New Analysis Shows Clinton Took Bulk Of Economically Productive Counties - Trumpies Shouldn't Count On Jobs

"In brief, the white working class rather consistently puts a gun to its (as well as our) head. As an ethnic class, it's economically irrational. "Trump Turning to Ultrawealthy to Steer Economic Policy," screams an above-the-fold NYT headline this morning — an act as predictable any other Trumpian con. Trickle-down conservative elitism has been hustled as a poor man's populism for decades, with predictably ruinous effect. And the suckers took the bait again."- P.M. Carpenter, on smirkingchimp. com

 

Newly released findings assembled by the Brookings Institution show that Hillary Clinton captured 500 U.S. counties that delivered 64 percent of the GDP over the past year. By contrast, Trump took  2,600 counties but all these in concert delivered barely 36 percent of similar economic activity. The takeaway is that Clinton won every large size economic county in the nation. This is unprecedented in the era of modern economic statistics for a losing candidate.

According to a Denver Post account of the anomaly (Nov. 26, p. 15A) "it has not been the case that the counties Clinton won have grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country. Rather they represent the same share of the economy they did in 2000."

But compared with Gore then, Hillary Clinton "was much more successful in winning over the most successful counties in a geographically unbalanced economy."

The Brooking analysis reported in the Post found that "counties with higher GDP per capita were more likely to vote for Clinton over Trump, as were counties with higher population densities."

Meanwhile, counties with higher shares of manufacturing employment were more likely to vote for Trump - as we saw in the case of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. According to Mark Muro, the policy director for the Brookings Metro program:

"This is a picture of a very polarized and increasingly concentrated economy with the Democratic base aligning more to the more concentrated modern economy, but a lot of votes and anger in the rest of the country."

The seething anger and sense of grievance was perhaps underestimated by those of us in the "blue states" but The Economist put it in perspective a year ago (Dec. 5, 2015, p. 30)::

"The anxiety Trump supporters betray by looking for scapegoats says most, of course, about themselves. Typically members of the white lower middle class, they are at once jealous of the small privileges that distinguish them from the toilers below, and bitterly resentful of the faraway government that provides their Social Security, VA care and Medicare.

Remonstrating in hard times, they are the "radical centre" in academic jargon, who turned out before for George Wallace, a populist southern Democrat who ran for President four times in the 1960s and 70s."

The article then identifies the iconic Trump supporter of this "radical center" with a character  from a John Updike novel named Rabbit Angstrom "from whose flabby mouth dripped endless expressions of impotence, anger and glum humor...having retired to Florida to nurse his disappointment".

Interestingly, this fits perfectly the mold of alienated blue collar worker described by Thomas Frank in his 'What's The Matter With Kansas?' , also pointing out how and why the Democrats began looking past the working class and its interests to focus on the shrinking middle class alone.  If any one major error of the Dems could be named, this was it.

Not everyone agrees, such as Christian Rightist NY Times scribe Russ Douthat, who I've pilloried before. He proposed in a recent column ('Can The Democrats Move To The Right?) that  the Dems lost the election because they were too far left on too many issues. His solution?  The party needs to move back toward the Right as it did in the good ol' days of the DLC and Clinton administration.

Thomas Frank's point as well as others (Michael Tomasky, American Prospect 'Dem's Fightin' Words') is this never works because working class folk will always veer to the real Right party - if they do put moralistic and other issues over their own economic self interest, as they so often do.

Douthat's prescription of moralistic distraction plays right into this template, warning the Dems spent overly much time defending Transgender restrooms and not enough on moral standards the working class seeks. He further writes:

"Without backing away from their support for same-sex marriage and legal abortion, leading Democratic politicians could talk more favorably about moral and religious pluralism, and offer reassurances to people who feel themselves to be dissenters from a very novel cultural regime.

Democrats could also talk anew about the virtues of earned benefits, about programs that help people who help themselves, about moving people from welfare back to work. "

The trouble is that none of this will work for the Dems, just as Trump's "make America great again" won't. As the Brookings study observes, "manufacturers have grown substantially more productive in recent years, meaning they won't be adding millions of workers- even if Trump pursues major changes in trade policy".

In other words, the unemployed factory workers who voted for Trump basically voted for a pig in the poke.  The cows have already escaped the barn and there's no way to get them back in no matter how much bluster and bombast Trump displays in his tweets. Productivity dependent manufacturers who are now content with more automated processes, robots etc. are simply not going to hire back workers for whom they have to cough up benefits.  As for the Carrier (United Technologies) deal, that was a farce purchased with $700m worth of state subsidized corporate welfare. Is The Donald really going to try to replicate that thousands of times over? I don't think so.

Besides, it entices any corporation to use economic blackmail to try to exert leverage: "Hey, Donald, we're planning to move 6,000 jobs to Mexico. Whatcha got for us?"

