Cowboys and Tea Parties

Americans worship the individual. The ideal of the self-sufficient man is embodied in Westerns. In countless films a lone cowboy rides into town to save the townspeople from some menace. Once the job is done, the cowboy then rides back out into the wilderness alone. He has only disdain for the townspeople’s rules and social order.

It occurred to me one day that we should instead revere the townspeople who did the hard work of building a functional society out on the frontier. They figured out how to work together, how to build schools and roads, and how to govern themselves. Being an individual is easy. Building a community is hard.

Modern America is a long way from the frontier, yet many Americans still hold the image of themselves as that lone cowboy, not dependent upon the social order.

Societies exist on a continuum between extreme collectivism and extreme individualism. China is an example of the former, and the U.S. is an example of the latter. Other countries such as European nations and Canada exist somewhere in between those two extremes. They have a much stronger sense of the society-as-a-whole, an entity that is greater than just the sum of its parts.

This worship of the individual is why we don’t have universal health care and all the other social safety nets common in other developed countries. Most Americans think people should be responsible for themselves, not dependent upon the government to help them out.

Last week there was a very interesting blog post in the New York Times by J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, “The Very Angry Tea Party.”

My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

The implicit bargain that many Americans struck with the state institutions supporting modern life is that they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible, and that for all intents and purposes each citizen could continue to believe that she was sovereign over her life; she would, of course, pay taxes, use the roads and schools, receive Medicare and Social Security, but only so long as these could be perceived not as radical dependencies, but simply as the conditions for leading an autonomous and self-sufficient life. Recent events have left that bargain in tatters.

…Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions.

…This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence.

In politics, the idea of divorce is the idea of revolution. The Tea Party rhetoric of taking back the country is no accident: since they repudiate the conditions of dependency that have made their and our lives possible, they can only imagine freedom as a new beginning, starting from scratch. About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality. The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.

Socialized Risk, Privatized Reward

William Cohan, in his New York Times blog makes the same connection I did in my blog entry "Time For a Progressive Leader" below, and in particular the destructive effects of the structure of corporations. No personal liability, no concerns: "The problem is that the corporate veil protects the decision makers from the consequences of their decisions and, accordingly, they are encouraged to take asymmetrical risks — huge paydays for them if everything works out; huge consequences for us if they don’t."

What these two disasters — one financial, the other environmental — prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the right incentives no longer exist to get corporate executives to do what they should want to do, and what they must do, to prevent such calamities from happening. The “corporation,” as a legal entity, is very good at attracting capital, providing jobs, maintaining a focus on profitability, creating wealth for the people who work there (especially at the top). It is also very good at shielding executives and boards of directors from liability for their poor own decision-making.

What these two crises reveal is that some corporations and their leaders aren’t very good at making decisions that take full account of the risks they and their companies are taking. It is a truism that human beings do what they are rewarded to do. But the corporate structure these days rewards bad behavior. The problem is that the corporate veil protects the decision makers from the consequences of their decisions and, accordingly, they are encouraged to take asymmetrical risks — huge paydays for them if everything works out; huge consequences for us if they don’t. As Senator Christopher Dodd correctly said in April 2008, during the first Senate hearing about the unfolding financial crisis, “We’ve socialized risk and we’ve privatized reward.”

Unfortunately, the financial reform legislation that Senator Dodd and his colleagues are working so hard on to make law does nothing to change that dynamic. Nowhere in the approximately 1,500 pages of the proposed bill is there anything about making Wall Street executives financially and legally liable for their decisions, as they once were when Wall Street was a series of private partnerships and a partner’s entire net worth was on the line every day. Talk about accountability! But that ethic was lost 40 years ago when Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette went public and the rest of Wall Street followed soon thereafter.

As a result, our financial crises come fast and furious these days, since Wall Street bankers and traders get rewarded for selling, and generating revenue, not for worrying about what they create. The time has come for actions to have consequences. You can be sure that if Jimmy Cayne, the former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns, or Dick Fuld, the former C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, had their entire net-worth on the line every day instead of being able to gamble with the house’s money, they would have been much more focused on the risks their firms were taking.

Time for a Progressive Leader

Last Thursday I watched Rachel Maddow’s show (she has gotten more serious and watchable lately). She has been doing some interesting and detailed coverage of the BP oil spill diaster. This night she commented how the 1989 Valdez accident didn’t break ExxonMobil—in fact in 2009 Exxon was the most profitable company ever. In 2009 the 5 most profitable countries in the world were all oil companies.

Eighteen months after the disaster the financial industry created they are back to staggeringly huge profits and bonuses.

Just as the bankers cared nothing about ordinary people and their retirement accounts and mortgages, thinking only of their profits, so the oil companies care nothing about safety or the environment but only about their profits.

