The thirty year long subterranean class warfare of rich and the super-rich against the middle class is entering its final phase – Class Genocide.
Until now, the top 1% has appropriated to itself the benefits of the country’s economic growth, while the middle class stagnated. While making the tax code more regressive, they wealthy have also cut programs that helped people out of poverty and into the middle class. In part they rich were enabled by the American middle classes’ dreams of moving up. Particularly during the booms, entering the top 10% seemed just one stock pick or house flip away for many people, so with a little luck that low-upper bracket could soon be theirs. Since the first government programs cut helped move poor people into the middle class, cutting them did not hurt already middle class Americans. There was always a racial and ethnic component to shutting down entry into the middle class that the politicians subtly played off of.
That was the old class warfare. It unfolded so slowly that for years it just seemed coincidence that the rich always won and the middle class always lost. Even then, the middle class was at least running in place and not losing ground, it just wasn’t gaining. The rich were getting more, but the middle class remained stable and reasonably secure in their ability to remain in the middle class, and they had reasonable confidence that their children and grandchildren would also enjoy middle class status. That is what made it a class – a status that could be maintained for your lifetime and passed along to your descendants.
Now everything that defined the middle class is being dismantled. In America, you are middle class if you have a white collar job requiring a college education, or a union blue collar job, own your own home, are secure in retirement and able to pass along at least a little something to your kids. It’s pretty much what most of us grew up expecting.
With the Ryan budget, and the radical actions Republicans governors are taking in the various states, the GOP is destroying the foundations of middle class security and its ability to ensure that middle class children can become middle class adults. Starting with the land grant colleges of the nineteenth century, public schools, the GI Bills and student aid, the state and federal governments have built the middle class through access to education. When I attended the University of California, a world class education cost $750 a quarter in in-state tuition. My father was the first in his family to attend college and the GI Bill paid for it. I hesitate to think of the state of education and student aid in ten years, when my kids are ready for college, if Paul Ryan has his way.
The Ryan budget put a fear into me, for the very first time in my life, that in retirement I could go broke from medical bills. This is a real fear for those of us on the downside of the baby boom who are not grandfathered into Medicare as we know it. It is also a fear for those in Medicare, or soon to be, because they would be one line of legislation away from being swept into fending for themselves in the insurance market – where insurers will not fall all over themselves to offer good coverage at reasonable prices to eighty-year old diabetic cardiac patients.
It is so much more than the “safety net” that is currently being lost. The continued fallout from the housing bubble/mortgage crisis is going to end the 30 year mortgage for good. Along with the bottomless cup of coffee, the 30 year mortgage is one of America’s great contributions to civilization. The 30 year mortgage exists because of Federal support and regulation. The 30 year mortgage turned America into a nation of homeowners. It also turned every home into a piggy bank where each mortgage payment represented a deposit, and this increasing equity provided an emergency fund, a college fund, retirement savings and the ability to pass something along to the next generation. Think what losing all of that will mean to what we now think of as the middle class.
Without home-ownership, retirement security and college education, what then is left of the middle class?
The effect of all these changes cumulatively ending the middle class as we know it is not an accident. As they say about software – this is not a bug, but a feature. In some of my next posts I will look at why changing the nature of America’s class structure (what we lulled ourselves into thinking was a practically classless society because the middle class seemed to embrace almost everyone) is not a byproduct of what is happening, but the purpose of what they are doing.
The cumulative effect of all of these changes is not simply that millions will be moved out of the middle class, it is the end of the middle class as we have known it all of our lives. There simply will not be a middle class – there will be haves and have not’s. It will not be the America we want or knew.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Being Played in the Great Game
There is a saying among professional gamblers that if you sit down to the table and you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
Every major power has a real, vital national interest in Afghanistan – except the U.S. and NATO – and the rest of them are all playing us for the fool. Afghan history did not begin on Sept. 11 2001. In Victorian times, playing power politics there was known as the Great Game because it played Great Britain, with its colonies in modern Pakistan and India, against Russia with China and Persia all involved, and the game pieces were local actors of unknown loyalties and shadowy motivations. Here are just some of the folks who are playing us:
Pakistan: Pakistan is India’s evil twin. Whereas India is stable, prosperous and has a long democratic tradition, Pakistan is/does not. Since splitting apart at independence in 1948, they have fought four wars -- and to Pakistan, the question is not will there be another, but when. Pakistan’s worst nightmare is an Afghanistan allied with India against them. They want Afghanistan as their client state, not India’s. And their tool for accomplishing this has been the Taliban. Pakistani intelligence helped create and promote the Taliban originally. Their support for the Taliban continued until 9/11, and it is no coincidence that India supported the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.
