Demography is Not Destiny

It appears that Mitt Romney represents older, white, suburban, and exurban voters who earn more than 50k per year and a smaller percentage of women than men from that demographic. Obama, as per the last link, has super majorities among everyone else.  I understand that a non-trivial percentage of Romney voters are racists fucks but not all of them but the racists fucks, as I argue below, were never Romney's base and they would have voted for a cheese sandwich so long as the black man was voted out and White supremacy with its unearned privilege returned.

This is leading many on the left, the right, and in the center to insist that in these United States demography is destiny. Well, it isn't. All of the groups, whether "racial," "ethnic," or biological, this argument must run, vote as they vote because of some in-born, onto-genetic trait or traits.

This is obviously nonsense. The divide here is between folks who have it made and don't care about anyone else correctly identifing. Romney as one of them. In short, Romney, whose concession speech was the quintessence of dickiness and prickitude, base was never right-wing Evangelicals or Tea Party Patriots, it was always the dicks of the world with the added fillip of those whose idea of a decent argument is them making shit up, bullshitting, and generally lying about the world in order to deny that, just as an example, water is wet. And the rest of us who would prefer our elected officials be competent, more or less honest and generally reliable so that we can go about the important business of having lives and enjoying the refreshing beverages of our choice.

That there are a lot of these horrid people in the world as it is, is evidenced by Romney's "bounce" after the first debate. There his lying prickiness and general dickitude were on full display and many of our fellow citizens lapped it up. The same characteristics, lying, prickitudal and dickital tendencies, are what  makes Paul Ryan Romney's ideal running mate.

If you read around the intertubes in the run up to the election, you know doubt read some of the blather about lesser evilism, this will do for the vote Obama as lesser and this as its opposite. Both sides here missed the fundamental point that this election was about driving a stake through the heart of the rule by privileged lying pricks and the continued elevation of competent managers of a nasty, nasty system.

It may well be that over the next four years the Obama Administration will take steps to ensure that the system becomes less nasty by rolling back the obscene policies of the neoliberals. One can hope; however, any reversal of these policies and a revision to the New Deal, only this time for gays, women and non-whites, is going to be a decade long slog.

One can only hope that the sharp rebuke handed to the lying pricks amongst us leads to a much more rapid decline in horrid little men and women gallivanting around and insisting that America, real honest to god America, is a land of horrid people.

I mean just consider the endless garbage by the horrid people who engaged in official and unofficial voter suppression. They failed and in failing shot themselves nicely in the foot. It is one thing to think that the only way you can win is to cheat it; it is quite another to get caught cheating before, during, and after the election while failing to win. That kind of a situation makes the vote suppressors look like what they are: Horrid people to whom and for whom a lie isn't something shameful but a necessary and honorable act in the service of ruining the lives and stunting the fortunes of their fellow citizens.

War On Women

Indeed:



So vote your conscience.

The Reason Romeny is Losing

Men and women on the Right aren't very bright. Here, for example is Ross Douthat burbling on about Romeny's most recent assault on his fellow citizens:

The way Obama and Romney employed these stereotypes are not actually equivalent. Both behind-closed-door comments were profoundly condescending, but only Romney explicitly wrote off the people he’s describing. As Slate’s William Saletan notes, Obama embedded his bitter- clingers characterization in a longer riff about why it’s important for Democrats to keep fighting for blue-collar votes. Romney’s remarks were more dismissive and therefore should prove more politically damaging: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said, of millions of his fellow countrymen, and left it at that.

He then asks that we

set aside the short-term politics for a moment. What does it say about our culture that the people funding presidential campaigns on both sides of the aisle seem to regard their downscale fellow countrymen as a kind of alien race, to be feared and condescended to in equal measure? 

The obvious idiocy of this "argument" is that Romney first blames the mythical  47% and they writes them off while Obama see's the creation of narrow minded bigots as a failure of public policy and outreach and demands that we do better. The "short-term" politics are likely to be less important than now might seem to be the case.

 However, the longer-term political implications are that the left-half of the neoliberal political world is going to continue to try and ameliorate the ravages of market capitalism, albeit insufficiently and sporadically, while trying to convince their fellow citizens to be less bigoted and fear-filled.

This dynamic, indeed, helps to explain the decline of the Republicans as a national party and their increased reliance on voter suppression and lies.

Whose Streets?