Since the Trump voters did, evidently, vote their pocketbooks this cycle - despite the fact that 'train' already left the productivity station - there is no moralistic tune the Dems can sing that will bring them back into the Dem fold. What the Dems need to do is what they always do - or should - belabor the point of how many Democratic programs Trumpies need and depend upon, including Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare.

And drum that into their heads until it's clear!

What CAN Trump do in order to respond to his voters who are experiencing economic pain? The Brookings gurus suggest "Trump could promote policies to help those areas adapt more rapidly to the changing economy."  In other words, get those forlorn folks new training opportunities, say to learn coding or maybe even indoor plumbing. Skills, in other words, that can always be put to use.

He can also get a leash on his mad dogs, like Tom Price (R, GA),  to hold off on being so ready to kill Obamacare, and Medicaid for over 14 million folks, of which it is estimated 60 percent are Trump voters.  As Paul Krugman observed, these people will now learn how "short, nasty and brutish" life can be under the Trump Dominion.

See also:
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/07/democrats-must-own-their-values-tea-party-style-not-shift-even-more-toward-the-mushy-middle/
 

A Post-Mortem On A "Primal Scream" From The American Working Class

As the heads of Neoliberal elites in the U.S. and world can be heard popping in the wake of last night's Trump victory, it behooves us to look beneath at what drove it. I will maintain the warning signs were there all along for those who had eyes to see or ears to hear. Five months ago, in fact, I posted on film maker Michael Moore's prediction that Trump would win the election based on working class rage in the "Brexit states". I wrote, referring to his appearance and statements on Bill Maher's Real Time":

Moore zeroed in on the "Brexit" in the US of A, comprising three  industrial states: Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania with their 64 electoral votes. Those 64  electoral votes were the difference between Mitt Romney becoming the 45th President in 2012 and just another loser to Obama. But this time around, as Moore explained, they could easily be grabbed by Trump - especially given all three feature Republican governors who can gin the voting rules in their favor, including via use of electronic voting machines which were a major factor in Bush winning Ohio in 2004.

This turned out to be the case, as all three 'rust belt' states named were lost to Trump, putting him over 270 to the consternation of all sane people on the planet. (As commentator David Axelrod put it on CNN, the voters had issued "a primal scream". Yep, and they also jumped off the political cliff)

Less noted was how the excitement in Democratic quarters absolutely nose-dived when Bernie Sanders (another change populist) was knocked out by HRC, assisted by the DNC's superdelegate system.. It didn't seem to register at the time that many voters wouldn't just jump on the Hillary ship, or evince the same level of excitement they did for Obama back in 2012. Indeed, exit poll results released this a.m. on CBS showed "Change voters" were swept up by Trump to the tune of 83% to 14% for Clinton. It is hard to believe many of those weren't actually former Sanders' primary voters - who jumped ship to the Donald because they didn't believe they could get real change from Hillary. (Her VP pick of Neolib Tim Kaine also factored into that, say as opposed to picking Elizabeth Warren).

As exit poll numbers and analyses came out this morning these suspicions turned out to be the case. For example, younger voters came out by only 55% this time for Clinton compared to 2012 when it was 7 points higher. Black voters came out to 88 % but this was 8 points lower than before. And Hispanic voters came out for Hillary 65% vs. 71% in 2012. The fact five formerly 'blue' states flipped last night was a case of lowered voter turnout in each of those demographics. Meanwhile, the GOP and Trump benefited from millions of new voters - all mainly blue collar (and many of them registered union Dems) - who came out to turn the tables.

This elicits the question of what happened with the damned polls, i.e.  that they got it so wrong?  In a previous post I cited Charles Seife's excellent book,'Proofiness - How You're Being Fooled By The Numbers' , which explored the problem of getting random samples within large populations. In terms of national polls specifically he indicated the error span could approach as much as 6- 7 percent. This alone could explain a lot of the "flipped states" last night. Another aspect was raised by Frank Luntz on CBS this morning, that Trump voters as a rule "don't want to tell pollsters anything, not because they're afraid but because they are hostile to the system and regard polls as part of it:."  That is something I've long suspected, but it really burst through in the wee hours last night as even Pennsylvania and Wisconsin fell red.

Let me also interject here that FBI Director Comey also merits some of the blame, releasing that absurd letter pertaining to Clinton emails 11 days before the election which - as The Washington Post noted:  "undercut Democratic enthusiasm, and his suggestion that the investigation into her would reopen motivated Republicans to fall in line."

I warned before, in a number of posts, that these  members of the white working class were feeling a lot of strain under the Neoliberal economic boot. Trade deals pushed since the mid -1990s had cost them their jobs, ground them under, even as Dem Neolib cheerleaders like Paul Krugman tried to insist more average people really do benefit from free trade policies like NAFTA. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/03/krugman-loses-it-brands-bernie.html

Add in the job loss from automation and the failure of corporations to create new jobs - instead sitting on their piles of cash - and you have most of the negative economic inputs. But why latch onto a billionaire like Trump who hasn't paid taxes the past 20 years as their economic lifeboat? Especially given he has no more use for them than Reagan had for "Reagan Democrats" in 1980 and 1984. Good question, but my theory remains:  that they have aggregated to him because he channels their pent up rage and bombast, from his outbursts against immigrants, to dissing the disabled, to rating women and castigating  other ethnic targets. And always wielding the grievance cudgel as he does so.  The Economist really put the Trumpies in perspective in a brilliant piece from last year, noting (Dec. 5, p. 30):

"The anxiety Trump supporters betray by looking for scapegoats says most, of course, about themselves. Typically members of the white lower middle class, they are at once jealous of the small privileges that distinguish them from the toilers below, and bitterly resentful of the faraway government that provides their Social Security, VA care and Medicare.

