Monthly Archives: July 2011

The Problem Isn't Republicans, the Problem is Us: the Neoliberal Debate as Exhibit A

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(warning: inside blogosphere baseball)

Amanda Marcotte is frustrated with a lot of folks on our side:

So, I posted earlier today about what jackass crazy fuckwits run the Republican party and that’s why we’re in this current crisis, I suppose the inevitable thing happened in comments: I got scolded about my priorities. Apparently, I’m supposed to be focusing like a laser on how Obama is actually a double agent for the GOP…

Yes, I’m saying it right here: whether Obama is a secret Republican or whether he’s a well-meaning Democrat who is simply being blackmailed is irrelevant. The problem, either way, is Republicans.

If only. I think there’s a much, much bigger problem here — us.

Exhibit A: the debate on liberal/lefty blogs over “neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias, nicely summarized here and here. To grossly oversimplify, it’s about whether policy folks need to make long-term grassroots base building an integral part of their thinking about policy. Matt Y had complained:

Kevin Drum offers this effort:

I don’t know the answer either. But as I said a few months ago, “If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we’ve ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.” It still is.

[Matt says:] So I really, strongly, profoundly agree with this. The moment someone comes up with a workable idea on this front, please sign me up. But if there’s no idea to debate, then there’s no idea to debate. Debating the desirability of devising some hypothetical future good idea seems kind of pointless to me.

Erik Loomis sums up the response:

being right about policy is often irrelevant unless you have a mass movement of people behind you ready to engage in collective action to see those policies enacted. And I don’t think left neo-liberals often understand that. This is why I get so outraged when, for example, left neo-liberals support education “reform” that weakens teacher unions. We probably all agree that there are bad teachers out there and it would be great to get rid of them. But by weakening the one educational institution that can best mobilize people to protect our schools from conservative attacks, these reforms often further right-wing politics even if they theoretically achieve a left neo-liberal policy point.

To which I say, Oh. My. God.

A few months after Wisconsin, we’re having a debate over this? The whole point of what Republicans are trying to do is to use policy to wipe out our power. How can anyone on our side who’s been paying attention at all – let along blogging endlessly – not get this?

So no, the problem isn’t the Republicans. The Republicans are playing a tough but smart bet: double down on the crazy in order to capture a lot of the anger that’s out there and see how far they can go before it blows up. As the Debt Ceiling drama is demonstrating, it may be a lot sooner than they were thinking. But considering the alternatives, it was a pretty smart gamble.

The problem is that our side isn’t playing equally smart. That’s why Obama can basically ignore what we want.

So if we want to stop losing, it’s time to stop whining about the Republicans or Obama and get in the game. One small step in that direction: stop having debates about whether (political) gravity exists.

Making Mass Transit Work in Gridlocked Streets

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If streets are gridlocked, how can mass transit work? Human Transit, a.k.a. Jarrett Walker, explains:

A few years ago I had a memorable ride on the Ventura Blvd Metro Rapid from Warner Center to Sherman Oaks. The service flowed smoothly through Tarzana and Encino but then got stuck in two miles of gridlock leading up to I-405, as it often does, and the crowded bus spent 20 minutes going almost nowhere. It made no sense. Cars can only fit onto 405 at a certain rate, especially if they’re going over Sepulveda Pass. So in the current arrangement, the surplus traffic is stored blocking Ventura Blvd. Why do you give over the entire width of Ventura Blvd, and effectively shut down the street, just for the purpose of storing waiting cars? Why don’t you set aside a through lane for transit (and perhaps also for taxis, HOVs, and certainly for emergency vehicles) so that efficient use of the street can continue even as the cars pile up? What would be the effect on traffic? Simple: the pile of stored cars would be narrower and longer. But meanwhile, people could get where they were going, and emergency vehicles could get through to save lives and property.

Chokepoints in a network are huge opportunities for transit, but only if transit can get past them. This bit of Ventura Blvd is one example. Another is the Sepulveda Pass itself. Caltrans is widening the freeway to add HOV lanes, which will finally give buses a clear path around gridlock, so that from the Valley to Westwood they can start offering the only truly reliable means of getting through the Pass. If it works reliably you may see a range of services extended through the Pass to broaden the reach of that advantage.

But Los Angeles is almost done widening roadways. It’s time to make hard choices about how to apportion the space that you have. The great boulevards of Los Angeles can be, in their own way, as magnificent as the boulevards of Paris. In the last decade Paris has added bus lanes on virtually every one of its boulevards, mostly at the expense of traffic lanes. Traffic isn’t any worse than it was, because once people see that transit is getting through reliably, some of them choose to use it.

The Right-Wing Class War in 4 Facts

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How’s the class war going for the right? Laura Clawson sums it up in four facts:

On Monday, Sen. Al Franken, Rep. Sander Levin, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and Center for American Progress economist Heather Boushey joined unemployed workers to discuss the jobs crisis.

What could they possibly have to discuss in a country where JP f’ing Morgan says wage reductions have driven corporate profit increases, the 400 richest Americans are paying just over half the taxes they were 12 years ago, two-parent families are working 26 percent more hours than in 1975 and only earning 23 percent more, and fading jobless benefits are about to deal another blow to struggling families and the American economy?

Wrestling in Private

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By last week, my latest theory jag had run out of steam. I felt stuck and uninspired.

After 2 1/2 years of practice, I’ve finally gotten to the point where when I stop feeling inspired to write, I know it’s a sign. Not that I’m an idiot — although it sure feels that way when I smack into this barrier. But that I’ve run into a theory problems that’s worth wrestling with.

So, I decided to spend some time rereading my model/framework posts. What I found was that I’ve been coming up with the same themes over & over & over. A lot of these themes feel really solid. What I’ve really been wrestling with is how to pull them together. So for the next leg of my journey, I’m going to try to focus on figuring out why it is these themes speak to me and why they work well individually but not together.