I just finished Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic. It is a really fine book that works through in great detail how the Automobile industry and its supporters managed to transform streets for essential public spaces in to expensive and always more crowded preserves of the motorized vehicle.

What struck me about his analysis and narrative was the extent to which the Automobile industry's strategy is the prevalent model for groups dedicated to destroying the vestiges of the welfare state in these United States and abroad. In general the idea is to buy off expert opinion and use leverage with the state to trample popular desires and, as result, create a new culture that is immeasurably less humane than what went before.

It is, however, possible to move back toward a more humanistic vision of your cities, towns, and burgs. As result of the Automobile industry's purchase of the opinions of key traffic engineers in the 1920s in the US streets are designed to maximize "floor space" for automobiles. This take over by private enterprise of the creation and maintenance of a public good without having to pay for meant and means that each year the American tax payer subsidizes the Automobile industry, trucking, and etc. Getting back to a livable city means returning to the older understanding of streets as multiuse public spheres in which cars, as they are least efficient and most dangerous modes of transportation, are relegated to the lower rungs in the ladder of importance.

One way to accomplish this it to insist, as the Dutch do, that streets are "area[s] where people want or need to be."  This formulation reminds us the purpose of cities, towns, streets, and, more generally, humanity in a social situation isn't profit and industrial expansion.

In other words, the neoliberals are wrong about everything because they have both  bought into and promote the economization of all modes of discourse. Bastards.

Opposite Day

I was going to write something about David Brooks', professional idiot, latest monstrosity, but stopped when I realized that his evidence derived from "history Web sites that track such things" as rampage killings is almost assuredly Wikipedia and that all of his actual experience in "read[ing] through the assessments that have been done by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists" is slighter than his regard for facts, intellectual honesty, and careful reading. So decided not to.

Instead lets consider the "you didn't build that" controversy.  Obama recently pointed out the obvious about the social nature of personal success and the right went nuts. Madison Wisconsin and other college towns have lower unemployment because bosses and investors know that they can get a highly educated work force. And they did not build the University or the fine public schools, the parks, and recreational infrastructure, etc.

Romney knows this, and I don't mean his remarks on the socialized nature of athletic success.  I don't  mean his borrow 20k from your folks to start a business to start a business notion; although, so one, so far as I know, picks their parents; therefore, those who can borrow succeed because of the luck of the draw.

This last point, I think, explains the virulence of the Right's response to Obama's bland truism. If success is a combination of luck and socialism, in its broadest sense, than failure is a combination of luck and socialism, or its lack, which -- in turn -- vitiates the whole of the Reactionary/Conservative/Neoliberal ideology. This fact of the matter means that the Right would have to disband, which they can't do. So they deny it even as they accept it as true.

Update, of sorts from Fox News more evidence that success grows from the efforts of others and ourselves:

Kilmeade: Clara, how do you feel about the President saying that you needed help to start this business. And just speak from — speak from within. All right, you know what? Let’s switch over to —
Younger sister Eliza yawns. Clara begins to speak.  
Kilmeade: Why don’t you answer that one?
Clara, age 7: I would say that’s rude because we worked very hard to build this business. But we did have help.
Kilmeade: And your help came from?
Clara, age 7: Our help came from our investors, our dad and stepmom, along with other friends and family.

And that says nothing about the roadway without which they would get no foot traffic.

UPDATE:
I just watched The Daily Show in which Louis Black made more or less the same argument. Great minds, or something, think similarly.

Fatal Misreadings

Everybody remembers Ronald Reagan's misreading of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. Not to be outdone David Brooks misreads Springsteen's entire body of work and proves once again that he lacks self-awareness. He has for some time now acted as a moral scold and reducing complicated socioeconomic phenomena to simple morality tales. He, it seems, is exempt from his desire for a more austere morally serious world. In order to better misunderstand Springsteen he and some of his

friends. . . financial sanity to the winds and went to follow him around Spain and France.

He finds himself baffled that Spaniards would chant "Born in the USA" because they weren't. Springsteen's popularity, he insists, is the result of

a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes.

Here is the problem. Born in the USA is about being the victim of Neoliberalism war on humanity. In Spain right now that war is coming to a successful neoliberal conclusion. Springsteen's global popularity results from his writing songs that are thematically coherent and he often speaks to and for people who are being crushed by the  combined force of a cynical state apparatus allied with corporations or who are in a desperate struggle to make sense of a life that just plain didn't work out.

