Unequal by Design

In case you just beamed in from Mars, there's an awful lot of bad blood about right now between Americans and their government. While the reasons for this are varied, one major factor is that we have a shocking number of decent citizens who have played by the rules and worked hard, who now find themselves either without a job or working their fingers to the bone in dead-end employment for a smaller and smaller piece of the American pie. These people can't help but notice that this pie is actually growing very quickly once again, but that that growth is almost entirely reserved for others who are better connected or less ethical than they are. Consequently, and not without some justification, many blame their government. But very few of those who are hurting most have any real sense of the root cause of this disease at the heart of our political system. To compound the problem, those who have zeroed in on the diagnosis are being accused of waging "class war," or trying to kill jobs or undermine the freedoms of "ordinary Americans." The reality is that they're merely trying to win back opportunities for these very Americans and to rebuild a system of responsibility, accountability and broadly shared prosperity that has been systematically dismantled over the past thirty years.

The entities that have brought about this massive unraveling claim to be operating on behalf of businesses and commerce at all levels, but the changes their influence has wrought have channelled an accelerating majority of our growth, in increasing wealth, advantage and preferential treatment, to those at the very top of the income distribution. The parties that expend the most resources on framing our national narrative are well aware that if you say something loudly enough, and repeat it sufficiently often, it can very easily achieve the status of truth among a passive electorate—even if truth bears no relation to it at all. Today, we find huge and angry swaths of the society who have been convinced that the very government programs that are keeping them afloat—and that could, if wisely built upon, help them move beyond mere subsistence—are actually their worst enemies. In a grotesque parody of thoughtful protest, many of these citizens now get themselves up in colonial garb, fasten disposable beverage infusers to their clothing and accessories, and take to the streets to declaim their bizarre received wisdom of indignant slogans and nostrums: sentiments that undermine the few remaining features of their social architecture that actually redound to their benefit.

When we say that we live in a nation of laws, we're essentially paying lip service to the fundamental constitutional principle inspired by John Locke (whom our framers rightly admired a great deal), namely that the individual is free to do anything except what's forbidden by law. Any complex contract or legal system can be gamed; all you need is a sharp eye for holes you can shovel money or unfair advantage through, and a regular dose of bad faith. But once these holes are identified, they should be closed. That's one of the most important and under-appreciated roles of the legislative branch.

Our financial royalty currently spends (literally "untold") billions on lobbying, both to keep existing holes open—called "policy drift"—and to create new holes. This spending constitutes their most successful investment to date in terms of their bottom line. Often, these new holes are ostensibly promoted for other reasons that seem unexceptionable at first glance, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that they license behavior that rigs the framework to the advantage of those who promote them. These loopholes pay massive dividends to the people who spend the money to create them or keep them in place, but they also undermine the social contract in insidious ways. When both your threadbare framework of rules and your lax regimen of enforcement preferentially rewards "legal cheaters," what message does that send to those who are trying to play fair? I think we can sum it up in one word: "Suckers..." It doesn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to point this out, but few seem to listen even when they do.

As citizens, our job is to do our homework and keep close tabs on this process, then use the ballot box to make sure the grifters don't take over our country. But who has the time, the education or the discipline for that task when we're too busy working overtime to keep our families healthy and fed? The tiny minority that the game actually favors can afford to pay handsome salaries and benefits to the professionals who tilt the table on their behalf. And we have more pressing matters to address in our discretionary time—like figuring out who the Antichrist *really* is, or discovering where Lindsay is blowing lines this week, or making reproductive decisions for women we've never met. Genius, I tells ya...

The question of whether or not we can retrieve our country from the clutches of organized money remains very much up in the air at the moment. The dollar is a powerful reinforcer; it's not easy to find public servants who are resistant to its allure. It will very much depend on our willingness to tear ourselves away from our trivial entertainment for long enough to fulfill our own civic responsibility to hold our elected representatives to account for whom their legislation legitimately represents. If the framers of our constitution are to be believed, that was supposed to be us. And the people waging class warfare are the ones trying to destroy this compact, not the people trying to uphold it—that's the critical difference. It's time for the latter voices to find a thoughtful audience. You can help make that happen.

