The Nanny Plutocracy

So Bloomberg's ban on 16 oz or greater sugary drinks in certain location and in specific kinds of containers passed. It is, we are assured, an attempt to deal with the obesity crisis in these United States. It seems like an attempt to stop people smoking by limiting the pack size to 10 cigarettes, which is to say silly, a waste of time, and generally a misuse of the state legitimate regulatory function.

Civility

So, I got a Romney fundraiser phone call. I figured I would play along and suggested that while I would vote for the him I had insufficient funds to offer any financial support. In the course of wheedling, or attempting to wheedle, the spandolax out of my wallet, the nice young woman on the phone informed that should we fail to defeat Obama he would "burn this country to the ground."

Obviously, this kind of language isn't an affront to either decency or comity nor yet an example of Romney trying to divide America into those who would vote for him and those who are going to burn the country to the ground, which recent polling suggests divides the country about 50/50. Nope, because if it were it would make mock of all the other bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, the Republicans and the Right more generally are flinging about in their increasing desperate attempt to impose the 19th century on an unwilling 21st.

Untheoretical Slippery Slopes

Over to the NRO's Corner they are all a twitter about religious liberty and threats to it. Meanwhile in the real world spurious claims of religious liberty provide bigots with ammunition to be bigots. For the third year in a row a "Christian" church holds an white only conference and its

founder of the church, Rev. Mel Lewis, complained that this year’s uproar shows a disrespect for religious liberty.

That's right the freedom to practice your religion as you see fit now carries with it the right not to be called a narrow minded bigot. When you think about the state's recent successful trial of Catholic Church officials for child raping and continued investigation of same is, perhaps, a violation of their religious liberty. If pangs of conscience are licit reasons for medical practitioners and pharmacists to refuse provision of legal drugs and procedures, surely the same religious liberty protects the Catholic hierarchy from fulfilling its moral and legal responsibilities to its parishioners.


And that is the problem with the rights misrepresentation of religious liberty, which does not exempt religious institutions from licit laws and regulations. This is an attempt to return to a world in which the church was an independent agent and rival with state for sovereignty. It is, in other words, an attempt by the "social conservatives" to out do the neoliberals, who - after all only want to go back to the 19th century, by returning us to the 18th or possibly the 17th century.

Republicans in Disarray

Flush from his recent victory of the sociopathic robot Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum makes with the wisecracks about Romney's wealth. Newt Gingrich, apparently stung because Romeny's fellow plutocrats spent millions making sure everyone remembers Gingrich's record of double-dealing, personal and professional crapulence and asshatery, had his plutocratic pals put out a movie with this for a trailer



I think it's great that this clowns are decrying wealth and neoliberalism; I await Romney's, who calls their kid Willard?, measured and reasonable response.

What I don't get is how they think they can attack Romney who represents decades of Republican, conservative, and neoliberal policies' successes and woe the crazed hordes they need to win the primaries or how they suddenly pivot back to hating socialism, which mean moderate neoliberalism.

Rhyming History

People often forget the number and kind of fascist regime that rose in the inter-war period. It wasn't just Italy and Germany. The new democracies created by Versailles didn't last long and, indeed, the war really didn't stop in 1918. Fighting in the east, between freikorps and commies, between indigenous fascists and commies, and so on, continued and relatively rapidly fascist movements sprang up from Finland to Portugal and, in many cases, rose to power. Salazar was no more an outlier than Mussolini.

One of the hallmarks of a fascist party is its reliance on brute force. All the fascists had some kind of a paramilitary force, brown  or black shirts for example, on which it relied to beat up opponents and generally stop the mouths of critics. Right now the 3rd largest party in Hungary has this:

Yes that's right a paramilitary force associated with a legitimate, in the sense that it garners votes, political party. Worse still even yet 

[o]n May 14, 2010, Gábor Vona, the chairman of Jobbik, was about to make an appearance at the Hungarian parliament, whose seat is probably the world’s most beautiful parliament building, a domed, neo-Gothic structure protected by bronze lions. Everyone was concerned that Vona would appear dressed in a fascist uniform from the past. As it happened, he showed up in a black suit, to the relief of many in the audience. But shortly before the swearing-in ceremony, the radical right-wing politician threw off his jacket to reveal a vest reminiscent of the uniforms of the Arrow Cross Party. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as “sort of a Nazi outfit.”

