tales of copper city

How we seek and see

When I first moved to Washington, D.C. in 1967, on my first morning there, a hot Saturday morning, I went for a walk up near DuPont Circle and I found a bookstore there (I've forgotten the name and it's surely gone) and I bought a prominently-displayed book called The Paper Economy, by David Bazelon. 

The main idea of the book is that we have become confused about how we see the differences between paper, the paper instruments and paraphernalia of capitalism, and the capacities of capitalism to produce goods and services that could benefit all together.  

Because we spend so much time on the paper side, worrying about it, gambling with it, hoarding it, and misunderstanding it, we ignore the productive capacity of what we have on our hands, a capacity for full employment and far more equality than we have today, and hence far more equality and public happiness, and far less misery and suffering. 

Bazelon's book was yet another addition to our "anxieties of affluence," our growing unease with the poverty and want in the midst of a booming economy. Bazelon was a well-known social critic of the day and his book was popular. Todat his book is out of print. Bazelon died in 2005 at 82. 

Some of the details of Bazelon's critique have changed but the essential insight, the failure of our seeing is still true. We could be so much better off, as a nation, if only we could come to see  the reality behind our Paper Economy, to see what is in front of our nose. And as George Orwell said a long time ago, seeing that is often the very hardest thing.

Just Say No

Have we lost our senses?  We have spent weeks, no months, talking about the debt ceiling, playing directly into the agenda trap set by a party that has a death wish.  And we have a president who listens more to poll readers in the White House rather than to the needs of the country and the ideas of the party that brought him to the presidency in the first place.

Let the deadline come, Mr. President, and then announce that the Treasury will pay its bills, and that you will ignore the deadline as an unconstitutional threat to the well-being of the United States and its economy.   And wait for a bill from the Congress that restores sanity.

Just say No, Mr. President, to the denialists in the Republican Party and to your former campaign manager in the White House, David Plouffe.  Be the leader we thought you had in you.  

Years from now, as Elizabeth Drew asks, in The New York Review of Books, we will ask ourselves "What were they thinking?"  Drew has it wrong.  We are asking that right now, all of us. 

Are there sane Republicans left?

Kevin Drum has a fine column on the schizophrenia of the sane Republican today: one day they admit the party is plunging off the deep end, and then a few days later, they find reason to blame Obama. Drum's column is about one particular "sane" Republican: David Brooks of the New York Times.

Peraonally, I thnk Brooks and similar conservative columnists have found themselves riding a dead horse, the dysfunctional Republican Party of today.  And, in Brooks case, as Drum points out, he sometimes points this out. But then, a few days later, Brooks lays into President Obama.

Of course, Brooks cannot help playing to his side, even if that side is truly getting scary, and reckless. 

I wonder why no nationally recognized Republican doesn't step up to the microphone and say what must be on their minds:  this is truly nuttiness.

The 39 times for the debt ceiling

Since 1980, the debt ceiling has been raised 39 times: 17 times under Ronald Reagan, four times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush.  

The debt belongs to both parties.

Why doesn't the president just say that?  Why doesn't he also say that, if the Congress doesn't act, he will.  

This is beginning to sound like a Hitchcock movie.

Kabuki Kraziness...enough already!

Having watched for the umpteenth time MSNBC commentators trying to breathlessly explain the craziness of the debt-ceiling drama, I notice people are constantly using the term "Kabuki," to dramatize that all of this is simply theatrics with one foregone outcome...raising the debt ceiling.

Lawrence O'Donnell is constantly reiterating his theme, with Kabuki regularity, that the president is engaged in a kind of political theater, making Republicans come and meet him, then raising the stakes until they walk out, and then appearing before the cameras, as our democracy's Last Reasonable Man.  That's like watching a Kabuki play with a commentator explaining, over and over again, how pointless the play truly is.