Remonstrating in hard times, they are the "radical centre" in academic jargon, who turned out before for George Wallace, a populist southern Democrat who ran for President four times in the 1960s and 70s."

The article then identifies the iconic Trump supporter of this "radical center" with a character  from a John Updike novel named Rabbit Angstrom "from whose flabby mouth dripped endless expressions of impotence, anger and glum humor...having retired to Florida to nurse his disappointment".

Interestingly, this fits perfectly the mold of alienated blue collar worker described by Thomas Frank in his 'What's The Matter With Kansas?' , also pointing out how and why the Democrats began looking past the working class and its interests to focus on the shrinking middle class alone.

It is easy to write such (Economist)  essays when one is a member of the entitled Neoliberal scribe class. It is much harder to bear when one must feed a family of five or six on a pair of $11/ hour "gig" jobs  after losing a good paying factory job.  Multiply that millions of times and one can see the angry 'chickens' coming home to roost, as they did last night, turning formerly blue states red.

 We can go through the endless whys and wherefores all we want, the bottom line is a guy totally unqualified to be President is now President Elect. All the "Rabbit Angstroms" who voted for him and now expect him to "make America great again" are in for a rude shock because he won't be able to deliver on any of those insane promises.   Just building the giant wall he wants will cost at least $200b and that is lowballing it. Where will he get the money? (He did ask facetiously at one rally recently 'Will you all help me pay for it?")

He might make greater strides on killing the TPP but even then will need congress to work with, especially the GOP who are all for it. (Siding with Obama). That is another thing that pissed off the working class, Obama's fetish for the very kind of trade deal  (e.g. TPP) that earlier cost them their good jobs. I am convinced they never forgot, and every time Obama went out to stump for Hillary - five to ten thousand more blue collar Dems decided to either stay home or vote for Trump.

A President Trump will have a much tougher time trying to privatize Social Security or cut Medicare, the "entitlements" those like Paul Ryan have been so desperate to whittle away. Indeed, if the Senate Democrats have any testosterone left at all they will use it to summon the nerve to filibuster such nonsense each time it comes up. Just because Mr. Trump managed to get elected doesn't mean he gets carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants. And that includes trying to repeal Obamacare and rounding up 11 million Mexican immigrants to send home.

In the end, the dyspeptic scream of the alienated American working class last night echoed one from 84 years ago in Germany, which saw Adolf Hitler ascend to power (after President Paul von Hindenburg capitulated when the Nazi party received a majority of seats in the Reichstag). The "good Germans" had spoken and they wanted done with the Weimar (democratic) system which they perceived as inimical to their economic welfare. But with Hitler, all they got in the end was blood, war and devastation.

Make no mistake, the Dems will have to grow a pair of balls  over the next three months and get used to using the same obstruction tactic that the Reeps have employed the past 8 years and had promised to use again.. That means NO Supreme Court picks approved, NONE - unless they meet certain critical litmus tests (e.g. for Roe v. Wade). This is exactly what these turds had planned to do if Hillary had won. (Google John McCain's remarks on it.)

They will also have to get used to using the filibuster to block any and all legislation that doesn't redound to citizens' benefit including Social Security cuts or replacing Medicare with "premium support", e.g. vouchers. If I had had to use them the past four years (only $10k allocated per year)  it would have put me in a $90,000-plus  debt hole and likely propelled a medical bankruptcy.  The WaPo today claimed that the Repukes will try to get social policy issues passed instead using "budget reconciliation" where a 60-vote majority can be sidestepped. But this is effectively a "nuclear option" which the Dems could use on them in a future, more favorable election cycle. It would therefore be dumb for Ryan and the Reepos to try to use it now, say to push for Medicare budget cuts.

One big consolation for Clinton voters: she is ahead in the popular vote (as of this writing) by:

59, 048, 170 to 58, 926, 233 for Trump.

If it holds, and I believe it will - obviously adding as the three remaining states are finally called- Trump will have his work cut out for him to bring in an even bigger slice of the electorate to: a) accept him as their President, and b) not to alienate them with policies or executive orders that they will perceive as hostile. If he dismisses them, he does so at the risk of being a one term wonder.


See also:

The Democrats Abandon the White Working Class to Trump At Their Own Peril

False Knowledge Syndrome: Why Does It Afflict So Many Tea Baggers & FOX-ites?

