Current State Policies Explained

As near as I can figure, things are getting worse instead of better and, it would seem, no one is willing t admit that the past 30 years of Neoliberal anti-humanism is to blame. Indeed, it's clearer every day that the response is to turn the pencil sharpener yet again, as it were:

Bug Me Not

Last night's supper, or plate #3 at Ish Kabbible's Smoke Shack and Grill, wood roasted pork tenderloin and potatoes, tomato and motz with fresh basil and lemon, side of butter poached pearl onions with rocket.

Had I but known, however, that I should be economizing for the return to the the 19th century, I would have eaten:

Menu
Slug soup.
Boiled Cod with Snail Sauce.

Wasp Grubs fried in the Comb.
Moths sautéed in Butter.
Braized Beef with Caterpillars.
New Carrots with Wireworm Sauce.

Gooseberry Cream with Sawflies.
Devilled Chafer Grubs.
Stag Beetle Larvae on Toast.

Speaking of Baffling

In this week's The New Yorker there is a long account of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. It was, if a bit hagiographic, filled with all manner of details and etc. It turns out that there are all manner of questions about the author, Nicolas Schmidle, the story's content and sourcing. The New Yorker really needs to clear this up.

It's a Puzzle

 A few days ago, John Quiggin argued for increasing taxes on the rich.  Matthew Yglesias responded by insisting that

a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Today, among other things, Henry Farrell points out that this is nonsense. Yglesias, or someone claiming to be him, shows up in the comments and argues:

Apologies if you feel I impugned the motives of anyone in regard to inequality. Let me simply restate my hypothesis that few tenured professors at reputable Anglophone universities actually envy the lives of CEOs earning above the “top one percent” threshold. Perhaps that hypothesis is false. But if my hypothesis is true, I think it complicates the issue of inequality somewhat beyond the terms in which Quiggin presented it.

In the space of a few short sentences he changes an observation, class resentment drives a lot of online political etc, to a theory which, if true, complicates discussions  of inequality.  Leaving aside that there needs to be some kind of an argument about how non-envy driven resentment based tax policies complicates inequality, how is possible that an initial factual claim is really a theory?

Baffling. What is clear, however, is that it is becoming harder and harder for the spokesmodels for "left neoliberalism" to keep their stories straight.

Update:
From the comments over to CT from Yglesias, or someone pretending to be him:

I also think that in a relatively affluent society it makes sense to take a somewhat broader view of quality of life—and thus of inequality in quality of life—than would be suggested by a narrow focus on cash income. This is why the fact that many people who earn substantially less than CEOs do not in fact envy the lives of CEOs is relevant.

This is just word salad.  The issue under consideration is quality of life, i.e., the poor today are better off, in the sense of having cell phones and ac, than the rich of the 1920s. This kind of an argument, which has been around, if not for ever, at least since William Graham Sumner, ignores the fact, and fact it is, that inequalities in wealth translates into political inequality.  This fact, in turn, means that the benefits the next generation of have-nots and almost-haves will be worse of than this generations. Furthermore, whatever is meant by "quality of life" it's something, in any kind of a capitalist society, requires  "cash income." So fine, provide everyone with a salary and subsidized house equal to that of his imaginary non-envious, CEO-resenting and consequently tax-increasing demanding professors without taking some of the "cash income" from the unenvied CEOs.

What, exactly, does he mean by "envy the lives"? Is he referring to the light work load? the long vacations? the endless homes? or the mind-numbing boredom of being able to whatever you'd like at any given day or week? Does he mean that some people live lives they find perfectly satisfying? Of course they do. What this has to do with increasing the taxes on the wealthy as a means of paying for civilization and, whatismore, doing something to decrease the political power that comes with excessive wealth escapes me entirely.

When is a Tax Cut Too Much For a Republican?

When it helps the poor. Iowa's Republican gov, vetoees a a tax decrease for the working class, while insisting on one for corporations that would decrease revenue 4 times as much, at least in part because of the revenue lost.

Those of you out there who were under the impression that the GOP at the national, region, or state level actually gave a hoot about taxes, as opposed to catering to the rich and capital more generally, might want to reconsider that particular position.

WWI: Origins and Causes

Around 1912 General Friedrich von Bernhardi penned a little ditty called The Next War in it he argued, among other things, that he

must first of all examine the aspirations for peace, which seem to dominate our age and threaten to poison the soul of the German people, according to their true moral significance. [He] must try t prove that war is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation find the highest expression of strength and vitality.

 It's easy, if you ignore what actually happened, to argue that things in the past happened because of impersonal forces and the like. When, in fact, it happened because a sufficiently powerful group of people thought that what they were about to do, start a war say, was in the world's best interests.

A Crucial Difference

Why did Obama "cave" when Clinton didn't? From an article getting quite a bit of attention, although not -- apparently -- this paragraph:

THE MOST CRUCIAL difference between Clinton’s debt limit battle and the current crisis is that, in 1996, the Republicans were bluffing. No Republican seriously considered defaulting on the debt to be a viable option. “It was essentially unthinkable,”Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton, told me. “There was nobody in the Congress who really contemplated forcing a default.” Larry Haas, communications director for the OMB from 1994 to 1997, agreed. “Everybody in the White House and on Capitol Hill knew that the conflict had to end at some point,” Hass told me. 

Then again, maybe the Tea Partiers were just bluffing.

Here In Wisconsin

On page A5 of today's Wisconsin State Journal there is brief mention of some possible shenanigans involving various unnamed etc in the upcoming recall elections. It's not clear who or what or if anything exactly happened. Here is what really went on:

Updated: August 1, 2011, 4:40PM
Is the Koch-backed conservative group Americans For Prosperity up to no good in the Wisconsin state Senate recalls?
As Politico reports, mailers have now turned up from Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin, addressed to voters in two of the Republican-held recall districts, where the elections will be held on August 9. The mailers ask recipients to fill out an absentee ballot application, and send it in -- by August 11, after Election Day for the majority of these races.