Nanny and the Freeloaders

All of this teabag-smoking, pea-poddy, pity party talk of liberals getting all "redistributy" with other people's money while the indignant-but-longsuffering conservatives try to reel them in (so as to let them keep a little more of "their own hard-earned money," we're told) is a hilarious little pant-load of pungent poo. The red states are the undisputed Welfare Queens of the United States of America. The blue states "redistribute" billions of their tax dollars to these states every year just so they can squeak by; yet the recipients are continually wringing their hands in poutrage and whinging about how unfair and "socialist" America is—all while raking in these massive handouts from their malevolent "big government" benefactors. They owe their very subsistence to redistribution from the blue states, and they're so irrepressibly grateful that they all put their fiercely independent little heads together every other day to cut us these lovely, broken records of cheeky abuse. We have to wear earplugs now when they hit us up for cash just to preserve our dignity when we capitulate.

And speaking of "illiquid and insolvent," some of these states are actually our equivalent of Greece! But not to worry, the blue state "nannies" have always got their backs, because that musty old scrap of parchment—the one that noted (among other things) the reasons our country was actually "constituted" back when Adams wore knee breeches—listed things like "to form a more perfect union" and "promote the general welfare" and "insure domestic tranquility," and some of us are foolishly convinced that those reasons still matter. Maybe they've read it, these states that are perennially in the red? Yeah, I doubt it too. In fact, non-partisan publications like the UK's Financial Times have speculated that the only way Greece is going to be able to stay afloat as part of the eurozone is if the EU adopts structural measures similar to those of the U.S. and agrees to start treating it like we treat some of our red states. I shit you not.

No, seriously, "Reds," don't mention it. In fact, nanny thinks maybe you could use a little time-out. Yeah, we're gonna need you to just stop talking until you have something intelligible to say—like "thank you!" or "we're not worthy!" or "golly, this socialism sure tastes mighty fine!" ...Or until you can sink your own stop signs, patch your own roads and fight your own goddamn fires without the hitherto uncomplaining largess of the blue states. Maybe take a break from Fucks' News and do a little homework? Seriously, there's a reason why those "fairly unbalanced" drama queens can't tell their heads from their asses; it's because the two are concentric. There are bags of pounding tools with more formidable reasoning skills—and better manners. What was that old line you used to give us, "God helps those who help themselves?" You thought that was in the Bible somewhere—I believe that was in the book of Tracheotomy, if memory serves... Well I'm not sure "help yourself!" means what you think it means here. You see, some of us know that the minute we let your vaunted "Lazy Fairies" begin working the invisible hand without adult supervision, it starts digging graves—and it starts with yours. Yes, even with all of the flaming ordure you pile on our doorstep year in and year out, and despite the parasitic relationship you've carved out with us, we still have a hard time viewing your destruction as "creative."  Lucky you.

What? Oh nothin', never mind—nanny was just venting (I suppose you could say she's in a "blue state." No, no, stop, that's not... that's just not funny at all). Go back to sleep. The check is in the mail again, per usual. Yeah, just whistle us that Chet Baker song while you drift off—you know the one: "Everything-depends-baybay . . . awn yeeew!" (And don't we just know it.)

ZZzzzzz...

License to Fail

We're beginning to hear a lot more cheek of late from the anti-regulation circus. The rhetoric pretty much all centers around a fundamental error of bivalent thinking: "Regulation bad! Freedom good!" As if that were a reality-based dichotomy.... This post will serve as a kind of final pass through that territory for me, with maybe a couple of asides, before I try to put it down for awhile.