 The far right ruling party recently passed legislation that granted it unusual censorship powers and, in general, things look to be going to hell in a handbasket.

Why bring this up? Hungary is a member of the EU and NATO. Right now either or both of those institutions could act to isolate an increasingly undemocratic state in a way that makes it clear that Hungary's future in both or one or the other hinges on a re-commitment to democracy and  rejection of both authoritarianism and its near cousin technocratisme.

What, you wonder, is the likely outcome? Given that the democratic United States and the democratic, kind of, EU are pushing for an expansion of technocratisme and are rejecting democracy, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict nothing consequential.

How Many Ways to Skin a Cat Are There, Any Old How?

Today, it seems, the inclusion of political processes to decide economic matters leads to a market "slide." In the linked article, the Greek Prime Minister Papandreou wants to put both the bailout and the related austerity measures up for a vote and let the people decide their own fate. Naturally enough, transnational finance is aghast. As I mentioned, I have been reading Neoliberal Hegemony in it Dorthee Bohle and Gisela Neunhoeffer provide a nice narrative history of the depoliticization of economic decision making in Poland's late communist regime and early democratic polity. As they make clear, neoliberal economic reformers made common cause with the Communists around the depoliticization of economic policy making, in order to cut market socialism out of the picture.  The theorists of market socialism, clustered around the Solidarity movement, were, consequently, unable to resist the march to neoliberal shlock or shock doctrine. It stands to reason, therefore, that a socialist politician offering the people the opportunity to weigh in on the economy terrifies the "experts" who seek to organize society around a set of economic theories and nostrums that created the problems in the first place.

To be sure, Greece has all manner of political problems that cannot be laid to the feet of the neoliberal consensus. However, the first step in creating a decent polity is bringing politics back in and granting or more precisely recognizing the people's right to rule themselves.

(see also: Johanna Bockman and Gil Eya, "Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism" in American Journal of Sociology , 108/2, 2002, pp. 310-352)

UPDATE

For a similar discussion but by someone famous, in bloggy terms, go here.

UPDATE

John Cassidy, speaking for all the baffled economist types in blather land takes the part for the whole

Greeks, too, are outraged. Six of Papandreou’s party colleagues called on him to resign. One quit the PASOK party. “They must be crazy,” a senior executive at one of Greece’s biggest companies told Reuters. “(T)his is no way to run a country.” With a parliamentary vote of confidence in his government scheduled for Friday, it is quite conceivable that by the end of the week Papandreou will be out office.

I count 7 politicians and businessman, which makes Greece's total population considerable smaller than one might expect. To say nothing of the fact that using democracy to run a democracy would seem to be the ideal way to run a democratic polity; but what do I know not being a senior executive at a biggest company in Greece or elsewhere.

Not happy with reducing Greece to handful of a politicians he than argues that

Faced with two unappetizing choices, Greece seems intent on choosing neither. Papandreou, for reasons of his own, is intent on forcing it to choose. But rather than doing that, it may well get rid of him and put together a new “national unity” government that will give the Greeks what they want: a European bailout and the right to complain and protest about it.

Reasons of his own? Yes on what grounds would a democratically elected official ever have for asking his constituency what they wanted to do? It's not like the Greeks have some kind of a democratic past nor is it the case that they once decided what the best use of huge sums of dough was and thus saved themselves from Persian overlordship. Oh, wait.

UPONELASTDATE:
Matthew Yglesias, whose minimal appreciation of the role of politics in policy making is well documented, comments:

Looks like Greece is now bailing (using the fig leaf of a referendum) from the Euro rescue plan that even had it been implemented wouldn’t really have solved the problem.

And there you have it; using democratic processes to decide the future of democratic polities is a fig leaf not, let's say optimistically, the first step in a returning. sovereignity the people, which may or may not be a good thing but clearly rule by technocrats has been a bad thing.