These concerns aren't narrowly local and have nothing to do with Brooks' "paracosm" blather. The Neoliberals have successfully transformed much of the world in a way that hurts most of us. And with rare exceptions few people look back on their lives and see them unblemished by compromise and failure. The fact that he explores these universal themes with upbeat music and fantastic stage show is just more evidence that Homer sang like rock star.

Over to the Daily Beast serial dolt Andrew Sullivan reads an article on Mexico that argues the root cause of the mess and violence in Mexico, which really sounds like a hellscape of a place to live, is

The PAN is often described as center-right, the PRI as center-left, and the country’s third party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.), as left-wing. But these labels carry little weight in Mexico today. “The parties have no ideology,” a magazine editor in Mexico City told me. “That aspect is meaningless. Power here is about money.” The P.R.D. candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a popular former mayor of Mexico City, who nearly won the Presidency in 2006, has moved toward the center this year, dropping his confrontational rhetoric. Indeed, in 2010 the P.R.D. and the purportedly rightist PAN combined forces successfully, backing the same candidates for governor in three state elections. The PAN and the PRI are both avidly pro-business. But it was the PRI that presided over the privatization of more than a thousand state companies during the nineteen-eighties and nineties. Carlos Salinas, during his sexenio, privatized hundreds of companies, as well as Mexico’s banking system, turning a lucky circle of his friends into billionaires. This creation of a new economic élite, with effective monopolies in fields such as transportation, mining, and telecommunications, resembles the creation, around the same time, of the new crony-capitalist oligarchy in Russia. And in Mexico nearly all its beneficiaries owe their fortunes to the PRI, not the PAN.

 In other words,  Mexico is a hellscape of a place to live because of ideological convergence around notions of privatizations and reverance for "job creators" leading to massive economic inequality and chronic underfunding of necessary state functions, which is another way of saying Neoliberalism.

Sullivan, who really is a silly little may, insists that the article is

[a] must-read from William Finnegan reports on the country's organized crime epidemic, fueled by the Drug War.

Like Brooks' misreading, which serves to protect his readers from the cold hard fact that more people suffer under and find the new economic system a misery making machine, this reading obscures the real cause of the worlds problems by pointing toward one of Sullivan's hobby horses, legalization, while ignoring or more precisely lying about  the actual cause of  the world's misery: neoliberalism, which is his preferred ideology.

Both men should do the decent thing and resign to spend more time gardening.

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift lives.

Recalled to Life the Final Comment

What exactly the recall election meant or means in Wisconsin politics is, of course, years away from being full understood. However, much of the emergent punditocracy's narrative strikes me as being foolish and wrong and based on a bunch of assumptions that don't hold up to sustained scrutiny.
 
It is difficult to see how the Walker victory constitutes a resounding defeat for the coalition of unions, workers, and politically active leftists. That coalition has now in place a million something network of politically engaged voters; it has a clear message that abhors the ALEC-based retreat to the 19th century; it has stopped an further rightward shift or shenanigans in the immediate future.

Given that, as everyone pointed out, how Obama was AWOL from the fracas it is difficult to see this election as having any bearing on the up-coming presidential election.

The election also, it seems to me, threw the tactics, strategies, and philosophical orientation of Walker and Barret supporters into sharp contrast. For the coalition behind Barret this was largely a state campaign waged with instate money, volunteers, and related etc over issues specific to Wisconsin.  For Walker's campaign this was a national campaign which drew on the power of the plutocrats his policies benefits and the various right-wing organizations that seek to erode the power of state legislatures to set their own agendas, i.e., ALEC.

Indeed, one constant refrain emerging from the noise and confusion is that Walker is a national figure on the right. This indicates, to me in any event, that the way forward for the neoliberal right and conservatives more generally is away from their always dishonest commitment to states' rights and toward and ever more powerful and autocratic centralized state.

On the plus side:

The Salem runner was last in the race and she picked up the other runner after she collapsed and  made sure she crossed the finish line a head of her.

Innovation II

I mentioned the debate about central  planning and innovation over to the Crooked Timber the other day as well as the patriarchal authoritarian lout Bloomberg's stupid regulation. It occurred to me that there is significant overlap between the  opponents of central planning and those on the right who denigrate Bloomberg.

But here is the deal, you know how cars get safer every year, and to the extent that inspections still exists, food and drugs aren't adulterated. That is because of central planning. Ditto roads, bridges, and, in the days of yore, public schools.