Before the the financial system got wrapped around the axle of the global economy, this kind of naïveté might have been understandable, given the money and effort that was sunk into the propaganda organ of deregulation's beneficiaries, but not today. What most people didn't seem to remember before the crisis--and still seem to have difficulty getting their heads around now--is that in order to have a robust and sustainable economy, you need both a sensible rulebook and a consistent, reliable system of enforcement. We hadn't been bitten this hard since the thirties, so people had forgotten how bad it could get. (Many were also apparently laboring under the impression that their social security, medicare and medicaid assistance were brought to them via the beneficence of some kind of heaven-sent, currency-laying waterfowl, so maybe that's not such a surprising lapse.) There seemed to be no appreciation of the concept that if something is not forbidden by law, then it's permitted here (thank you John Locke); and if people can make money at it, they'll be lining up to do the hell out of it--even if it torpedoes the system that underpins their livelihood. But hasn't that lesson been duly delivered by now?

To take just one well-known example, The Banking Act (Glass-Steagal), which passed in 1933, was put in place for good reason. The financial system had just taken a dump on America's dinner table, and people had understandably lost their appetites. Among the smarter things that legislation did was to erect a barrier between commercial and investment banks. Customers who deposit money in their trusty Main Street bank don't want it jeopardized by, say, the activity of crack-fueled speculation in Manhattan. And since the FDIC wasn't designed to cover the bets of the casino capitalists, guess who catches the tab when we drop that fence and those yutses scramble in and start breaking things? A clue: not them. The capital gains tax is still at a measly 15%. And on top of that, the serious royalty can afford to retain small armies of well-compensated tax and finance lawyers (preferably poached from the IRS) to find creative ways to exploit the loopholes their lobbyists have thoughtfully purchased for them with the coin they banked from their last tax "rescue."

Not so awfully long ago, we lived in a country where the more successful among us were contributing back to the system that made that success possible at a level at least *arguably* commensurate with the up-tick in their (still briskly increasing) fortunes. That allowed others to come up from below and emulate their inspiring example. Not this time. They've pulled the ladders up after themselves over the past couple of decades, so they can sit in their penthouses and smoke the spliffs they've rolled with the social contract.

The repeal of Glass-Steagal in '99 was indeed part of what did us down, but that was just one of the more visible pieces of a huge, unprecedented and astonishingly well-funded campaign to roll back vast swaths of safeguards and protections. This effort wasn't launched to secure any additional or substantive freedoms for you or me, whatever the rhetoric may have sounded like at the time, and it certainly hasn't done so. What it did accomplish was the consolidation of financial--and consequently political--power among a much smaller and wealthier cohort and solidify already challenging barriers between socioeconomic strata. Of course, it also supplied that much-needed little boost of confidence for the small minority of nervous winners whose fortunes were already climbing so quickly they had to yawn every thirty seconds to equalize the pressure in their ears. That's where the benefits of this new-found freedom went and continues to go. Real wages have been stagnant or decreasing for most Americans for decades, and social mobility is a receding dream to anybody who cares to run the numbers.

Poor lending standards and lax enforcement were also a big part of the dumfuquerie that compounded our vulnerabilities leading up to this recent shitshow. But think about where that "anything goes" climate blew down from. What do you tell the suits upstairs when they need more paper for their mortgage Cuisinart (it slices, it dices, it wipes away risk...). "Don't you worry your little pomaded pompadour about the niggling trivia of employment or credit history--when Wall Street sees the ribbons and wrapping paper our rating agencies are gonna slap on this stuff, they'll be stepping on their dicks to get a piece!" Turns out that's exactly what happened.

And if you mumbled unseemly dissent while that pipe was making the rounds you were promptly disinvited to the party. Nobody likes a buzzkill. Come on, show some perverse incentive...

Smart legislation provides both the structure and immune system of a healthy economy, much in the way that the sensible bits of the rest of our legal framework protect, say, our bodies, our voices, and our right to feed and exercise our personal beliefs unmolested by pitchfork-wielding heretics who think we're the Antichrist--or worse still, socialists! Like the immune system, regulation has to keep pace with threats to the health and integrity of the economy. Like the immune system, misplaced or excessive regulation can deprive an economy of its vitality. But smart regulation fosters robust and healthy competition, innovation and broadly shared rewards. Strip it out and you get what we enjoy today: runaway systemic risk, anti-competitive practices, frozen socio-economic strata and astronomical rewards shared by a tiny sliver of the productive population while the rest of the country withers on the vine. That ain't even a little bit ethical. Maybe we're ready for another round of vaccinations....