UPDATE
It seems the Greeks aren't profligate monster after all.

Inside Baseball

Josh Marshall goes all inside basebally to explain Perry's drop in the polls:

But stepping back from all the particulars, it seems to me that a key reason for Perry's burn up on reentry into the atmosphere after his rapid ascent in August is that his key political handlers -- and presumably Perry himself -- simply didn't grasp that the dynamics of national politics are just very different from those of Texas.

Ah brave new media with such people in it. How about this: Rick Perry is a moron and his policy positions are idiotic and moronic. The percentage of American voters willing to risk  their future to another moron with idiotic policies from Texas is vanishingly small. When Perry's policies weren't idiotic they were centrist Democratic policies and the percentage of Republicans willing to vote for centrist Democratic, which is to say workable if insufficient, policies is vanishingly small. As a consequence Perry's popularity dissipated. QED.

Why is it that pundits, new media or old, think that the key to explaining things is to pretend that there is some kind of a circle of seriousness and knowledge that they inhabit while others don't. It'd be one thing if Marshall or any of them were right more than they were wrong but the fact is they mostly don't know what they are talking about. Except Krugman and his political judgements are reliably utopian.  Perry and his advisers thought that the time was right for another Texas moron with idiotic policies; they where wrong.

Obstruction! Obstruction!

Michele Bachmann demands that Obama recall Congress because something must be done about the current crisis.

On of her fellow Tea Party maniacs explains what will be done to deal with the current ciris while

[a]t a town hall meeting yesterday, a Tea Party member urged Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) to bring impeachment proceedings against President Obama in the House. Burgess replied, “It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up…No question about that.” When asked to clarify, Burgess said he wasn’t sure what the proper charged to bring against Obama would be, but reiterated his support for such a move. “We need to tie things up,” he said. “The longer we allow the damage to continue unchecked, the worse things are going to be for us.” Burgess joins numerous House Republicans in their impeachment-saber rattling.

It's not as if the Republicans and not just the Tea Partiers have made not-doing anything a policy its that they are willing to do anything to not do anything. Think additional stimulus is the wrong policy? Impeach Obama. It's just stunning to me that these anti-American bufflaheads can say this and it isn't the lead story in every paper in the country.

Oh and for what it's worth, I would argue that the recall elections here in Wisconsin are different precisely because they are about 1) substantive disagreement on policies 2) result from a heretofore unannounced policy shift and 3) at the very least involved the misuse of the democratic process to limit the public's and their representatives understanding and knowledge of the radical alterations imposed with the aid of ALEC and others from outside the state.

Here In Wisconsin

It's no secret that the Wisconsin GOP is running fake Democrats in the upcoming recall election, although they seem to not be particularly popular. We're I running the Wisconsin Democratic Party, I would push two arguments: one the running of fake candidates means that the Republicans have a great deal of contempt for the people of Wisconsin, thinking them too stupid to differentiate between the real and the fraudulent. And, more importantly, the Republicans are working as the pawns of outside agitators, who hate America.

How Soon He Forgets

Remember when Andrew Sullivan was all a twitter about the "Arab 1848" that his misunderstanding of the past and the use of historical analogy was on a nearly hourly display? Despite the continuation of the tumult his interest, if judged by posting, has dropped to zero. I have no real idea why this is but I would suggest that it is that fact that what is there going on is so complicated and the triumph of the masses, if that's what happen in Tunisia and Egypt and might yet happen elsewhere, so long in coming that he just plain lost interest or, more precisely, he wasn't much interested in the events on the ground as he pretended to be.

In the same way, outside of TPM or TPM-like outlets, despite information concerning the continuing and increasing foolishness and counterproductive nature of the anti-human policies of Scott Walker and his fellow travelers is difficult to find in the national news. Indeed, in TPM and its fellows, we mostly read of popularity versus unpopularity. Why? Again, I have no real idea but would suggest that the groundswell of support for traditional American remedies for the excesses of capitalism embarrasses  excess's most recent defenders: the Neoliberals left right and center wings.

In other words, once the reality underlying some phenomenon or another becomes complicated or runs counter to interests into the memory hole it goes.