Croak of the Day: Jeff Sharlet

(Well, yesterday, anyway.)

"@JeffSharlet Masked men in all black, wearing strange armor, refuse to ID selves, carrying sticks cld be weapons. Turns out cops have a black bloc, too."

(After FireDogLake, link.)

Centrist Fiscal Responsibility

The center-right coalition which had governed Greece since 1975 broke apart in the last election. The conservative "socialist" (though perhaps it is best described as SINO--socialist in name only) PASOK party lost, in favor of more leftist parties, and the fascist Golden Dawn. The largest plurality in the election went, unsurprisingly, to the more conservative centrist New Democracy party, with the second largest to a left to far-left coalition, and the third to the fascists.

The loss of PASOK, and the realization that in Greece the "centrist" coalition had broken up, led me to reflecting on how similar Greek politics was to US. In the USA, it is the Democrats, the slightly further left element of the centrist coalition, who have suffered the most in the breaking of that coalition. In Greece, PASOK. In the USA, the Democrats have responded by becoming more conservative; in parliamentary Greece it is possible that PASOK will fail entirely, or at least become a marginal party.

I am struck by how the economic history of Greece under the centrists parallels the economic history of the USA under the centrists. The corruption was worse in Greece, with widespread tax evasion and over-borrowing in prosperous times. But in the USA, the financialists stole our health care and banking systems and the peacetime militarism has been huge, so it is not like the USA was corruption-free.

Centrists consistently claim to be fiscally responsible, and they lie. With their military over-spending, their over-borrowing to cover over-spending (as under Reagan and Bush II as well as in the last decade of Greek history), with their crony capitalism, with their tax-base decreasing austerity policies, they are anything but fiscally responsible. Their claims of fiscal responsibility, in entire, are delusions which much of society accepts, apparently because of the widespread belief that pain is more to be trusted than pleasure.

If you went to a doctor, came away feeling worse, and kept feeling worse, while the doctor kept claiming you were getting better, would you go back? Yet that is what centrists and austerians ask us to do. To Orwell's three slogans of the Party: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," "Ignorance is strength," I think I would add two more: "Poverty is wealth" and "Sickness is health."  After decades of centrist policies, and the abysmal failure of those policies, I don't see any reasons to believe at all.

A focus on debt, and debt alone, in government budgeting is fiscal irresponsibility.

Conservatism is as much in love with violence and pain as nihilist anarchism, and conservatism is far more popular.

I believe that health is health, and wealth is wealth. Much simpler that way.

On the failure of welfare reform

Dr. Jared Bernstein:

Excellent reporting in today’s NYT on whether welfare reform worked as well as almost everyone says it did. The conclusion, as we’ve stressed in lots of recent work at CBPP, is that it is at best a fair-weather ship: it only appears to work when there’s lots of job opportunities for the low-income, single parents.

Croak, posted in comments on that blog. Posted here as a record, and in case Dr. Bernstein doesn't pass it through moderation.

This was made possible by the conservative Democrats; it was proposed by Bill Clinton. The same faction to which Obama belongs, which controls the Democratic Party, and which, in coalition with the Wall Street Republicans, now governs the USA and will probably do so for at least the rest of the decade – that is, if the Tea Party Republicans don’t simply take over.

“Screaming in language that no one understands / Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands / When we wiped out the bosses / And stormed through the wall / Of the prison they told us would outlast us all // Marat we’re poor / And the poor stay poor / Marat don’t make us wait any more. / We want our rights and we don’t care how / We want a revolution – now.”--Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade.

Croak of the Day

Is this really my first post of 2012? So it is. Well, I've been busy. And it's just a "what he said."

Anyhow, today's Croak of the Day goes to Robert Reich.

The Republican right thinks Paul’s views on the economy are responsible for this fire among the young. I just now squared off with Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore on Larry’s CNBC program, both of whom are convinced young people are attracted by Paul’s strict adherence to the views of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and Paul’s desire to move America back to the gold standard.

Wrong. The young are flocking to Ron Paul because he wants to slice military spending, bring our troops home, stop government spying on American citizens for the purpose of homeland security, and legalize pot.--link

Occupy the Ballot Box?

Yesterday, in Balloon Juice comments, I wrote:

There are factions of Occupy that are quite radical; it is an anarchist movement, after all. Rather like a US political party internally, come to think of it. Link

Could it be? Could Occupy be the seed of the next major US political party? Let's see: young people, check. Women, check. Libertarian left, check.

Maybe...

On Occupy and Violence

In answer to Ian Welsh, advocating that Occupy tolerate violent anarchism.

Occupy is an anarchist movement with or without the violence. I do not see how inviting a crackdown is going to help Occupy as a political movement: when it comes to violence, Occupy is not a patch on the government, or even private security forces. Occupy's great strength lies in its widespread popular support, and in the real grievances it gives voice to. If it turns into a factionalized violent movement, it will lose that support and much of its power.

[Later thought: violence is inherently authoritarian. Can anarchism ever be violent?]

Political Spectrum, 1931 vs. 2011

[In response to Jay Ackroyd at Balloon Juice, comment, Eschaton, post, and DougJ at Balloon Juice, post. Originally posted in response to DougJ, lightly edited.]

A generation ago what Jay and Stuart are calling “centrism” and what you are calling “centrist corporatism” would have been simply called “conservatism.” Two generations ago, what you are calling “the outright insanity of conservatism” would have been called fascism.

In FDR’s time, the far right of the political spectrum was fascist and the far left was communist; the center was what FDR called liberal. Now the political spectrum is between the Tea Party Republicans—fascist in all but name—and the liberals. Unsurprisingly, then, the center of debate in Congress is what Doug has called “centrist corporatism.”

We had, until recently, lost the far left of the political spectrum, and the moderate had been marginalized. The how and why of this are not entirely clear. The anti-union activism of Reagan and his successors was part of the story, as was the fall of the Soviet Union. Probably the imperial Presidency; the intense militarism of the Cold War period, which continues to this day; and the consolidation and politicization of the national news media that was enabled by Reagan-era policies also contributed

So a big part of the story was a successful reactionary movement that has emerged into politics as “centrism.”

And now Occupy, enabled by new technology, ideology, and vaguely Gandhian tactics, brings back left anarchism. It’s an astonishing development, and one which I only dimly foresaw. In stated policy Occupy is liberal: at the popular center. But in practice it is pure left anarchist. How this will play out in electoral politics—or if it will play out, or if it will be silenced for years to come—remains to be seen.

Thinking it over, I think I see the short-term triumph of centrism. Occupy has already shifted the terms of debate far enough that the radical right looks less credible and I think this will tell in the 2012 elections. But I do not see actual liberal, or even a bit further left, policies being adopted at the Federal level for some years to come. I've been predicting 2020 as the watershed year and this still seems plausible: it will take time to raise a new generation of liberal politicians and bring the Supreme Court back to the true center. But just possibly it will be faster: if the Obama administration, like that of LBJ, decides that it is best to side with the reformers. On the other hand, it could also be slower: the reactionaries are deeply entrenched and very wealthy.

How do we shift the balance? Can we?