Head Like a Hole

In today's NYTimes, Friedman goes all "Bad News Bear" on U.S. job prospects. He buttresses his argument with an approving quote from Sunday's Times Magazine on the superiority of the MadeInChina:

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’

As a commenter points out, The Guardian also has a new piece on the MadeInChina. It kicks off this way:

The man's hand is twisted into a claw, crushed, he says by a metal press at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, where Apple's luxury electronics are assembled. He is looking at an iPad – he has never seen one switched on. His mangled hand strokes the screen, bringing it to life.

Back at the factory, where the buildings are swathed in nets after 12 workers committed suicides in a single year, a young girl emerges from the gates. Her job is to clean the iPhone screens before they are packaged. She says she is 13.

And here's another bit from a recent NY Times article on Apple's Chinese labor:

Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”
...
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Bottom line is one thing; perspective is everything. Puts me in mind of one of Reznor's Nine Inch Nails songs – as a lot of things do of late:

God money's not looking for the cure.
God money's not concerned about the sick among the pure.
God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised.
God money's not one to choose.
...
You know who you are.

Indeed.

Pimping Our Huddled Masses

When a pimp turns out a new sex slave, the common practice is first to get their victim hooked on something powerfully addictive.  The next step usually involves saddling them with a mountain of debt at larcenous rates, sometimes just for the basic necessities of day-to-day living such as room and board, or the fraudulent arrangements by which they've managed to transport them from their familiar environment in the first place; but always for the addiction. Finally the pimp coerces the victim, with both misleading monetary inducements  and threats to themselves and their families, to demean themselves at the whims of men with sufficient financial means to pay a minimal sum for their services. And they do this for the duration of their victim's capacity to do the work. Years of fun for all involved—minus one. There's an analogy here if I could just get my finger on it...

The next year will be a critical one for both our country and the world. I don't think any of us can afford to be mere spectators during this next election. There are things that need saying clearly and forcefully, and we owe it to ourselves to try. Social welfare is an essential component in any sensible national survival kit. You can't call "home" a truly representative democracy without it. Yet even the laughable framework we've had in place here in the U.S. is gasping for breath in the current political arena. We're quickly becoming a nation of "have it alls" (a tiny fraction of a percent of us) and ''have nothings', where the former buys the legislation that keeps them having more, the middle class continues to slip through the cracks, and 15.1 percent (and growing) of America now huddles under the floorboards below poverty line. That's not the country I was born in. The legal framework that lets this happen has been hammered together with billions of dollars in political persuasion and a formidable army of well organized lobbyists and operatives over the past thirty years—and they've gotten amazing returns on that investment. If you can buy the privilege to swoop in whenever you like and jump the line, you can take home a lot of cake. But that's a nasty little game—some might even say uncivilized! So maybe it wants some talking about.

Politics turns out to be a very reliable transducer for the conversion of money into legislation. All too often, through the meretricious alliances it engenders, it despoils the soul in the process. Over the next few months, we need to both emphasize the purpose and necessity of smart progressive taxation in maintaining the polis (Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond and his colleage Emmanuel Saez currently argue for a top rate of 73%), and also to decisively counter the dangerous and virulently anti-tax kleptocrat narrative that has gained traction with the ascent of the extreme right-wing media Juggernaut. And of course, we'll have to draw attention to the hideously skewed economic baseline that results from the pollution of the political dialogue with money.

Executive pay is one interesting index of the absurdity of our spendthrift financial aristocracy that has gained mainstream media attention over the past few years—though perhaps the most interesting thing about this attention is that it has accomplished sweet fuck-all in terms of putting an end to that insanity. The pay-without-performance "compensation" packages that have become customary at the top are surreal even by the standards of obscene avarice. In 2007 Home Depot's CEO Bob Nardelli skated with $210 Million while HD's stock tanked. Stanley O'Neal famously peaced at Merril Lynch with "no severance pay" while his company was plummeting through the basement. Not so famously, he left with 161.5 million and an executive assistant, gratis, for the next three years. What more they could conceivably have stuffed into his vest upon departure in the name of "severance" is a question too ridiculous to contemplate. Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo split with $120 million in compensation and stock sales—and we know all about Countrywide financial. The list grows longer and loonier by the day.