"El Rushbo"  Limbaugh - one big reason so many brains are led astray to believing "liberal lies"


If I had a buck for every time Rush Limbaugh claimed Liberals were "attacking the Heartland" - whatever the hell that means - I'd be a millionaire. In fact, Red state interests and welfare are in the crapper because most of them  are so blinded by their false beliefs and ideology that they vote against their own economic interests, a condition superbly described in Thomas Frank's book, 'What's the Matter with Kansas?'  And because Red state voters keep pulling the levers for the 'pukes, it's no surprise that they never get ahead  - since the Repukes are the party of Big Business and incessant tax cuts.   But the sixty four dollar question remains: Do Limbaugh's bombastic rants shape the brains of his audience, OR is it their limited knowledge and education on the facts that draws them to the likes of El Rushbo  and FOX News - just to hear bunkum that supports their false knowledge and beliefs?

In short, one can put forward the proposition that the Ditto heads who fawn over Rush and the Foxites that regularly tune in O'Reilly believe a constellation of untrue things, and that leads them to collect — even invent — bad information to flesh out what they already believe.  The classic case is the dupe who by virtue of some streak of bad life decisions or experiences comes to believe "all liberals are liars". He then somehow finds Larry Schweikart's fishwrap book on '48 Liberal Lies About American History' and finds specious support for his false knowledge and bad insights. Classic confirmation bias. 

The other aspect is that media itself can shape viewer's perceptions toward false knowledge and beliefs.   This was vividly illustrated by a 1991 study that found that the more people watched TV during the first Gulf War, the less they knew about fundamental issues and facts, even as they were more likely to support the war. Wanting to believe that the U.S. was involved in a noble cause, for example, only 13 percent knew that when Iraq first threatened to invade Kuwait, the U.S. said it would take no action, while 65 percent falsely “knew” that the U.S. said it would support Kuwait militarily.

This indicated that when anyone asserts they "know" something about history, one needs to take it with a grain of salt unless they produce hard evidence (not just citing Larry Schweikart's abominable book!)

In earlier posts I examined part of the reason for this as linked to  the  Pew Research Center's  huge survey of American politics  showing the American Right is even more whacked out of its collective head than we thought. Recall the first part, released a couple weeks ago, focused on political polarization .  As indicated in this split for the data:


Pew found more than three quarters of conservative Americans - those in the steadfast conservative, business conservative, and young outsider typology groups - agreed that "poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything." Only seven percent of steadfast conservatives say that the poor "have hard lives."  Now, which group do you think is detached from reality?

Overall, it is the widespread agreement among conservatives on this point of grabbing benefits without doing anything that's really striking. There are reasonable, well-intentioned arguments on either side of many poverty-related issues - about the causes of poverty (see the right half of the chart), or whether government benefits provide a leg up or simply perpetuate poverty, for instance. But at root the conservative beliefs about what agents perpetuate poverty are totally out of whack with the actual data.

But possibly this bifurcation is because the Right accepts too much misinformation overall, such as on global warming, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/09/partisanship-and-brain-why-we-cant-get.html

As I noted in that post:

"Sure, all humans want to believe they’re rational, but Kahan's work shows that in reality most people employ their reason  ex post facto to  rationalize what they already want to believe. Thus, if they already believe global warming is a "hoax" their brains won't work in order to process new information that invalidates that, but rather they will search for bogus information (say from a Terry Lovell, or Richard Lindzen, or Jason Lisle) that reinforces their misperceptions. "


Sadly the problem isn't limited to issues of  scientific fact, or sociology,  war and peace. Misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, according to a new study published in Social Science Quarterly  which employed a “knowledge distortion index” and looked at two competing explanations for why this is so — one top-down, the other bottom-up.  The researchers used three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.

The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index. (Of course, knowing how suspect people are of being tagged "Foxites" we must understand how they may under report their viewing habits.)

Lead author, Justin Reedy, told Salon.com. “Both of these theories recognize that citizens can develop distorted factual beliefs because of their political views, but they disagree about how those distortions might happen. Heuristics researchers generally think that citizens have limited attention for politics and try to process information quickly and efficiently.”

Which makes sense.

In another take, Reedy further explained:

“People who are fairly politically knowledgeable can figure out whether political information and factual claims match up with their own ideology or not — and therefore whether they should accept or reject those.  Cultural cognition researchers, however, see political opinions as driven by deep-seated values about how the world works, and not contingent on someone’s political knowledge.”

The first type is what I refer to as critically thinking rational voters. We can clearly see, for example, that the last several efforts to put "personhood" amendments on the Colorado ballot were all driven by fundamentalist ideology and not rational information or sound politics (they've been defeated resoundingly three times). On the other hand, in terms of the recent Colorado initiatives to control fracking locally, we saw rational and practical advantage to environmentally conscious citizens despite all the hysterical screaming from the oil and gas industry that we would "destroy jobs".