Is this a connection that could be made in people’s minds, of the unthinking impersonal nature of the corporate business model that is incredibly destructive? This seems to me a perfect time for a progressive leader to emerge who could speak of a new way, a new model that has humanity as its central focus, not profit. Why are all the loudest voices the regressive teapartiers?
The next day (6/4/10) I read Tom Toles' blog and he made the same connection:

So Eric Holder has announced both civil and CRIMINAL investigations regarding the oil spill. They'll be looking into FALSE STATEMENTS! CONSPIRACY! These things are apparently ILLEGAL NOW! Criminally so! So if you are picturing a crazed cartoonist perched atop a bookshelf (and you should be) ready to pounce on why these same things are “perfectly legal” when done by the financial sector, well here I go.

The pipeline of crude that Wall Street built ran right through America’s family room. Newly jobless mom and dad staggered out, covered in goo, just in time to watch their house slide into foreclosure. The wizards of finance didn’t even have the wherewithal to try a top kill or a junk shot or siphon hose or robot sub. THEIR top hats came off their heads and were held out directly to the government. But haven’t they paid their debt back? AS IF! Oil companies are expected to CLEAN UP and PAY DAMAGES. How many jobs were lost in the financial meltdown? Businesses ruined? Families devastated? Oh, but profits are BACK at the BANKS! Time for some BONUSES!

Don’t TELL me no laws were broken. I say it’s time for some prosecutorial work that is one-tenth as creative as the financial instruments the wizards devised.

Frank Rich made the same connection in his New York Times column a couple of days later, “Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even.”

Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Given Toyota’s recent game of Russian roulette with Americans’ safety and Anthem Blue Cross’s unconscionable insurance-rate increases in California, Obama shouldn’t have any problem riveting the country’s attention to this sorry saga. He has the field to himself, thanks to a political opposition whose hottest new star, Rand Paul, and most beloved gulf-state governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, both leapt to BP’s defense right after the rig exploded…

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

Obama is never going to make that pivot point. We need someone else to be that progressive leader.

Obama administration continuing to issue drilling permits

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is NOT halting off-shore oil drilling, that not only is it still issuing permits, some of the permits are for even deeper wells than the one now gushing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling
new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental
waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits
for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted,
according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20
explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental
waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of
which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before
it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the
Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed
to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the
agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.

...these waivers have been especially troublesome to environmentalists
because they were granted through a special legal provision that is supposed to
be limited to projects that present minimal or no risk to the environment.

At least six of the drilling projects that have been given waivers in
the past four weeks are for waters that are deeper — and therefore more
difficult and dangerous — than where Deepwater Horizon was operating. While that
rig, which was drilling at a depth just shy of 5,000 feet, was classified as a
deep-water operation, many of the wells in the six projects are classified as
“ultra” deep water, including four new wells at over 9,100 feet.

The only political issue that counts

I believe the only political issue that counts is removing money from elections. Until our elected officials are free from the need to solicit bribes—that is, campaign contributions—our country’s policies are going to be skewed towards the interests of large business. The interest of the average American will not count.

Two articles in today’s New York Times made the connection between Congress and business explicit.

In “Debit Fee Cut is Rare Loss for Big Banks,” about an amendment by Senator Richard Durbin to financial legislation that would regulate fees paid by retailers to banks for the use of debit cards, “Lobbyists for the wounded but formidable banking industry made clear to some senators that this decision would affect future campaign donations, according to people who participated in those conversations.” In other words, vote in favor of this amendment at your peril.

The other article describes President Obama’s speech on Friday about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry.”

Mr. Obama reiterated that he intended to break up the beleaguered federal Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore drilling, “so that the part of the agency which permits oil and gas drilling and collects royalties will be separate from the part of the agency in charge of inspecting oil rigs and platforms and enforcing the law.” That way, Mr. Obama said, “there’s no conflict of interest, real or perceived.”

David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration, said that Mr. Obama was trying to walk a fine line between capitalizing on populist anger over the oil spill and alienating the business community, which he needs for his jobs agenda.

“I think one of the risks associated with his rhetoric on the spill is that it hardens the divide between the Democratic Party and the business community,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “And that’s something that while it seems to be in the spirit of the moment now, could have serious ramifications come election time.”

That, he said, could result in money from corporate America going to the Republican Party.

For some reason the conservative Washington Post editorial page has allowed Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, to publish a weekly op-ed column. Last week she wrote about this issue, and about another bill sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin which would radically change our electoral system. "How to turn Congress Inc. back to just Congress."

What is the biggest scandal of 2010 so far?

Allegations of fraudulent misrepresentation from Goldman Sachs? An oil spill that poses a threat to our environment and economy for generations? Mining operators freely ignoring safety violations and treating workers as disposable?