So how does this nonsense even happen? Well, it depends on whom you ask—and whether they've done their homework. If you ask the Wall Street cognoscenti, you'll meet with the usual suffering shibboleths and duck-billed platitudes about the free market, about the right of shareholders to pay their royalty whatever they feel like paying them, or about the increasing value of the CEO in today's world and the increasingly competitive process for acquiring star performers. What you won't likely hear about (given that most of the "cognoscenti" know next-to-nothing about it) is the wildly imbalanced bidding wars where the execs hold all the high cards. Nor will you hear much about the perversely distorted system of corporate governance that lets CEOs ratchet up their own pay.

The financial system has been hacked from the inside, and it's hemorrhaging from thousands of massive holes—into the pockets of those who payed for the job. The tide has gone their way for decades now, and it will be a hard dynamic to shift. They've gotten used to getting-over; it's hard to get over getting used to getting-over.

Nearly all of us recognize that progressive taxation is the fairest way to ensure that the social contract remains intact. But how many of us noticed when Baby Bush knocked a hole in the capital gains tax that you could drive a tanker through—and that the beneficiaries of this largesse have been frantically shipping mountains of money through ever since. How many of us noticed the way the wealthy (and corporations like GE and Google) finesse the regulatory shell game to shift billions of dollars in profits offshore, presumably to await another "tax holiday" when they can sneak it home under the radar of public opinion—though even that is now an almost quaint idea: the U.S. is "home" to these entities only in the most abstract and strained sense of that word.

57% of Americans believe wealth should be more evenly distributed. Seven in ten Democrats think government should address this by increasing taxes on the wealthy. About the same percentage of Republicans think it shouldn't. The way government in general—and the issue of taxation in particular—has been increasingly framed over the past twenty years is surely a major factor. Taxation has been viciously demonized as oppressive and punitive, with little emphasis on what it gives back to the citizen. The remaining 43% could be forgiven for supposing that all of the government programs they take for granted (social security, medicare, financial aid for college, etc.) are simply a product of our God-given rights rather than the result of legislation that courageous lawmakers fought for tooth and nail against furious and well-funded opposition. The list of pejorative terms popular on the right for these programs, along with all of the rest of our anemic attempts to do right by our citizenry, could go on for several lines, but they could much more accurately and succinctly by described as "mildly giving a rosy rat's ass about your fellow human being." 

Opinions in the absence of relevant information are more an indication of who is winning the struggle to frame these issues than of how important the issues actually are, or what should be done to protect our investment in them. For example, there's plenty of compelling research on the devastating impact of extreme inequality on everything from mental health to violence to infant mortality. But few people have any real sense of how extreme the inequality actually is. A surprising percentage of poll respondents in the U.S. actually believe the middle class is growing. The percent of all people living in poverty has increased from 11.3% to 15.1% between 2000 and 2010. This is not a problem solves itself if we all sit on our hands and wait for the magic of markets save the day. Markets don't even work that way. The incentives markets operate under consist largely of variations on the theme of “return on investment,” not social stability or security in our twilight years—or any of the other indices of a healthy nation. For that conversation, we would need to begin a deep and persistent inquiry into, say, what benefits and advantages derive from various investments; to whom these advantages accrue; and how these benefits enhance or erode the fabric of a “free and just” society. Profit doesn't care.  That's our job.

Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, champion of deregulation and lobbyist for Swiss Bank USB, can rhapsodize all he likes about Wall Street as a “holy place” while the middle class is sacrificed before the Sacred Bull, but only because he knows who butters his toast. He dares not utter the name of his True God in polite company. The founder of the religion to which Gramm's adopted party pays lip service had his own ideas about people messing about with money in a “holy place.” The phrase “den of thieves” derives its origin from that narrative. It's right there in the New Testament—four times: in all three synoptic Gospels, as well as the book of John. I suppose it could be important. Jesus is also reported to have said things like "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." And "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Apparently, God only knows what that means. Somehow it never seemed dreadfully ambiguous to me, but there must be a loophole somewhere, what with all of these God-bothering fuckwits in our political system soaking the "chosen" for their last thin dime while they legislate against the interests and trust of these goodly people—and sleep like babes at night with women other than their wives.