"Values voters" occupy a decidedly different rung, as first observed by Thomas Frank. They have pre-existing "values" on how the world ought to work and let these trump any contradicting facts - whether scientific, historical or political.  Thus, in their fanciful worlds, CO2 should not be able to overturn an entire planet's climate - so they disbelieve any facts trotted out. In their world they also reject that humans could evolve from a common ape-human ancestor, so reject Darwinian evolution. They also value bibles and guns over "liberal" positions like gun control and freedom from religion, so reject liberalism as a threat to their own values. Oh, and they are convinced that liberals have been the ones shafting this country from the year dot. They believe this without a whit of evidence, and only because some schmoe like Limbaugh or Larry Schweikart tells them so.

But they often go much farther in asserting their lack of knowledge and information based on their values means ALL liberal values are wrong. The next cognitive step is to tie liberal values to knowledge they implicitly disdain, such as about global warming and evolution. Hence, it's easy to believe bollocks such as "liberal lies about history" or that global warming "is a hoax."  But they don't see these as emblems of ignorance but rather badges of honor.

Which brings us back to the latest study and an unsavory finding:

"Whatever future refinements may be made to the values-based distortion model, the unsettling evidence remains that many voters are systematically misinformed on political issues, and those erroneous factual beliefs appear to influence how they mark their ballot on election day "

To say this is a serious problem is putting it mildly.  It shows me that values distortion and bias can lead to a toxic and destabilizing political distortion.  We have a political system that purports to not only reflect the “will of the people,” but that also respects reality as a basic matter of course. But does it? What if the will of too many is based on false information or knowledge?  In fact, from the time of the Founders (the REAL ones, not the imaginary constructs the  Tea Baggers have conjured) it has been an axiom that informed people are needed to sustain a functioning democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his 'Notes on Virginia':

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds,  not improvement. He understood that citizens to attain this improvement needed to read in a focused fashion and not believe anything they read. Another Founder, John Adams, wrote:

“Facts are stubborn things,”

But epitomizing the blind stupidity of the Right, their favorite President,  Ronald Reagan,  famously misquoted him:

“Facts are stupid things,”

 Which could be the motto of all those who get their "values" regularly confirmed  via a reality filtered through Limbaugh or Hannity, or the likes of Larry Schweikart!

 

Plutocrats Plus - Why Neoliberalism Is Bad For Us All

Author Thomas Frank in a recent essay ('Plutocracy Without End: Why the 1 Percent Always Defeats the Middle Class') wrote:

"The One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?"

How much fatter can the fat cats get? Much fatter indeed! We've already seen the Gini coefficient, one of the best measures of inequality, rise to its highest level in decades - accelerating most since the Reagan era and the massive cut in the top income tax rates. People bitch and moan about paying taxes, but don't understand that they are what keeps our society afloat. No taxes, then no roads, no schools, no benefits......and no armies! The problem with the myopic Right is that they want all the taxes to go for armies and weapons and none for the domestic foundation. But this is a fool's thinking because without domestic security at its basic level, in terms of providing roads, bridges, water mains, sewer lines and means for people to not only subsist but thrive, you are looking at a banana republic.

The problem with the Neoliberal, pro -free market idiom is that it denies the most basic security for the majority of citizens. In this way it feeds economic inequality while it rewards the speculator and banker class. It also helps to corrupt the political class via unregulated campaign contributions.

Jay Bookman aptly noted('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad', in The Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1997):

"The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative. In times of crisis, however, that premise cannot be sustained politically. In times of trouble it is human nature to seek security and protection and to be drawn toward those who promise to provide it. That is how men such as Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to power, with disastrous consequences."

This description of the New World Neoliberal Order is exactly why the seeds of its own destruction are built into it, have been built into it.  Even as I read (in the New York Times) yesterday of the collapse of multi-employer Pension benefits funds, and how many union workers can no longer receive pensions, it occurred to me that if congress doesn't act, this is a situation that can rapidly destabilize.  There's only a small critical threshold between mass suffering and mass unrest- as we've seen all over, from the Arab Spring, to the Ukraine.

 But in the case of the Ukraine, the unrest was fomented by U.S. Neoliberals and their neocon sidekicks,  driving NATO expansion to the east. The cover story sold is that the people wanted "freedom" and being aligned with the EU and the West. The truth is that if they go that route they will become economic slaves to the Neoliberal  Economic Order. Indeed, once the IMF and EU funds go through one of the first offsets will be cutting public pensions and abolition of all rigid price controls, as well as painful cuts to public subsidies. Those Ukrainians pining for "freedom" would have been better served to have pondered FDR's famous words:

"Necessitous men cannot be free men."

And looked before they leaped into the Neoliberal Abyss (which they might have asked EU Sovereign debt victim Greece about).

Meanwhile, Thomas Frank goes on to observe (ibid.):

"That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive."


Marx's dialectic theory of history is one thing, but a more germane or relevant destabilizer is that without adequate income, with only debt to purchase the capitalist goods manufactured - the whole edifice of the consumer economy (and our GDP) collapses.  The reason is simple, and one evident to anyone with basic math skills: it is consumption that supports 70 percent of our GDP. Take away that consumption, and kaput! The economy dives into depression, irrespective of what the Fed, Obama, congress or anyone does.