After 9/11, Pakistan had to choose between the Taliban and its longtime alliance with the U.S. America backed Pakistan in the cold war because India’s non-aligned status was seen as titling towards Russia. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. flooded Pakistan, and especially the Pakistani military, with aid and other goodies. Now they are profiting from their part in the war on terror.
Continued war is in Pakistan’s best interest. Pakistan saw after the Russians withdrew how soon America’s interest in helping them dropped off. The war also keeps Afghanistan so self involved and weak that it could not think of turning to India. And with deep contacts on both sides, Pakistan is able to keep the pot boiling.
China: I’m surprised our troops can’t hear the laughter coming at us all the way from China. We are spending a hundred billion a year making Afghanistan safe for Chinese mineral concessions. Mountains have minerals, and because of the decades of chaos, Afghanistan has the most unprospected, undeveloped mountains in the world. The value of Afghan mineral wealth has been estimated at over a trillion dollars – a fact trotted out to justify our surge, even though the Chinese are the ones profiting from our military venture.
And boy is China snapping it up. In 2007, China paid $3 billion dollars to lock up the largest unexploited copper reserves in the world south of Kabul. Found by Soviet geologists, we chased them out before they could exploit it and now it is part of China’s increasing influence in Central Asia. China is building Afghanistan’s first major railroad – which will connect this mine and future mines back to China, while providing a captive market for Chinese goods. This railroad will connect to a deep water port being built in Pakistan. (Having read this far, you probably won’t be surprised that the Indians are building a deepwater port in Iran and financing transport that would allow Afghan minerals to flow out in a way that bypasses Pakistan).
The Afghans: Let’s put it in macro-economic terms – the civilian Afghan GNP is $16.6 billion. We spend a hundred billion a year on our war there, and war is their biggest cash crop. It dwarfs opium and rug production. And it is income that Afghans wouldn’t want to lose.
I got a great insight into how we are being played by the Afghans by a New York Times piece I almost didn’t read. It was about the problems we are having with security for transport around Afghanistan, which didn’t seem a particularly interesting topic – but it was. Seems that we are spending billions and billions on private Afghan security firms to guard our shipments as they make their way through the country. Those firms have discovered that the most cost effective way to insure safe arrival of their shipments is to pay off the local Taliban not to attack them. Furthermore if the U.S. gives the contract to a different firm, they pay the Taliban to attack those shipments, or they stage the attack themselves with their now unemployed guards. Draw your own conclusions from the fact that President Karzai’s brother owns the largest of these firms.
Afghanistan can’t afford peace. And the newly minted millionaires buying mansions in Kabul, and just-in-case mansions in Abu Dhabi, certainly can’t afford for peace to break out. This explains why Karzai would promote chaos by denouncing the Florida pastor who burned a Koran. Chaos is his friend because it keeps the dollars flowing into Afghanistan.
The U.S. : The war on terror is over. We won. And we won in spite of our best efforts. The war was for the hearts and mind of the young of the Muslim world. The choice we presented to them was between the Mubaraks we were supporting and Osama bin Laden. But now the choice is between Tarir Square and suicide bombing, and we know what they are choosing now. Zawahiri tried for decades to overthrow the Egyptian government, that was his main aim, and he made not a dent. His way – the way of Islamic extremist terror – has been now totally supplanted by something that actually works.
And what of the $100 billion we spend in Afghanistan? We can no longer make that decision in some off-budget dreamland that pretends the money doesn’t come from somewhere. If we are spending that money there, then it is money we are not spending elsewhere. So the question isn’t a black and white "should we be in Afghanistan?", but rather, "what is the best place to spend that $100 billion?" Can we really say that we wouldn’t be more secure spending the hundred billion on alternative energy or education? In every discussion of the budget, and every mention of various cuts to social programs, end your response with “and we’re spending $100 billion in Afghanistan.”