Of course Rand Paul would have you believe there's "no such thing as the rich." Indeed, those we call "the rich" and "the poor" have ever so much in common: lo, they're both carbon-based, they both breathe oxygen, and they're all well over six inches tall! As usual, the venal tools of our oily overclass equivocate most on matters of degree (as in "order of magnitude") when degree matters most of all.

Newsflash: the percentage of even middle income families in Cali just dipped below fifty—that's down from over 60% in 1980. Income in the poorest families—who can least afford the hit—dropped more than 21% since just 2007.

In fact, 146.4 million Americans—a full 48% of us—are now "Low Income" (defined as people earning between 100% and 199% of poverty level) or below—up four million from 2009. Sadly, those with the most thoughtful ideas are seldom the ones most motivated to whip up catchy slogans. "We are the 99%" may be a step in the right direction (and I'm not complaining abouut that), but where's their plan? I think they're helpful in drawing broader attention to the problem, but what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs to make up the terrible gap in our basic coverage of necessities for a huge and growing number of Americans.

We need dramatically increased spending on infrastructure (which is circling the drain all over the country); we need massive new educational investment and increased investment in science and technology; we need tax incentives that reward *actual* job creation, especially for small businesses, rather than mere tax breaks for a demographic lazily labeled "job creators" by their hardly-disinterested mouthpieces. We need dramatically higher tax rates on the highest incomes. We need to deny the ilk of the laughable Laffer all access to the halls of power unless they're carrying a mop or a broom (thank you Charles Pierce). We can't fight our way out of this slump by squeezing government spending and crushing the slumpin' proletariat indiscriminately. It's about Keynesian multipliers. They work. And when the private sector can't—or won't—do that spending, the public sector needs to step in and pick up the slack. If we want growth in the near term, we're going to have to increase internal demand, and that means jobs, not deficit reduction, must be our first priority. Not a single economist in my acquaintance at Treasury, the Fed, or the IMF disagrees on this point.

The number of Americans living in poverty is simply mind-boggling for a country that pretends to any measure of decency. The percentage dipped respectably during the Clinton administration after a fairly long and persistent climb. For this we should set aside a little love for Pappy Bush, for having the courage, after a smart peep at the numbers, to break his "No New Taxes" promise—to the eternal consternation of his party purists. But the figure has been rising ever since.

For the celestially well-to-do, it's been a different game. They've been steadily hauled up by their Burberry hats past the tippy-top of Jack's magic beanstock. Nowadays, most of the country couldn't see these people's bottom lines on a clear day, with a pair of astronomy binoculars and a neck ache.

Of course it's just plain goofy to hate somebody merely because they happen to be rich. But it's just as pathetic to heap scorn and derision on the less well-off simply because they correctly point out that their government—and consequently their economy—is rigged to keep them there. If you massacred every one of the poor tonight and quietly buried them away from polite society, there would only be more of them in a year. The legal and regulatory framework that girds (or ungirds, really) our current flavor of capitalism produces them in droves. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It has always been thus to some extent, but never, ever to this degree.

Now that reasoned critique has been rebranded as class warfare, optimism for the near term is a little naive. Even with the best of outcomes next November, we're still in for a bone-jarring ride. Why is it so hard for those at the helm to see America as family, rather than as marks in some sordid con? The impact of big money on policy is a matter of public record, and it is not a pretty one. When you can effectively buy the passage or blockage of legislation, then good government merely means "good for you."