Thus, once the Neoliberal Order of Globalized capital was established, the seeds for its future destruction were sown. Recall that it was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ( 'Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism', 1916) who first sounded the warning that mobile finance capital was designed to continually leverage labor to the lowest common denominator. Lenin clearly showed in his treatise how the Political and Economic Elite, simply by the expedient of export capital, could indirectly exploit raw materials from poor nations, or use the latter as captive labor markets. Meanwhile, that same exported capital would ensure working conditions degraded at home. Under such a scheme, financiers would continually divert capital to foreign locales where it would generate the highest return and refrain from aiding industry in their own countries.

That working conditions have degraded at home is self evident to the most cursory reader who follows economic conditions. We still have more than 24 million people under-employed or unemployed and we have a Middle Class losing more ground every day, even as the Elites talk wildly of cutting their Social Security and Medicare benefits - the last barriers between them and penury ...

Then there are the millions trapped in minimum wage jobs with no chance of advancement. Nor is there any motivation in our congress to help them by increasing their wage to a living wage, despite the fact that such a move could actually extend the life of their market Neoliberalism - since it would permit workers to purchase the goods that prop up the GDP without going into debt.

Finally, there are the tens of thousands of recently graduated college students mired in debts accrued that they now must pay off, but with no decent job prospects by which to do so. Do the Neoliberals care at all about the plight of these students or their families? Not at all! Their message is basically, "Sink or swim!" 


Will the Neoliberals quit while they're (relatively ) ahead? Not on your life! They want to add the Ukraine to their potpourri of misery, saddle them with endless debt and poverty like they did the Russians post-1990,. They also want to double down on the global Neoliberal order itself - this time using TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership, another way to screw with us like the earlier GATT and NAFTA.

Are people paying attention? Maybe, maybe not. It is painful to watch as many of our citizens simply hunker down with their TVs, DVDs, notebooks, Twitter, Facebook or other entertainment and refuse to understand that the active citizen must come to the fore if the Neoliberals are not to send our nation into a plutocracy.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has released the draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, currently being negotiated in secret by 12 Pacific Rim nations.   It would be well for every citizen who thinks of him (or her-)self as more that than consumer to read it, and do so carefully.

Your future, and especially that of your offspring, may well depend on it. You need to know of the massive collision coming - heading right toward you - before it happens.  If an informed citizenry is the basis for democracy, why are we being kept in the dark? Perhaps because we no longer have a democracy  but a corporatocracy!

But that is the other prop the Neoliberals depend upon: citizen inertia, stupidity or belief in impotence, i.e. that they only have "opinions" - which carry no weight.  Also, they don't want citizens pursuing truth - information outside the media they promote, which is more invested in propaganda.

If we each do our part, as opposed to retreating, we may yet wake the Neoliberal New World Order up to the fact that poverty stricken indigents (replacing well paid, economically secure citizens) is the last thing it needs.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55716/msnbc-can-be-trusted-by-the-established-order-thats-a-problem

Rush Limbaugh Is A Bombastic Moron For Going After CBS & Steven Colbert

It's somewhat amazing to me that anyone with an I.Q. over room temperature even tunes in to Rush Limbaugh any more. This guy demeans those who call in to his foolish show, and he demeans the whole country with his babble. We'd seen it earlier - in the run-up to the 2012 elections when for three days running he viciously attacked Sandra Fluke personally,  distorting the contraception issue and finally - after women across the country (at least the ones with brains) got up in arms, offered an "apology".

Anyone with two neurons in their gray matter knew this "apology" was bollocks. I mean, any sensible person - and that includes Ms. Fluke- could tell the genuine article from grandstanding and excuses wrapped in PR. Especially as El Swinebo made his vile comments for not one, not two but THREE days running, and then blamed liberals because he "made the mistake of following their example" as opposed to his own good conscience.

The truth is that this odious, grunting porker miscreant: a) feared the exodus of no fewer than 35 major advertisers already, and b) oinked what was in his heart - which 'oink' also echoed what most of the Woman-hating GOP believe in their own heart of hearts (accounting for their tepid reactions), as well as Rush's sickening listener audience - wherever they lived (mostly in the education backward Red States - where most still believe the Duck Dynasty are real rednecks as opposed to pretenders, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-duck-dynasty-fake-rednecks-and-how.html

Now, this Blowhard of Bombast has once again gone off the rails, as we beheld him frothing at the mouth in a vid-clip played last night on Chris Hayes' ALL In  (MSNBC) show. Evidently, Limbaugh is outraged that CBS could have picked Steven Colbert (of Comedy Central's 'The Colbert Report') to take up the prized 'Late Show' gig next year, since David Letterman announced he's leaving.