Wisconsin's independent voice, indeed. And, for what it's worth, I searched for the story on the WSJ's site and couldn't find it, which isn't to say it can't be found just that after searching for verbatim sentences, article title, and browsing the day's news I failed to find it. Found something, after 6 pages of browsing:

Voters across Wisconsin are receiving misleading information about the dates of upcoming recall elections.
Absentee voter applications sent by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity tell voters to return the mailing after the Aug. 9 recall elections targeting Republican Sens. Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Rob Cowles of Allouez.
And the Democratic National Committee has been placing calls giving the wrong date for the recall election against Republican Sen. Dan Kapanke of La Crosse.
Wisconsin Government Accountability Board spokesman Reid Magney says DNC officials were contacted about the calls with the wrong date and they told election officials the calls would stop.
The GAB is also urging voters who want to cast absentee ballots to not rely on mailings but instead to contact their local election official.

And now a transcription for the actual morning  paper:

State election watchdogs have seen absentee ballots applications supposedly being distributed to voters in upcoming recalls, containing errors such as incorrect addresses and dates, Government Accountability Board officials said Monday.
  Kevin Kennedy, Wisconsin's chief elections officer, said it is legal for groups and political parties to produce and distribute absentee ballot applications, but voters should not rely on them.
 "If you need or want to vote absentee, contact your municipal cleark directly and request a ballot," Kennedy said.
 Kennedy said if the address on the absentee ballot application mailer or envelope is incorrect , it could go to the wrong place and ultimately could go uncounted.
 There have been cases where political groups try to influence outcomes by confusing voters with absentee ballots.  Kennedy said there has been confusion between the recall elections in Senate districts, 2, 8, 10, 14, 18, and 32 on Aug. 9 and those in districts 12 and 22 on Aug. 16.
  The board has received reports that some automated telephone calls and telephone polls in recent days contained incorrect election dates.

Some difference eh? Also, too misaddressed mail goes to the right address, somehow or another?

Image of article:

UPDATE: In today's WSJ on the front page there was a long AP article that concluded that both sides do it.

Matt Damon Says Glibbertarians Don't Understand Reality

On Occupation as Calling:



He dropped the ball on the 10% figure. Says who? Measured how? Percentages in other  professions, etc.

Jonah Goldberg Still Wrong

He writes an impassioned screed about how no one is calling out the characterization of the Tea Party and Republicans more generally as terrorists and hostage takers is evidence of liberal bias. TPM, which is a biased liberal media outlet, publishes a long piece making the very point that lots of people, who complained re Giffords, are using wholly "uncivil" discourse.

A Quick Point

One reason that has become so difficult to raise taxes is that neoliberals posing as Progressives make this kind of arugment:

That’s not to say we need to “soak the professors” rather than “soak the rich.” Taxing the consumption of high-rollers and redistributing it to the less fortunate is a great idea. But a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Here the desire to tax the wealth is represented as class warfare. The obvious response:

Taxation isn’t a matter of rewards and punishments. It’s a matter of paying for the public obligations a govt takes on by collecting money from the members of society. The reasonable way to go about this is in the manner that least disturbs the ability of those individuals to go about their lives, at the very least to go about their lives in a way that leaves them capable fo contributing next year at tax time. We don’t tax the rich members of society at higher rates than the poor because we imagine that they are sinners in need of punishment. We tax the poor at lower rates because we don’t want the govt to take from them what they need to survive and thrive. We could tax people who earn $1,000,000 a year at 90%, and they and their families would do fine, would have food and shelter and clothing and health insurance, and even amusement, in abundance, and they would still be doing just as well next year and able to pay just as much in taxes. Take 90% from someone who earns $25,000, take almost any % from them, and you’re going to starve them. They won’t be able to pay taxes next year if they go quietly with this arrangement, because they will be dead of starvation or exposure, and there will be war if they don’t go quietly

Small wonder, then, that tax increases are off the table when we have to rely on some guy on the internet to make the argument alleged progressives refuse to make.

Substance Not Process

A fair reading of the new debt ceiling/spending cut "deal," as of right now unpassed, Is that it's not good for what ails us  and, more importantly, appears to be a pretty important abdication of the state's role in the post-WWII era. 

Take the threatened defense cuts, for example, the left has been calling for these ever since Reagan turned us into military-industrial complex with a state attached; however, the idea has always been to redirect the spending into productive or socially useful, infrastructure, research, etc, or necessary, e.g., education, welfare, medicine, acts and transactions. Across the board cuts in defense spending will lead to a  loss of jobs in both the explicit defense industry, factories, support services and other contractors[1], as well as those dependent on these  now unemployed people. How this can be anything other than bad is beyond me. What's worse is that lots of these workers make a decent wage, a janitor, for example, working in the Pentagon or for a military contractor is making more than a janitor at Macy, although both are underpaid.  So this is yet another blow against decent paying jobs and etc.

I have no idea what the people engaged in crafting this deal were thinking[2];  but I am leaning toward hypnotized by toads fed up with wetlands destruction striking a blow for their amphibian brothers.


[1] I know,  I know, but lots of people have jobs not only creating fighter planes and bombs and what not but also logistics and food.

[2] And I am sick of the ill-informed attempts to explain the negotiating process all of which proceed from zero actual information and rely on various forms of tea-leaf reading criticism, which, particularly on the left, which rely on some mixutre of: Obama got rolled, Obama's a coward, Obama's a neocon