The Most Cost Effective Solution: The best solution I’ve heard is to take what we can and leave the rest. In the Taliban heartland, the Pastun area centered around Kandahar we will never control anything more than the ground we are standing on. We can take any area we want and it will revert to Taliban control the second we leave. That is 40% of the country. Just leave it be. Life there will suck, but it sucks in lots of places in the world, and we don’t send troops. If they set up any terrorist training camps, we destroy them with drones. The rest of the country -- including Kabul, as well as most of the recently discovered mineral wealth -- supports us, out of hatred for the Pashtuns and the Taliban. We should be able to empower the people there with weapons and training to keep the Taliban out.
Every major power has a real, vital national interest in Afghanistan – except the U.S. and NATO – and the rest of them are all playing us for the fool. Afghan history did not begin on Sept. 11 2001. In Victorian times, playing power politics there was known as the Great Game because it played Great Britain, with its colonies in modern Pakistan and India, against Russia with China and Persia all involved, and the game pieces were local actors of unknown loyalties and shadowy motivations. Here are just some of the folks who are playing us:
Pakistan: Pakistan is India’s evil twin. Whereas India is stable, prosperous and has a long democratic tradition, Pakistan is/does not. Since splitting apart at independence in 1948, they have fought four wars -- and to Pakistan, the question is not will there be another, but when. Pakistan’s worst nightmare is an Afghanistan allied with India against them. They want Afghanistan as their client state, not India’s. And their tool for accomplishing this has been the Taliban. Pakistani intelligence helped create and promote the Taliban originally. Their support for the Taliban continued until 9/11, and it is no coincidence that India supported the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.
After 9/11, Pakistan had to choose between the Taliban and its longtime alliance with the U.S. America backed Pakistan in the cold war because India’s non-aligned status was seen as titling towards Russia. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. flooded Pakistan, and especially the Pakistani military, with aid and other goodies. Now they are profiting from their part in the war on terror.
Continued war is in Pakistan’s best interest. Pakistan saw after the Russians withdrew how soon America’s interest in helping them dropped off. The war also keeps Afghanistan so self involved and weak that it could not think of turning to India. And with deep contacts on both sides, Pakistan is able to keep the pot boiling.
China: I’m surprised our troops can’t hear the laughter coming at us all the way from China. We are spending a hundred billion a year making Afghanistan safe for Chinese mineral concessions. Mountains have minerals, and because of the decades of chaos, Afghanistan has the most unprospected, undeveloped mountains in the world. The value of Afghan mineral wealth has been estimated at over a trillion dollars – a fact trotted out to justify our surge, even though the Chinese are the ones profiting from our military venture.
And boy is China snapping it up. In 2007, China paid $3 billion dollars to lock up the largest unexploited copper reserves in the world south of Kabul. Found by Soviet geologists, we chased them out before they could exploit it and now it is part of China’s increasing influence in Central Asia. China is building Afghanistan’s first major railroad – which will connect this mine and future mines back to China, while providing a captive market for Chinese goods. This railroad will connect to a deep water port being built in Pakistan. (Having read this far, you probably won’t be surprised that the Indians are building a deepwater port in Iran and financing transport that would allow Afghan minerals to flow out in a way that bypasses Pakistan).
The Afghans: Let’s put it in macro-economic terms – the civilian Afghan GNP is $16.6 billion. We spend a hundred billion a year on our war there, and war is their biggest cash crop. It dwarfs opium and rug production. And it is income that Afghans wouldn’t want to lose.
I got a great insight into how we are being played by the Afghans by a New York Times piece I almost didn’t read. It was about the problems we are having with security for transport around Afghanistan, which didn’t seem a particularly interesting topic – but it was. Seems that we are spending billions and billions on private Afghan security firms to guard our shipments as they make their way through the country. Those firms have discovered that the most cost effective way to insure safe arrival of their shipments is to pay off the local Taliban not to attack them. Furthermore if the U.S. gives the contract to a different firm, they pay the Taliban to attack those shipments, or they stage the attack themselves with their now unemployed guards. Draw your own conclusions from the fact that President Karzai’s brother owns the largest of these firms.
Afghanistan can’t afford peace. And the newly minted millionaires buying mansions in Kabul, and just-in-case mansions in Abu Dhabi, certainly can’t afford for peace to break out. This explains why Karzai would promote chaos by denouncing the Florida pastor who burned a Koran. Chaos is his friend because it keeps the dollars flowing into Afghanistan.
The U.S. : The war on terror is over. We won. And we won in spite of our best efforts. The war was for the hearts and mind of the young of the Muslim world. The choice we presented to them was between the Mubaraks we were supporting and Osama bin Laden. But now the choice is between Tarir Square and suicide bombing, and we know what they are choosing now. Zawahiri tried for decades to overthrow the Egyptian government, that was his main aim, and he made not a dent. His way – the way of Islamic extremist terror – has been now totally supplanted by something that actually works.