Nobody in their right minds wants the state to, say, regulate beer or the taste of burgers or the shape of your clothes but by the same token nobody in their right mind wants to let a bunch of deranged maniacs concerned only with profit to decide how safe a vehicle, fireproof a home, or any related etc.

Sure there are the 27% but none of them are, in fact, in their right mind.

Framed

As we all know Mayor Bloomberg is busy fulfilling his role as patriarchal-authoritarian-billionaire-twit of the year. Scott Lemieux responds that the proposal that

  this kind of thing can bring out my inner libertarian.

Here is the thing. Libertarians aren't the only ones to oppose patriarchal, authoritarian bullshit, in the Frankfortian sense. Socialists, Communists, and Democratic Socialist oppose this kind of nonsense. By ceding the ground to libertarians Lemieux is valorizing the insane notion that the left generally wants to rob the world of its freedom to do what it will. That simply isn't true.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone seriously dedicated to the reversal of thirty odd years of neoliberals assault on humanity think that Bloomberg's unilateral imposition of a childishly silly policy that will have little to no effect on obesity or consumption is a good idea.

Most of thought and think the no butter diktat was equally silly. Libertarians are twits and insisting that resiting patriarchal, authoritarian bullshit is their bailiwick is to accept their hopelessly blinkered view of the world in which the struggle for effective democratic solutions to the intractable problems of humanity in a  social situation is a form of nanny statesim, which it isn't.
 

Post Human

One aspect of the world as currently constituted is that machine labor in factories has replaced human and this is making it ever harder to find decently paid work. It is also the case that the US military has embraced the productivity fetish and is constantly trying to use ever more machines to replace humans. There are two obvious advantages for the military.

The first is that with smaller number of actual people involved while a majority of Americans oppose the various freedom bombing forays into the wider world, the direct impact, in terms of honored dead, grows ever smaller.  The second advantage is that at some point in the future war can be waged without people, which is perfectly consistent with the neoliberal project of creating a world designed to protect plutocrats from the rest of us.

The other day I posted this video:



The other day, via War is Boring, came this video of a half-way measure:



  Most of us remember, either from the unintentionally -- I assume -- campy movie or the deeply perverse Heinlein book, the dystopic future where men and women in suits of similar nature fought for earth and the right to vote. It is odd, isn't, how it all the promises of a future made pacific and equitable through the use of technology are proven time and again to be false while the the actual critiques of the policies that led to this neoliberal, neocon nightmare are proven right.

Memories, Memorials, and Poppies

For years now I have been buying a poppy on or around Memorial Day attaching it to the bike and removing one year later. For me, it is a symbol of the First World War in all its murderous fatuousness, silly stupid slaughter, and pointlessness and, consequently, a nearly perfect example of the misrule of the 1%, whether old school aristos or new  model plutocrats.

In that spirit some musical to contemplate the unnecessary misery imposed on most of us by a thoughtless, heedless, and  feckless minority:








Enjoy your weekend before the forces of reaction take it away.

One Other Thing

People often, well not really, ask me how do stay so cheerful, the occasional deranged rant at sociopathic motorists to one side, when things aren't going so well. It is stuff like this:



The whole song makes nothing like sense and yet watching it makes me, in any event, aware of the fact that outside the stupidity of neoliberalism and the deranged antics of the Right more generally that the world is filled with people whose first commitment is to joy and nonsense.

Panic, They Cried.

The recent and entirely predictable failure of a failed and starving state to muster the technological wherewithal to launch a satellite/ICBM creates the opportunity to try and convince the gullible that North Korea will, all facts and evidence to the contrary, build and launch satellite/ICBM or other weapon of mass destruction.The failure was entirely predictable because NK is a failed and starving state and building and launching satellites/ICBMs cost a fortune. NK, it's will to succeed to one side, isn't a player in the we are armed and dangerous category.

On the other hand, the claim that

[o]fficials in Beijing tried to persuade Pyongyang not to go ahead with the launch but failed — either because they lacked the diplomatic skills or didn’t press hard enough. It raises new doubts about whether China can be a serious international player.Needs

Needs rethinking. It is more than slightly plausible that the Chinese don't care a hoot about the fear-filled fantasies of Western militarists, who are ever eager to either build more unnecessary weapons or launch wars doomed to fail. The Chinese might be perfectly happy to let the NK do fiddle about with expensive and doomed attempts to build nuclear arsenals precisely because it works to distract America and others from more pressing problems, like getting our economies in working order. Imagine the enormous economic benefits the Chinese elites and state have gained from the neoliberalization of the world economies.