But the structure and functioning of our political system has also evolved to make it even more resistant to change—e.g. just note the way the use of the filibuster has risen over the past couple of decades. This means that policy can no longer keep pace with economic exigencies, creating what Walter Lippmann called "drift," which militates in favor of the status quo and exacerbates existing inequality. (See Lippmann's flawed but seminal volume "Drift and Mastery," an influential attempt to get to grips with similar unrest in this country back in 1914.) Also note that if one party chooses not to play the filibuster game—say, in the interest of fair play or good faith—this creates a ratchet effect in the direction of the policies of the side that does use this stifling tool. So: polarization and impasse—or "the Divided States of America."

We need to get the word out. What we are up against is organized money, and what that money buys them is a lot of noise—noise that conflates sentimentality with compassion, and rationalization with reason. Organized money is remarkably proficient in using institutionalized irrationality to sway vast armies of religious fundamentalists—no one is more susceptible to simplistic zealotry and sophistry than people whose minds are so peculiarly constituted as to both expect and enjoy its deployment. I hasten to add that these are often very decent people; they are not to be scorned for being they way they are. The distinctive modes of mass delusion and specious reasoning to which they are accustomed are the product of very sophisticated and pernicious memeplexes that have been evolving resistance to rational scrutiny for hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of years. These modes of non-thinking are baked into the wetware from a very early age, and nothing will ever shift them once those habits of mind have annealed in that configuration.

But there's hope for the rest of us—the young and the passionately curious of all ages and stripes. And here's the bottom line: there are more of us than there are of them, and we know something. We know that social justice isn't just a good idea; it's also the smart money strategy for sustainability in complex iterated games—particularly where the relevant agents are these "human being" thingies. That means we also know that if they win, everybody loses; that species survival may well depend on the triumph of curiosity over dogma, and of empathy over narcissism. Perhaps most importantly, we know that the only hell we need fear is the one we build for ourselves, or allow to be constructed in our name.

So let's get to fucking work. There's simply too much lo lose to justify passivity.

It's Go-Time (actually, it's go-thirty)

It's not a standoff if you begin to stand down before you've really stood up. We desperately need to be seeing a lot more of our President right now. That is to say, we need to be seeing much more of the version of the man we thought we elected, and much less of the man we have increasingly begun to suspect that he actually is. That's what frightens me: the identity issue. Did somebody catch their forty winks next to a pod on inauguration night?

It's not just the number of press conferences he holds, or how many interviews he sits for; it's also the tone of those appearances, and the behind-the-scenes "negotiations" which thoroughly misunderstand both the dynamics of the game and the role of a leader. In the context of recent negotiations, he seems to have neglected what I would call Rule Number One: NEVER make concessions to bullies and expect them to compromise in return. They will always view it as a simple victory, another validating stamp for their superior position, and keep trying to push you even further. To the bully, it scans as weakness. If you don't seize the discursive field decisively with such people, you will never gain any control over the flow of play. And as our leader, if you let them play you, you've let them play us.

It has been said—and I suspect there's something to the notion—that not even the President can change the public's mind if it's already made up. But he ought to be able to at least get out in front when public opinion is squarely in his corner—surely that couldn't be construed as going beyond his brief. (Minimally, this means immediate job-oriented stimulus and letting the "dumb then and dumber now" Bush tax cuts for the oligarchs mercifully expire.)  And were he to make a valiant and concerted effort to that end, he would almost certainly find that even his enemies would accord him a grudging respect. To be fair, that is why we hired him. The idea is to move the ball as far as humanly possible, with the passion and eloquence that becomes a leader, in the direction you believe to be right—before you begin negotiating. But his tentativeness makes us question both his commitment to his position and his resolve--two things you don't want to have up in the air when you come to the table.

It takes a lot of strength and inner intensity, not to mention resilience, to hold such a line. There's no shame in not possessing these qualities; you just don't want to be the guy running the ball if you lack them. Charisma and deep intelligence will not suffice without the fierce courage of your convictions. That courage tends to work even when those convictions are misplaced; it becomes even more critical when the convictions are arrived at rationally and thoughtfully, and when the world is in crisis mode.

