Austerity

There are much more appalling examples of wasteful military spending, but I have to imagine $300,000 for a go-kart racing track in Guantanamo Bay is going to be held up as an example akin to thousand dollar wrenches for some time. I don’t expect anyone to be asking members of the military to practice austerity while stationed overseas. But someone is going to have to explain a go-kart track.

And just so I’m clear, working families need to feel the impact of this recession through austerity.  State governments need to cut the salaries and void contracts of state employees, ensuring that those workers in particular must resort to austerity to survive. But the Pentagon budget is totally off-limits in discussions as to how we reduce the all-important deficit.  Got it.

Responding To BP Isn’t About Politics

On TPM, Theda Skocpol is given space to respond to Robert Reich’s case for President Obama putting BP America in receivership so the company would be forced “to use all its available resources and submit itself to full federal oversight and control.” Skocpol’s response is purely taken from a political standpoint:

When a huge private corporation makes a mess and cannot fix it, it is sheer lunacy to take direct charge of that mess unless you can fix it right away.

This is not about politics. It’s about fixing a cataclysmic disaster in the Gulf. That actually matters to some people, but apparently not Skocpol. Sure, BP is saying nothing can produce the results needed to stop the leak until August at the earliest. But Skocpol is a political science professor, not a scientist. Her answer is based entirely on politics and not on any knowledge of what is and is not possible beyond what BP has told her.

I don’t dispute that from a purely political perspective, the administration taking ownership and responsibility for stopping this disaster by deposing BP  is risky if the government doesn’t actually produce better results than BP is saying they can (and to this point, they have produced no results). And yes, as Skocpol says, the administration should be doing a lot to hold BP financially and criminally accountable, while simultaneously dealing with the on-surface consequences of the oil spill in the Gulf. This isn’t a two-front war, it’s a three-front war and ignoring the third front only ensures that the job is harder on the other two fronts. And that the Gulf is turned into a wasteland for decades.

I really don’t care about the politically expedient response from the government. I care about the morally necessary response and the ecologically required urgency that action be taken. All of BP’s efforts have failed and while I am not a geologist or oceanographer or deep-sea drilling expert and therefore do not myself know what else can be done, I believe the size, power, and treasury of the US government is capable of finding another way to try to solve this problem.

Stay Out of Primaries

Chris Bowers:

The lesson for the White House here should be to stay out of primaries. These stories are costing them a lot of news cycles, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars they sunk into Arlen Specter’s campaign.  Further, these primary challenges are actually helpful to the administration’s legislative agenda, as they do a lot more to prevent defections on big votes from Specter and Bennet than any backroom deal ever will.  If the White House had just let these campaigns play out, they would be a lot better off right now.

This strikes me as self-evident, but evidently it needs saying. Beyond the White House, I’d say the DSCC and DCCC should stay out too, but that is less relevant to Bowers’ point.

We’re Not Greece

Sam Seder has a great video, calling bullshit on the conservative fears that the US is going to be the next Greece to leverage reduction of deficit spending. In the economy we are in, with 10% unemployment, the best way to get things on track is with a steady diet of stimulating federal dollars. But conservatives just don’t want to see the government spend money helping people who aren’t Wall Street tycoons or insurance CEOs.  The stalking horse for conservative opposition to stimulating expenditures is the deficit. You’d think that if the deficit was a major concern for the markets and for people who make money in the finance industry, that they would be reacting accordingly, driving up the US government’s bond rates and betting against the dollar.

But you’d be wrong. Paul Krugman noted on Monday that conservatives are pushing for austerity and measures to calm the markets from fears of inflation, there is no inflation and no fear of inflation in the markets.  And in yesterday’s Washington Post, there was a long expose on the gap between DC Conventional Wisdom that says the debt is going to turn the US into Greece shortly, while bond traders are heavily investing in the US government. Neil Irwin writes, “they can’t both be right.” And as is so often the case, Conventional Wisdom is wrong.

So why the massive shift in Washington from concern about fixing the economy through job growth (last year) to doomsday proclamations about the growth of the deficit (now)? Brad DeLong addresses this question:

But whenever I wander the halls of Washington these days, I can’t help but think that something else is going on—that a deep and wide gulf has grown between the economic hardships of Americans and the seeming incomprehension, or indifference, of courtiers in the imperial city.

Have decades of widening wealth inequality created a chattering class of reporters, pundits and lobbyists who’ve lost their connection to mainstream America? Has the collapse of the union movement removed not only labor’s political muscle but its beating heart from the consciousness of the powerful? Has this recession, which has reduced hiring more than it has increased layoffs, left the kind of people who converse with the powerful in Washington secure in their jobs and thus communicating calm while the unemployed are engulfed in panic? Are we passively watching an unrepresented underclass of the long-term unemployed created before our eyes?

