, let me explain: ACORN have registered 1.3million poor people to vote. That's just not what the GOP is in to.

Night Shift Fodder

1) "The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which the premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that." -F. Jameson

2) Doug Henwood's latest radio broadcast features two political economists from York University - Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin discussing the possibility that this last financial crisis may, in fact, be, the "one" that precipitates a new style of capitalism: a restructuring in the relations of production, you know? So what comes after neoliberalism? There is no reason to be dumbly optimistic about it, whatever it is, as Henwood concludes in a powerful editorial in the new Nation:

Although we're hearing a lot now about how the Reagan era is over and the era of big government is back, an expanded government isn't likely to do much more than rescue a failing financial system (in addition to the more familiar pursuits of waging war and jailing people). Nothing more humane will be pursued without a far more energized populace than we have.

Henwood's is the most timely commentary on the bailout and its long/short-term stakes that I have heard/read. Apparently this is one area where I fall out with Pete De Fazio and Dean Baker, and fall in with Paul Krugman and Barney Frank. Weird. 'Makes me uncomfortable, but so does the ongoing financial collapse, and so do the prospects of the restructuring of the US fiscal/labor/monetary policies that are about to go down under either BHO or the Maverick. I think the consequences of moves made around this bailout and the subsequent restructuring of global finance will be decisive for the long-term prospects of the "working class" at home and "globalization's discontents" abroad, moreso even than election outcomes this year. But obviously the two variables are fatefuly related to one another.

3) Libertarian stalwart and initiative also-ran Howard "Howie" Rich returns to the scene in South Carolina?!?!?

Why Bother?

Looks like the new bailout bill contains tax breaks for "small business" in order to attract the votes of the House Republicans.