Each of these is bad. But perhaps the biggest political scandal is the one that aids and abets these others -- the pay-to-play system that buys up Congress, pollutes our political system with special-interest cash and deep-sixes the kind of bold reform agenda that we voted for and need.

The health-care industry has contributed more than $200 million to congressional candidates in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Is it any wonder that there was no public option in the final bill, or that Medicare isn't able to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors the same way the Veterans Administration does for veterans?
…
This legislation, the Fair Elections Now Act, would sever ties between big-money campaign contributors and members of Congress, who, in the Senate, must raise an average of $27,000 every week they are in office in order to run competitive races. The bill would bar participating congressional candidates from accepting contributions larger than $100 and allow them to run honest campaigns with a blend of small donations and public matching funds.

Sponsored by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill has 18 Senate co-sponsors (12 of whom signed on since the Citizens United decision) and 149 bipartisan cosponsors in the House. Activists are hopeful there will be a House vote as soon as this summer, and Durbin reportedly will push for the Senate to take it up after the House does.

Fighting for this bill is good policy and good politics. A recent Greenberg/MarkMcKinnon found that voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a 2-1 margin, 62 percent to 31 percent. Independents support it 67 percent to 30 percent. Is there a candidate in the country who wouldn't gain votes by saying, “I want a political system in which someone who doesn't take more than $100 from anybody can run a competitive race for Congress. I want a political process that makes Congress listen to their constituents and allows them to ignore the lobbyists with fat checks in hand”?

Tom Toles: the Difference between Liberals and Conservatives

Not only is Tom Toles a brilliant editorial cartoonist, he is an intriguing and funny writer. He has started a blog to accompany his daily cartoons on the Washington Post website, and today he had a wonderful statement about the difference between liberals and conservatives:

Everybody thinks I'm a liberal and I don't argue the point, but here's what the term means to me and always has. A liberal is someone who looks at a problem and is willing to consider trying a solution other than traditional ones. There. Can we all be liberal now?

And what of conservatism? It has become an irreconcilable pairing of the longing for past forms of Americana and devotion to the free market, which is even more ruthless in destroying those beloved forms than liberals are. Throw in pretending to want to cut spending, but habitually not proposing specific things to cut. So, can we all stop pretending to be conservative now?

No? Not until liberals are willing to check back on their efforts and see what actually works and readdress what doesn't? Okay, it's a deal! That was pretty easy, now wasn't it?

I wrote a column a little over a year ago discussing the difference between liberals and conservatives; I've copied it here.

The Giving Spirit (published Dec. 23, 2008)

Christmas is known as the “season of giving.” While pondering the difference between liberals and conservatives recently it occurred to me that perhaps one way to look at the difference is in terms of giving. I think this is the motivation of liberal philosophy: To give. To give opportunity to all people. To give all people a decent life.

If you look up the two words in the dictionary, besides their political meaning they have other meanings; “liberal” means “given freely or abundantly, generous” and “characterized by willingness to give in large amounts: a liberal portion” while “conservative” means “restrained” and “cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.”

Just to be clear from the start: this doesn’t mean I think people who are politically conservative are personally ungenerous. This is manifestly untrue in my experience.

Some conservatives might point to studies that “show” conservatives are more personally generous than liberals, but a close look at these studies demonstrate that it is religion that makes the difference in giving, not political beliefs. Religious people give more to charity, and religious liberals give as much as religious conservatives.

What I mean is that liberalism has a more generous outlook towards sharing the fruits of freedom and prosperity.

Liberals have pushed for the inclusion of everyone, the extension of freedom to all, equality of rights for all. One hundred and fifty years ago liberals—at the time their party was called Republican—fought for the rights of people of color. One hundred years ago liberals fought for the rights of women. Sixty years ago liberals fought again to give equal rights to black people. Now liberals are fighting for the equal treatment of homosexuals.

Conservatives have resisted every one of these fights for freedom. A conservative who is a strict constructionist would, I guess, want to restrict voting to wealthy white men again.

Liberals want to broaden the number of people sharing in the prosperity of our nation. Liberals have promoted such innovations as the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, and Social Security which helped to create the middle-class. Liberals have supported the labor unions, which were a major component of the great American prosperous decades of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Conservatives have fought every one of these tooth and nail. Do you remember the bitter struggle to get the Republican Congress to raise the minimum wage during the booming 1990s? If you’ve forgotten the trade-busting tactics of conservative hero Ronald Reagan, watch a film by Barbara Kopple, “American Dream,” a documentary about the strike at a Hormel meat-packing plant in the mid-1980s.

Liberals advocate giving everyone an equal opportunity. Liberals have created programs such as Head Start, free school lunches, and welfare to help the poor better their children’s lives. They’ve created mandates for such things as handicap access to make sure no one is left out of participating in life.

Once again, conservatives hate these programs. Remember Reagan suggesting the school lunch program could save money by labeling ketchup a vegetable? Or describing the welfare queen with her Cadillac?