I wish I felt comfortable doing more of this wrestling on my blog. But I don’t yet. And it’s particularly hard to do right now because my health problems are really limiting how much time I can spend in front of a computer. So, I’m going to give myself a few weeks to wrestle with it in private. I’ll keep posting interesting stuff I find. But the heavy-duty lifting? That’ll be behind the scenes until I’m ready to show some of it.

Republican Politicians: So Long As There Are Crack Dealers, I Should Be One

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On March 20, House freshman and Tea Party backer Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.)

voted for the a Republican House budget that cut billions of dollars, including from many other transportation priorities. His office put out a press release scolding “out of control” and “reckless” federal spending.

But two days before, he was fighting furiously to save funding for the Port of Cates Landing, a critical piece of pork for his district that included

a 9,000-foot slack-water harbor, an adjacent 350-acre industrial park, improvements to local roads to connect it to U.S. Highway 78, and a short-line railroad to a larger rail line 28 miles away. It would, by some estimates, create thousands of jobs — a much-needed boon for the Lake County region, 37.8 percent of whose residents live below the poverty line.

It also would cost a fair amount of cash. By the spring of 2011, more than $33 million had been invested in the project; an additional $20 million — $13 million from the federal government, $7 million from the state of Tennessee — was on its way.

Rumors had it that it was going to be nixed by the House budget, so two days before the budget passed, Fincher successfully lobbied Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to sign off on a grant for the money.

Fincher isn’t the only one, the Huffington Post reports. A lot of Republicans are playing the same game. For thee:

“our nation is broke. The federal government has maxed out its credit card.”

For me:

“There’s a difference between smart federal spending and the reckless, irresponsible waste of tax dollars the American people are fed up with.”

There’s only one little problem with this argument:

every member insists that the spending he or she requests is smart, not reckless, in nature. Not everyone, however, came to office on a promise to implement cuts across the board.

You’d think the Tea Party would be going ballistic over this hypocrisy, threatening to zero out House members like these. Isn’t this taking us one step closer to Socialism?

“Obviously there is going to be infrastructure spending, and one of the jobs of a Representative is to represent their district,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. “I would say that we should be paying close attention to this process of petitioning federal agencies [for money] … But I don’t think anybody is saying that when the federal government is spending money, that no congressman should try to fund projects his district needs. I think what they are saying is we don’t want egregious, crazy, pork barrel spending.”

‘Nuff said.

Genuflecting at the Hem of the Market

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Discussing the round of pro-stimulus remarks from economics advisers who recently left the Obama administration, the Economist’s R.A. writes:

There was a strong case for policymakers to say, look, we’ll continue to act until we’ve solved the problem or markets demand that we stop. Would there be the potential for waste and inefficiency in this approach? Absolutely. There is no question that more government involvement in the economy would have generated some misallocation of resources. At the same time, America has come nowhere close to making all of the positive return public investments available. And the real economic cost of the presdent sustained, long-term employment is frightfully high.[emphasis added].

It never ceases to amaze me how many folks continue to feel the need to genuflect towards the market even when they’re calling for more government action. Just the other day the New York Times reported on the latest stats on CEO pay:

Brace yourself…. the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009….

Total C.E.O. pay hasn’t quite returned to its heady, prerecession levels — but it certainly seems headed there. Despite the soft economy, weak home prices and persistently high unemployment, some top executives are already making more than they were before the economy soured.

Pay skyrocketed last year because many companies brought back cash bonuses, says Aaron Boyd, head of research at Equilar. Cash bonuses, as opposed to those awarded in stock options, jumped by an astounding 38 percent, the final numbers show.

So corporate boards are doing what they can to shove CEO upwards while millions of Americans willing and able to work still can’t find a job, and R.A. feels compelled to say that “more government involvement in the economy would have generated some misallocation of resources”?? How can anyone say with a straight face that the economy is even mostly allocating resources efficiently right now?

Material from Van Jones' Speech

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There was a lot of great material in Van Jones’ speech at the Rebuilding the Dream kickoff — so much so that I decided I want to write up some of it to experiment with later. Here are some of my favorites:

On the myth that we are broke:
We’re not broke, we were robbed.
Saying “we are broke” is a great way to paralyze people.

Every American entrepreneurs blessed to have the best investor — America pays for roads, courts, firefighters, teachers. So: “if you do well in America, you should do well by America.”

“I am not talking about the good businesses” — small businesses, green businesses, “the corporations that are still patriotic. We honor them, we admire them.” He’s talking about the businesses whose attitude is “gimme, gimme, gimme — don’t give nothin’ back.”

The three pillars of the middle class: good government, good employers, and good citizens.

Why unions are the key to middle-class: our grandparents knew that “giving working folks the voice was the key to an economy that can maximize profit without minimizing people.”

The attitude of the superrich: “privatize again, socialize the pain. Socialism for the super wealthy, Darwinism for working folks.”

The biggest lie: “we are helpless. We can’t do anything.”

“Our slogan was never, ‘Yes He Can.’ It was ‘Yes We Can.’”

Fighting for the American dream, not for the American fantasy. The American fantasy: “everybody will be rich and buying things will make you happy.” The American dream “hard work should pay” — good American wages, benefits, dignified retirement.

The story of America: “the story of an imperfect people struggling to bring that unequal funding reality closer to that beautiful founding dream “that all men are created equal.

We are fighting for our opponents too. We don’t want them not to have a fire department near their house, we don’t want them to drink poisoned water.

The Tea Party talks about liberty.
We like the whole Pledge of Allegiance. “The Pledge of Allegiance does not stop with the word Liberty.” We believe in “Liberty and Justice for All.”