If we ignored the fictive threats of nuclear NK and Iran and responded to the threat of terrorists in a proportional way, we might all be focused on repealing the neoliberal agenda and creating, not just here but everywhere, an economy based on humanistic ideals and goals.

Balderdash, Nonsense, and Bullshit

As one looks round and about the world as it actually is, one of the more compelling conclusions is that the current system isn't all that hot. Indeed, looking backward at the long history of the present, one might conclude that the violence, both moral and physical,[1] necessary to create the various version of a centralized state aren't out weighed by the current misery and its likely continuation. Indeed, as you and I are not moral cretins, when we consider what is to be done, we conclude that it ought to be something rather different.

Perhaps, as Graeber suggestively suggests, the future might look like a society bound together by mutual respect and material reciprocity, which is really just another way of saying the future is not going to be a neoliberal laboratory for the creation of sociopaths.

On the other hand, if you have no moral center and don't particularly care if the world continues past your next paycheck, which is to say you are David Brooks, you might write of seeking an alternative method of social organization and melioration as a

prevailing service religion [that] underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources into it.

The very idea that improving the world depends on creating a nonviolent, nonhierarchical social solution is impossible because

[h]istory is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering — whether in a country, a family or a person — flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it. 

Leaving aside what Brooks knows about history and historiography, he seems to think that the socio-political order we currently enjoy, and by we he means America, is not only an but the ideal set of social, political , and economic relations and, furthermore, with no evidence at all, he implies that the long strange path to the present is a natural one.

These are both commonplaces of the neoliberal thinkers, whose job it is convince the rest of us that change is impossible because the inhuman and dehumanizing present is culmination of human progress and the ideal expression of humanities essential nature.

This position is, of course, balderdash, nonsense, and bullshit of the highest order. But it does show how Brooks sticks to his chosen profession with a tenacity that reality cannot dim nor possibility mar. On the plus side, given that he is wrong about everything, the efforts of those he belittles might indicate that they are winning.

He is a horrid little man, who like nothing better than to smother the potentially effective alternatives to markets because it pays the rent.



[1] By moral, I mean something like Elias' Civilizing Process.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

begins with a single step. Clearly many of the Right's responses to Trayvon Martin's murder have been repugnant. On the other hand, Paul Krugman's op-ed piece shows one way to use the event to focus energy and attention of ALEC and, ideally, convince the non-crazy among us that the time has come to shut down the neoliberals' privatization of everything in their  relentless attempt to destroy America.

How Does That Work?

From Paul Krugman comes an Alec MaGillis article on hedge fund managers in which a neoliberal economics professor intones, concerning the mild criticism of the men and women who wrecked the economy, that because

it wasn’t just anyone knocking them–it was the president of the United States, notes Eugene Fama, a legendary finance professor at the University of Chicago and Asness’s former mentor. “Lots of [hedge fund managers] started out poor, and made a huge amount of money, and created thousands and thousands of jobs in the process. They’re used to being the American Dream, and now you have the president who looks at them and sneers at them like they’re bad guys.”

How does that work? What jobs did the hedge fund manegers create? One or another of my siblings suggests private cooks, maids, butlers, yoga teachers, and related etc. Recall, on the jobs front, that from Reagan on stock prices rose on the shedding of decently paid jobs and their replacement with machines or shipping of to low wage countries.

Hurrah the hedge fund managers and profit maximizing corporate presidents and boards, they hollowed out the American economy and profited form the semi-slave labor and nonexistent environmental laws and regulations of repressive regimes.

Where'd All The Money Go?

For Sam Stone's kids it was a hole in daddy's arm. For the 99% in the current jobless recovery, it's the hyper rich:

And yet somehow or another Obama is a socialist marxist scum.

Now That's A Recovery

Via we learn that the top 1 percent absorbed 93 percent of the wealth created during the recent "recovery." Let's hear it for expansionary austerity and Neoliberalism more generally.

Neoliberalism Explained

Robert Walser[1] once wrote:

I only know that all the poor people work in the factory, perhaps as a punishment for being so poor.

The consensus is that he was being ironical; the Republicans, conservatives, the Right, and Neoliberals more generally mean it and, consequently, work is the punishment for not having Romney's parents.

[1] About whom more later.