Anyone who's watched Letterman knew at once that his quixotic persona would be difficult to replace. The first person I had thought of, indeed, was Mr. Colbert - who in his Comedy Central gig-  portrays a Right Wing blowhard similar to Bill O'Reilly.  After O'Reilly once complained about Colbert's shtick, Steven replied:

"Mr. O'Reilly!  I DO agree with everything you say on your show even when the words don't agree with each other!"

Limbaugh, in his tirade, bellowed:

"What this hire means is a redefinition of what is ‘funny’ and a redefinition of what is comedy, and they’re blowing up the 11:30 format under the guise that the world’s changing and people don’t want the kind of comedy that Carson gave us or even Letterman.
 It’s the media planting a flag here. I think it’s maybe the media’s last stand, but it’s a declaration. There’s no  unity in this hire. They’ve hired a partisan so-called comedian to run a comedy show.”

He went on to claim the CBS was "attacking the Heartland" - whatever the hell that means - but I suppose it means that hiring a true progressive (who not long ago appeared before congress on behalf of migrant workers) was inimical to Red State interests. Of course, this is horse manure, Red state interests and welfare are in the crapper because most of them vote against their own economic interests, a condition superbly described in Thomas Frank's book, 'What's the Matter with Kansas?'  And because Red state voters keep pulling the levers for the 'pukes, it's no surprise that they never get ahead  - since the Repukes are the party of Big Business (well, to be accurate, the Dems are as well, to an extent - with their Neoliberal - pro market parasites - but not to the extent of the pukes who have the likes of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson trying to buy elections.)

Meanwhile, another puke-loving zombot on Breitbart.com railed against Colbert as a person engaged in "political blackface" - whatever the hell that means - for impersonating a nutso Right winger on TV. Evidently, the bozos at Breitbart don't understand the concept of political satire - as Limbaugh doesn't either.

For those of us who partake of late night comedy, it will be as much fun watching the righties squirm as it will be seeing Colbert handle the Late Show with his typical talent and aplomb.

Bravo to Pope Francis for Warning of Capitalism's Tyranny and Consumerism!

Pope Francis: Gives a much needed shot over the bow to capitalists!

Once again, Pope Francis has shown himself percipient and also with the courage to call out the real culprits in our midst - now including Neoliberal capitalism and wanton consumerism.  This he has now done in an 84-page document known as an apostolic exhortation, headed "Evangelii Gaudium" of the Holy Father. which makes official the platform for his papacy. It also is such a formal document that makes it impossible for any claimed Catholic intellectual or moral philosopher to ever again turn a blind eye to economic inequality and suffering that ensues from it. Most especially, it makes clear that NO moral theologian can embrace "trickle down" supply side" economics or the Pareto model that it's based upon.

Readers will recall in an earlier (Nov. 12) blog post on Francis not being appreciated by the conservatives in his flock (the same breed that also like "trickle down" in the general population) I quoted his earlier words: "Everyone has his own idea of good and evil".

And added:

"Which is, of course, true. A starving child or parent of that child will, for example, regard evil as the gross systemic inequality in a supposedly rich nation that permits such a travesty to occur."


Resonant with my own take earlier are Francis' recent words from his document:

"How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us."

The shot at "trickle down" is spot -on and we've been saddled with this bollocks ever since one Arthur Laffer dreamed it up,  later deployed during Ronnie Raygun's tenure. (And also in Barbados in 1986, which nearly sent the country to the international poor house). The story goes that the pivotal event was the invention of the "Laffer curve" (see diagram below) on a napkin and on the fly, by a hyper-excited Laffer in 1974. Laffer was then an economist at the University of Chicago and traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford's then chief of staff.                                                                                                           



Based on this Laffer hatched a new theory on why tax rates were inefficient and high, or one might say "inefficiently high". The story then goes that one interested nabob from the WSJ asked Rumsfeld to meet with Laffer on the issue. As it happened, Rumsfeld had other commitments so dispatched Dick Cheney instead to a bar, where the meeting took place. (See, e.g. Economics for the Rest of Us by Moshe Adler, Ch. 6) Laffer then proceeded to sketch his infamous diagram on a napkin on why the rich could be said to be "over taxed".

As drawn, it was totally convincing! Especially for a guy like Cheney with minimal math skills. Note the line defining the highest marginal tax rate of 70% for Gerald Ford's presidency. What Laffer's curve sought to show is that by cutting that rate down, say to 50%, one could increase the revenues by nearly 35%! Of course, the 50% turned out to be wholly arbitrary and in fact after Reagan became President in 1980 the rates were cut down to 50 by 1981, then to 28% (by 1988). After all, if one could increase revenues by cutting taxes 20%, imagine what one could do by cutting them more than 40%!

Thus did Laffer's curve become the basis of Reagan's tax cuts and the whole tax cut meme ever since, despite the fact that in reality no community or even human body has managed to GROW by virtue of starving! But try to tell the bulk of Americans, who continue to buy into this codswallop at a mind-boggling rate! Despite the fact there's never been evidence it's actually worked!  Even the Obama administration played into this by extending the Bush tax cuts when ALL ought to have been sunset 3 years ago!