Obama's greatest asset, given his rhetorical skills, is his pulpit. If he is hoping that the GOP will overplay their hand and leave him ahead at the end of next year, well, then I fervently hope that he's right about that. I fear that will not be the case. And I pointedly question any decision to rely on that sort of too-clever legerdemain rather than stepping out in front and nailing his theses to the church door. One of your most powerful perquisites, when you hold the office of President, is that it offers you the opportunity to establish a new frame, a new narrative. Sure, your natural enemies will oppose you vociferously—that's what they're there for—but they aren't the POTUS. And don't think that they (and everybody else) don't know that too! Unless you, yourself, forget...

Obama is the greatest campaigner I've ever seen. I will always love the man, come what may. But my esteem for him as an advocate for America is dwindling by the hour. I am ashamed that he seems so constitutionally averse to making enemies, because effective leadership so often demands just that—and because the nature of your enemies can be just as telling as that of your friends. Calculating a clever strategy is also important, as far as it goes. But if, in the clutch, that strategy does not involve getting out in front powerfully and decisively to oppose those who are pushing in the wrong direction, and staying there with his jaw set and his back unbowed, then He. Is. No. Leader. He may be a lot of splendid and charming things, but if he lacks that iron will and that sense of moment when the moment is dire, then he lacks what the moment requires.

I'm afraid it's time to step up or step off. A lot of lives and livelihoods depend on it. I believe he that can do it, but that's not the point, is it?. He needs to do it now—because while we have already lost much, we could always lose much, much more.

No New Taxes?! (Take 2)

The GOP's obvious allergy to any sensible tax structure, combined with their claimed infatuation with the Constitution, has to rank near the top of the list of the most ridiculous things I've seen in my short, happy life. One of the crucial driving forces behind the creation of the Constitution at the outset was the government's need to collect excises and levy taxes on individual citizens when necessary. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had little recourse in the collection of revenue beyond reliance on the good faith of the states. The country was up to its eyeballs in the debt we'd incurred in the birthing and administering of this new experiment in democracy, and we needed to be able to service this debt if we were going to remain viable as a nation. So a small group of insignificant troublemakers—shameless "big government" types with names like George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams—began to push for a stronger central government to oversee commercial and fiscal policies directly, and thereby maintain the stability of the U.S. economy.  The result was our Constitution.

Bizarrely, we have a surprising number of people in Congress today who purport to be rabid for the Constitution, yet utterly fail to recognize the necessities that gave rise to it—necessities that remain in force today. In many respects these intellectual poseurs are anti-constitutionalists. Because it's still true: you cannot pay down the debt without raising revenues. In fact, I believe Alexander Hamilton may have said it best back in 1780: "Without revenues, a government can have no power. That power which holds the purse-strings absolutely, must rule."

Of course you don't want to raise taxes on those who would be rendered destitute by it, or in a way that will adversely impact the health of the economy.  One of the more thoughtful early comments on this comes directly from noted anti-federalist Patrick Henry: "the oppression arising from taxation, is not from the amount but, from the mode — a thorough acquaintance with the condition of the people, is necessary to a just distribution of taxes." That's why progressive taxation is such a vital idea. People who insist that the rich will stop spending if you raise their income tax a bit are—how to put this delicately—talking out of the wrong end of their digestive tracts.  That is to say, such utterances smell funny for pretty much the reason you'd expect. One of the more robust behavioral findings of the last few decades is the recognition that the spending habits of the astronomically wealthy don't change much at all when you slightly decrease the rate at which they're growing astronomically wealthier. In fact, pretty much the only thing that changes under those conditions is the size of the bequests that they leave to their broods.

Surely the ones who have benefited most disproportionally from the way our economy is structured and regulated are the very ones who both (a) owe that system the greatest debt of gratitude and (b) ought to bear the greatest responsibility for its continued stability. Eisenhower understood this, as did Nixon and Ford—and to some extent even Reagan and Bush the Elder—so it's not really a traditional Republican blind spot. This is a madness of relatively recent vintage.

In any event, I certainly have little time for anyone who claims to worship at the altar of the Constitution, yet asserts that raising taxes is anathematic to the American way of life. Even in terms of history alone, that one is a non-starter.