Liberals want to give everyone the right to express themselves; they are tolerant of others. This is why the great urban centers of our country are far more liberal than the rural areas, because when you live around millions of people you have to learn to get along with people who are different.

If you spend an hour listening to conservative talk radio or Fox television, you will become acutely aware of the extreme lack of tolerance on the part of today’s conservatives for any point of view other than their own.

Maybe most important, liberals offer hope for a better future. Liberals are also called progressives because they believe in progress, evolution, improvement, change for the better.

I’ll quote from an authoritative source—William F. Buckley (from his book Up From Liberalism)—for what conservatives believe: “Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.”

What a dismal philosophy! All the good times are passed and gone, to quote the old folk song. What a repudiation of the natural world, where all is growth—even death and decay is growth in another form. I can’t imagine not believing that the human race continues to grow as it progresses through time, that we learn and evolve in our cultural and psychological expressions (not to mention our technology), that we have great unimagined experiences ahead of us every bit as important as any in the past, and that we have fantastic adventures lying in store for us as the human race learns to live together on this small planet.

Sure liberals have made mistakes. Sure some of their programs have had unintended consequences, such as welfare contributing to the breakdown of the black family, or efforts to promote tolerance devolving into political correctness. But…….the reason liberals are called “bleeding-hearts” is because they have a heart for giving.

Reduce the Federal Deficit by Cutting the Military Budget

I can't believe it but someone in the federal government actually has the guts to discuss cutting the military budget! Not surprisingly, that brave someone is Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Frank has put together his own commission to recommend steps to reduce the federal deficit, and the group will look at specific ways to cut military spending. Frank estimates that $100 billion a year could be trimmed easily.

Have you ever looked at graphs of where your federal tax dollars go? It is astonishing how little money goes to departments such as Education or Health and Human Services, and how much goes to the military. Most information you see about the federal budget includes the moneys spent on Social Security and Medicare which is completely misleading; these are in actuality separate from the federal budget, completely financed through payroll taxes.

The War Resisters League has a pie chart that will shock you: according to their calculations, 54% of our tax dollars go to military spending, both past and present.

‘Current military’ spending amounts to $965 billion (2009 budget), which includes Dept. of Defense ($653 billion), the military portion from other departments such as the nuclear weapons program of the Department of Energy ($150 billion), and an additional $162 billion to supplement the "misleading and vast underestimate" for the ‘war on terror’ of only $38 billion. ‘Past military’ represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt. [If the government does not have enough money to finance a war (or spending for its hefty military budgets), they borrow through loans, savings bonds, and so forth. This borrowing (done heavily during World War II and the Vietnam War) comes back in later years as ‘hidden’ military spending through interest payments on the national debt.

The story about Rep. Frank's commission was reported by Dan Froomkin in the Huffington Post, "Deficit Group formed by Barney Frank Looks Where Others Dare Not—At Defense Budget":

Defense cuts seems to be politically off-limits these days, but the group convened by the outspoken liberal congressman from Massachusetts shares a belief that America is "overextended and overcommitted" and that there should be a "substantial reduction in the reach of American military commitments," Frank told HuffPost.

He expects the group to propose reducing the number of overseas bases, especially in the rich countries of Western Europe and Japan. "There's a big debate right now about where 3,000 Marines in Okinawa should go. My suggestion is Nebraska," he said. And he expects it will propose cutting weapons systems that don't meet any plausible need.. "No matter how good a weapon is technically, we shouldn't buy it unless it has an enemy," he said.

Frank despairs that the deficit-reduction debate plays out in Washington as if there are only two choices: raise taxes or cut entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare.

Even President Obama's proposed freeze on discretionary spending explicitly rules out any defense cuts, which Frank describes as "my biggest difference" with the president since he came into office.

...[S]pending has increased completely out of proportion with the need, he said. "During the Cold War, 26 percent of military spending in the world was American; now it's 41 percent. So we have fewer enemies and we're spending more money."

The key to defense budget cutting, Frank said, is to attack the notion that the U.S. military needs to be everywhere in the world militarily. "If you let them insist that there is a need for worldwide military engagement, we will be at a disadvantage when we fight the specific fights" to cut programs, he said.

Once you drop that notion, he said, "I believe we would save over $100 billion a year over what's been proposed."

The F-35 fighter program alone may end up costing $338 billion or more. And according to author Chalmers Johnson, the U.S. military currently spends as much as $250 billion a year maintaining approximately 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories.

Frank is particularly critical of the proposed missile defense shield in Eastern Europe -- a Bush idea that Obama has adopted. "Defending Poland, the Czech Republic and I think it's Bulgaria against Iranian missile attack? I think what happened is the software from a video game escaped" and got into the Pentagon's computers, he said.