And what of the $100 billion we spend in Afghanistan? We can no longer make that decision in some off-budget dreamland that pretends the money doesn’t come from somewhere. If we are spending that money there, then it is money we are not spending elsewhere. So the question isn’t a black and white "should we be in Afghanistan?", but rather, "what is the best place to spend that $100 billion?" Can we really say that we wouldn’t be more secure spending the hundred billion on alternative energy or education? In every discussion of the budget, and every mention of various cuts to social programs, end your response with “and we’re spending $100 billion in Afghanistan.”
The Most Cost Effective Solution: The best solution I’ve heard is to take what we can and leave the rest. In the Taliban heartland, the Pastun area centered around Kandahar we will never control anything more than the ground we are standing on. We can take any area we want and it will revert to Taliban control the second we leave. That is 40% of the country. Just leave it be. Life there will suck, but it sucks in lots of places in the world, and we don’t send troops. If they set up any terrorist training camps, we destroy them with drones. The rest of the country -- including Kabul, as well as most of the recently discovered mineral wealth -- supports us, out of hatred for the Pashtuns and the Taliban. We should be able to empower the people there with weapons and training to keep the Taliban out.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Correlation is not Causation
Two clocks striking midnight ten seconds apart every day – the first does not cause the other. An incumbent who has so angered his base that he is primaried would be in trouble in general election regardless of the primary challenge. So yes, Jimmy Carter was primaried and lost the general election, and the same happened to Jerry Ford. But does anyone think that had Carter not been primaried he would have beaten Reagan, or that Ford could have been elected after pardoning Nixon? Or even that George Bush Sr. could have beaten Clinton if only he had not been challenged by Buchannan.
Primary challenges are a very different animal than third party candidates. Third party candidates can and do act as spoilers taking votes away from what would otherwise have been a less of two evils. So although there were plenty of other reasons Al Gore lost in 2000, had Ralph Nader not been on the ballot, Gore would have won. That is a provable mathematical fact.
The “primarying Obama will get us President Bachman” argument is the same type of chicken game as the Republicans are playing with the debt ceiling. Threaten the apocalypse and then settle for complete surrender. We are not going to have President Bachman. The policies the Republicans are pushing are anathema to average Americans, and polling proves that. Regardless of whether Obama is the nominee, we will win if we can make a clear contrast to the voters. In fact, we would be better able to make that contrast with a different nominee.
Primarying Obama will be good for the Party and the Eventual Nominee
Without a primary challenge, the news cycle for the next fifteen months will be the many Republican candidates tearing down the Democrats and the administration. Given the Administration’s above it all approach to anything even slightly partisan, expect no effective response. But image a primary challenger out there 24/seven attacking the Republicans and putting forward a coherent Progressive vision. In the 2004 election, while Kerry, Dean, Edwards and the others were all out there bashing Bush, his ratings went into free fall. Bush only recovered when Kerry locked up the nomination and disappeared from public consciousness until the Convention – by which time it was too late.
Primaries build organizations and parties. Had Obama won in New Hampshire and eliminated Clinton and all the others with the first primary he would never have built the nationwide grassroots organization that propelled him to victory. He had to campaign in states that Democrats had written off in the general for years and found surprising strength – with the result that they put the resources into places like North Carolina and Indiana and turned them blue. It was also a time when he found some of the problems in his message and tried to fix them. My opinion is that his campaign advisors assume a level of grassroots activism that they can simply call forth and which is not in fact there. If that is true, we are much better off if we discover that now.
But the most important result of this primary challenge will be the building of a nationwide progressive grassroots movement that will continue on after 2012 regardless of the outcome. If that movement does not nominate its choice in 2012, so be it. But consider what 2013 would look like if Obama where not primaried and lost anyway, we would not have built the infrastructure we’d need to oppose the ruling tea party conservatives. In 2016, our standard bearer would start out as the prohibitive favorite. Remember that the conservative movement we are still fighting came together out of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford in 1976.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
The One Who Primaries Obama Will be the Next Democratic President
During the Seventies, we had two ineffectual presidents unable to deal with the economic and other hard times that confronted them. Both were primaried and both went on to lose the general election. However, their parties had very different fates after those elections.