Forget the tax increases...sign an all-cuts deal

Johnathan Chait of The New Republic argues that Obama ought to sign an all-cuts deal and forget the tax increases.  The Republicans preach the theology of tax cuts, which is Voodoo economics, according to nearly all economists and the first President Bush.  

LBJ and the debt

The New York Times has a wonderful section on presidents and the debt.  Robert Dallek, the historian, on LBJ and the debt is especially good, including Dallek's quote from Nietzsche: "Convictions are more desperate enemies of truth than lies."  Amen to that.  

Read also Joan Hoff's take on what Nixon did with the debt and with fiscal policy generally.  We always forget how flexible Richard Nixon could be.  He thought of himself as a "conservative Keynsian," a president willing to use the debt to foster growth and employment, yet to also cling to conservative principles.  Whatever that means.

Jeremy Galbraith, in his book, The Predator State, has a wonderful chapter on the myths of the balanced budget and debt.

The endless idiocy...

When I watch the nation sink into the endless idiocy of the debt ceiling debate, I am reminded of a story I once heard Senator Ted Kennedy tell a small meeting in Washington of people working on various versions of universal health care.  This was sometime in 1991, as best I can remember.

Kennedy told the story (told to him by former Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana) of three men seeking a teaching post in a small town in that benighted state.  The town was equally divided between round earth and flat earth people.  The teacher who supported the round earth "theory" went in, and soon came out, saying "I didn't get the job. The flat earth members of the committee nixed me."

Ditto the flat earth candidate: "The round earth members voted against me."

The third candidate went in, and soon came out:  "I got the job," he said.  When asked how, he said, "I told them I could teach it flat and I could teach it round."

That in a nutshell is where we are and what we argue about in American politics.  No economist worth his or her salt believes that a debt ceiling or debt limit has anything to do with sound fiscal or economic policy. To be sure, the size of the debt can, at some levels, have adverse effects on the economy.  But we aren't at that level today and most economists know it.  (But for a very different and very sane view, read what the economist Jamie Galbraith says here. I think Galbraith is right; modern economics is totally screwed up about what the deficit means.)

What we have is a nation in a recession, and cutting spending at the state and federal levels only deepens the future path of the economy.  We should be spending to end unemployment and to put more purchasing power in the hands of the consuming public. Government should work to resolve the mortgage debt crisis in ways that increases spending among the public, instead of trying to placate the very banks that took us to the brink.

Why Republicans Should Fear President Obama

To hear some Republicans talk, Obama is the worst president in U.S. history.  There may be a small minority of Americans who believe this; I'm old enough to remember how much some grownups fulminated about FDR years after he was dead.

Obama's no FDR and today's Democrats are not as liberal about overseeing the economy and Wall Street as were the Democrats of the New Deal and the Great Society. Many Democrats got talked into the de-regulation mania of the past thirty or forty years.

Still, the Republicans are desperate to defeat Obama for some pretty important reasons.  

The biggest reason is that if Obama wins re-election, and the odds are he will, he can defend the Affordable Care Act with the power of the veto, no matter what happens in the House and Senate.  And health care reform, if it morphs into an instrument for more social justice in health, will be a powerful threat to today's Republicanism.  If we catch some breaks, "Obamacare" can be a game-changer in American politics.

An interesting take on the 14th Amendment

The constitutional scholar, Jack Balkin, of Yale has an interesting take on the public debt clause of the 14th Amendment. He argues that the clause in the 14th Amendment regarding the debt was written to reassure the public that the Union would not default on its legitimate pensions and debts incurred in the Civil War.  Apparently, the returning Southerners put that rumor about as a kind of "final shot" from the Lost Cause. Professor Balkin has that history here.

Thus, when Geithner says that the 14th Amendment means what it says, that it is an affirmation of the political and constitutional faith in the obligations and promises that all branches of government should uphold, and that President Obama should use the clause to remind Congress, and particularly the Republicans, that they should uphold the Constitutional principle.