Digby answers DeLong:

To coin a patented DeLong phrase — Simple Answers To Simple Questions: Yes.

At the bottom line, it seems that Washington, particularly Republicans, but also conservative and “moderate” Democrats, are no longer seeing the financial difficulties of working Americans. At a moment of economic crisis, they are looking past the challenges Americans are facing and towards policy prescriptions that will slow recovery and not help unemployment. This is going to hurt people. It’s going to prolong the unemployment crisis. And American families will suffer as long as Washington isn’t serious about creating jobs and growing the economy.

I’ve often said that if there is a disconnect between how you would want your elected officials to behave and how they actually behave, it’s most likely that they are not behaving how you would want because they don’t believe in the same things you believe in. What’s becoming clear is that decision-makers are, in bipartisan fashion, showing that they do not believe there is a jobs crisis and they do not believe that the government has a major role to play stimulating the economy to create new jobs.

And if you think things are bad now, wait until there is a push to cut Social Security again.

Repealing the 17th Amendment?

Well this is news to me. Apparently some Tea Party activists are starting to campaign around repealing the 17th Amendment, which made it so senators were elected directly through popular vote, as opposed to appointed by the state legislatures. I suppose there is some intellectual honesty on the part of the Tea Party about the value an appointed Senate was intended to have as a check on federal powers. But it does strike me as bizarre for an allegedly populist movement to be advocating the removal of the popular vote for the functionally more-powerful chamber of Congress. Obviously this is not a movement that is going anywhere; the 17th Amendment will not be repealed.

Heck, between the move to “go Galt” (fall off the economic grid) and repeal the 17th Amendment, is there anything Teabaggers actually want to do along with the rest of us here in America?

Deficit Hawks Should Be Honest

Of course it isn’t shocking that the deficit hawks that want to cut Social Security don’t give two wits about the damage the BP oil spill causes to future generations and the costs that today’s actions are incurring for them. Sarcastic cynicism aside, Dean Baker is right when he writes, “[deficit hawks] just want to cut Social Security and the other programs that allow ordinary working people to enjoy a decent standard of living.” There isn’t anything larger than a hatred of participating in a society that has a social safety net built by the entire nation. On one level, there isn’t anything wrong with having ideological differences with American social safety net policy. But the deficit hawks should be honest about these differences. They aren’t concerned with future generations – they just don’t want there to be Social Security, neither now nor in the future.

Obama Should Listen to Obama

State Senator Barack Obama, on Bill Clinton’s pursuit of bipartisanship, in 1996:

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr Obama said.

Yep, this is right. I wonder what the President thinks about this statement now.

Via Matt Yglesias.

Critical Perspective?

It’s great that an anonymous oil industry insider writes to TalkingPointsMemo to say he thinks BP is doing a swell job, but should the rest of us care? Yes, having someone who understands it beyond reporters for the Times or CNN provide perspective is useful. But we are at a point where industry experts have noticeably failed from top to bottom. They failed to due their due diligence about how to safely drill in this location, at this depth. They failed to use proper techniques to make sure the well was properly dug. They failed to handle changes in pressure. They failed to stop the rig from exploding and killing eleven people. They failed to build a kill valve that worked. They failed to initially contain the leak. They failed to accurately measure how much oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. They failed to deploy oil booms correctly. To this point, a month after the initial disaster, the experts in the oil industry have not stopped the leak, though things are finally looking better.

Most of the expertise in offshore oil drilling lies with the oil industry. I get that. But I don’t really give a damn about how public criticism, scrutiny and outrage offends these experts, who really, honestly, they swear are doing all they can to fix this crisis. They fucked up and they have to be accountable for that. Some of that accountability is going to come while the disaster is ongoing and there damned well better be more accountability once the leak is stopped and mere millions and millions of gallons of oil are poisoning the Gulf.

In the mean time, I don’t care about anonymous oil industry insiders’ perspectives, when that perspective is that the criticism of them is wrong and they are really good people.

The Dalai Lama Talks with Chinese Citizens

This is incredibly interesting. On May 21st the Dalai Lama held an hour-long question and answer session, a “free dialogue,” with Chinese citizens. The event was organized by Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong and questions were submitted through Twitter and ranked on Google Moderator. Chinese authorities shut down the page in China, but hundreds of questions and thousands of votes had already been cast, allowing the dialogue to move forward. Perry Link of the New York Times has translated the session from Chinese into English.

What is incredibly interesting to see is which questions were promoted by Chinese citizens as questions they want the Dalai Lama to answer, ranging from succession for the Dalai Lama to how Han Chinese living in Tibet would be treated if Tibet where to gain real autonomy. As always, the Dalai Lama offers thoughtful, good-faith answers to tough questions. The exchange is definitely worth a read.