A  Financial Times Analysis (9/15/10, p. 24) of the Bush tax cuts found:

The 2000s- that is the period immediately following the Bush tax cuts – were the weakest decade in U.S. postwar history for real, non-residential capital investment. Not only were the 2000s by far the weakest period but the tax cuts did not even curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures. Rather the slowdown accelerated to a full decline

For reference, the top marginal tax rate during the Bush years (for income tax) was reduced to 36% from the 39.5% during the 1990s Clinton Years. Over the 1950s and into the 1960s (until about 1964) the top marginal rate was at 91%, going down to 65% by the mid -60s. The lower level of 50% wasn’t hit until Reagan arrived in 1980, and passed his tax cuts. And we've been piling up deficits ever since.

The FT conclusion was blunt:

“Business investment data demonstrate the Bush tax cuts failed to achieve their goal of spurring productive U.S. investment and that failure has contributed to the poor performance of U.S. stocks”

And because of this misguided foolishness, income -economic inequality has been ratcheting up ever since - with NO politician on the left even remotely able to marshal a strong narrative on why higher taxes are needed.

But we who follow these things know this is all part of the Neoliberal free market idiom, especially the sort of "market populism" nonsense that author Thomas Frank excoriates in his excellent book, 'One Market Under God'.   Interestingly, in 2011, as the Occupy Wall Street movement was underway, the Vatican’s Justice and Peace agency called for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a central global bank. The document condemned “the idolatry of the market.” We know also that ever since the 1980s and Reaganism, this idolatry has been on steroids and became endemic in both parties. In this mutation, Neoliberalism declared the only way to "true democracy" and "freedom" was the absolute reign of markets - and in addition, no nation could afford to dispense any security to citizens not market contingent.

To illustrate the perversion of this sort of thinking, Laffer argued that higher tax rates on the rich would only cause them to work fewer hours, or if REALLY rich, invest in fewer projects, enterprises, hence create fewer jobs. Thus, revenues over all would decline, first from the working rich because Uncle Sam would get less taxes by virtue of their reduced work, and also from the investing rich because they'd create fewer jobs and thus no workers would be around to pay the taxes Uncle Sam wants. Thus, Laffer argued, the higher tax rates were Pareto Inefficient! In addition, because of this the common Mickey D or Walmart worker would also suffer.

The argument was further reinforced (mainly in Bush II's 2nd term) that Social Security payments undermined market democratization by providing a stream of income that didn't depend on actual market behavior.  This prompted Ayn Rand acolyte and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to go on record (in an appearance before congress in 2003) to assert that "Social Security benefits need to be cut to pay for Bush’s tax cuts."

Social Security payments, especially with COLAs, do everything the Fed Chairman didn’t want. They pour more money into the economy, but not via productive labor or market indices, returns. People receive their checks merely by existing and breathing day to day, and having paid into the system with FICA deductions. Even then, they receive far more in benefits than actually paid in, making a total mess of Pareto utility.

Since the Bush tax cuts have continued, especially for the Middle class - the supply siders - mainly emerging from the 'Fix the Debt' parasites, have demanded Social Security cuts in the form of COLA revisions i.e. the "chained CPI". The only way to have avoided that would have been terminating the Bush tax cuts for ALL.

Does supply side work? No, not ever - as Francis has clearly observed in his statement,


This opinion.....has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power

And the facts bear him out! Not only the FT analysis (above summary) of the Bush tax cuts, but also the tax cuts in Reagan's administration.   first full examination of the empirical effects arrived in James Medoff and Andrew Harless, The Indebted Society, 1995, wherein they found, p. 23:

"For the health of the economy, Reagan's policies turned out to be just about the worst thing that could have happened: investment did not increase, growth continued to stagnate, and the federal deficit ballooned to new dimensions....

In 1981, the year Reagan took office, the public debt was 26.5 % of the gross domestic product (GDP)....In 1993, the year that Bush left office, the public debt was a staggering 51.9 percent of the GDP."

Thus, we have the first evidence that Laffer was plying bare bunkum not sound economic policy! Yet conservatives continue to embrace this horse shit!

This is all the more reason Pope Francis is to be applauded for specifically calling out one of the most egregious facets of market populism and Neoliberal capitalism overall. While previous popes (e.g. Pope John Paul II, Benedict)  discussed the disenfranchised, they didn’t single out the issue the way Francis has. He has not only done so with his words, but in his actions, such as paying his own hotel bill in person or affectionately embracing a man disfigured by disease.

And he has insisted parish padres do the same, getting their "shoes dirty" instead of remaining in their little domeciles  or rectories, untouched by the world.

He has also condemned over the top consumerism such as will be manifested in the US of A this Friday. I believe his subtext is that any professed "Christians"  who'd let themselves go nuts tomorrow in a shopping frenzy (forsaking family traditions)  or on Friday,  actually worship the god of Mammon and not any true God.

With that sentiment, I couldn't agree more!