After Ronald Reagan lost to Gerald Ford, he did not stop campaigning and organizing. Not only did he go on to win the next time, but his 1976 campaign is basis of the Conservative Movement that has dominated American politics ever since. In retrospect, conservatives would surely say that the Regan Revolution and all that followed was worth it to suffer through four years of Carter. Additionally, what most people remember of Gerald Ford is Chevy Chase’s imitation, and no one brands his failures onto the Republican Party.
Even thirty years after Carter’s defeat, we can’t use the word Liberal because the Republicans succeeded in branding him a “Liberal.” Of course, Carter was a moderate at best and actually started the country on the road to de-regulation. But for anyone old enough, his feckless “malaise” is forever mixed up with the word “liberal” and the Democratic Brand.
The question with Obama is, can we afford not to primary him? If Obama continues on his present course and does not show real strength and leadership, he will lose. In losing, his ineffectualness and lack of spine will become that of the Democratic Party and Progressives. The Left will be redefined in terms of Obama’s positions, as the Republicans try to roll back even those small accomplishments. And we will be out of power for another generation.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, a far-sighted scientist can see that the Galactic Empire is crumbling and is to be followed by a thirty-thousand-year-long dark age, but with the right steps, the darkness can be limited to only a thousand years. There is probably no saving an Obama Presidency that stubbornly refuses to save the country and itself. There may even be no way of preventing the Republicans from taking the White House. But conducted properly, a primary challenge now can result in victory: if not in 2012, then in 2016.
Frankly, a 2012 challenge has a better chance of winning than conventional wisdom gives it. The fight for a nomination is about the base and appealing to its parts. At this point, what part of the base has Obama not disappointed and angered? Challenging Obama may be like pushing on a partially opened door.
We saw in 2008 that organizing a primary campaign apart from the built-in support of the established party can create a national movement for change. A successful campaign has to recruit and organize supporters around the country, it must create its own message machine and rapid response team, and it must create donors and fundraise successfully in order to support all of these efforts. Modern technologies make this even easier than it was in the days of Reagan’s 1976 campaign. But, to really succeed, the movement cannot be discarded at the moment of the Inauguration (just ask the poor folks trapped in the tunnel with the Purple tickets).
After Ronald Reagan lost to Gerald Ford, he did not stop campaigning and organizing. Not only did he go on to win the next time, but his 1976 campaign is basis of the Conservative Movement that has dominated American politics ever since. In retrospect, conservatives would surely say that the Regan Revolution and all that followed was worth it to suffer through four years of Carter. Additionally, what most people remember of Gerald Ford is Chevy Chase’s imitation, and no one brands his failures onto the Republican Party.
Even thirty years after Carter’s defeat, we can’t use the word Liberal because the Republicans succeeded in branding him a “Liberal.” Of course, Carter was a moderate at best and actually started the country on the road to de-regulation. But for anyone old enough, his feckless “malaise” is forever mixed up with the word “liberal” and the Democratic Brand.
The question with Obama is, can we afford not to primary him? If Obama continues on his present course and does not show real strength and leadership, he will lose. In losing, his ineffectualness and lack of spine will become that of the Democratic Party and Progressives. The Left will be redefined in terms of Obama’s positions, as the Republicans try to roll back even those small accomplishments. And we will be out of power for another generation.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, a far-sighted scientist can see that the Galactic Empire is crumbling and is to be followed by a thirty-thousand-year-long dark age, but with the right steps, the darkness can be limited to only a thousand years. There is probably no saving an Obama Presidency that stubbornly refuses to save the country and itself. There may even be no way of preventing the Republicans from taking the White House. But conducted properly, a primary challenge now can result in victory: if not in 2012, then in 2016.
Frankly, a 2012 challenge has a better chance of winning than conventional wisdom gives it. The fight for a nomination is about the base and appealing to its parts. At this point, what part of the base has Obama not disappointed and angered? Challenging Obama may be like pushing on a partially opened door.
We saw in 2008 that organizing a primary campaign apart from the built-in support of the established party can create a national movement for change. A successful campaign has to recruit and organize supporters around the country, it must create its own message machine and rapid response team, and it must create donors and fundraise successfully in order to support all of these efforts. Modern technologies make this even easier than it was in the days of Reagan’s 1976 campaign. But, to really succeed, the movement cannot be discarded at the moment of the Inauguration (just ask the poor folks trapped in the tunnel with the Purple tickets).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)