Cold Shot

Not everybody loves The Guvner, I guess.

An Email

For my intellectual friends:

AMAZING WORD GAME

Did you know that the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells "race car"?

And that "eat" is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, "ate"?

And if you rearrange the letters in "Tea Party Republicans," and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the fuck up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefits-grabbing, resource-sucking, violence-prone, hate-spewing, hypocritical assholes, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black, so get the fuck over it."

Unconvincing

This is ridiculously powerful, but it's (prob'ly) not gonna matter.

First, she's obviously an egghead, and we all know now that all eggheads are liberal tools of the liberal academic establishment, and the liberal media.  Science cannot be trusted because it keeps insisting that we address "What Is", rather than freeing us to indulge ourselves in "If Only".

Second, she keeps referring to the EPA, and (here again) we all know that the EPA is just a bunch of Big Gubmint looters and parasites bent on obstructing the free market system and denying our noble entrepreneurs their God-given right to do whatever the fuck they want.

You Can't Go Home

The GOP started to lose me in Reagan's 2nd term (Charles Keating and the rise of the TheoCons, Ed Meese's censorship commission, Iran-Contra, etc);  I then struggled mightily to vote for Senior Bush because of the Willie Horton ad; and then had no problem at all going with Clinton* twice - mostly because he was the best Republican president since Eisenhower (IMHO) - but also because his guys weren't pulling shit like The Arkansas Project.

(*large bunches of Clinton's achievements had some pretty great short-term effects.  The problem is that they also helped get us into our current abysmal pickle; but that's a slightly different rant.)

By way of truth-out.org and The New Republic, here's some good smart analysis of what's been going on.

Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery. --John Judis, tnr.com

-and-

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. --Mike Lofgren, truthout.org

My conservative instincts tell me to stick with the program.  ie: when the problem is that democracy is at risk, the solution is never less democracy.  Even when the system itself is corrupt (maybe especially when the system is corrupt), you can't strengthen democracy by abandoning the principles of that democracy.

Rebound

Racism.  Racist rhetoric.  Race resentment.  Affirmative Action Backlash.  Southern Strategy (Repubs).  Modified Southern Strategy (Dems).

Wishful thinkers have pushed the concept of a Post-Racial America since about 2006, when Obama really started to get up some speed.  Maybe 'wishful thinking' is the wrong description for it, because I see a pretty strong tendency in my own kids to categorize people in ways that seem to have a lot more to do with behavior than with race.  One thing that's been kinda jarring for me is that when I've talked with them about their attitudes toward "different kinds of people", they've all but told me I'm a racist my own self.  So maybe the social evolution thing is working the way it should, in that I can claim to be somewhat less racist than my dad was, and that I think I can say with some certainty that I'm  a lot less racist than his dad was.  It doesn't mean the racism problem is fixed, but things are better than they were when I was a kid.

Anyway, we have a system of electoral politics that looks and feels exactly like The Cola Wars, or McDonald's vs Burger King, or Ford against Chevy; or whatever, but it's no longer about finding ways to connect people thru their shared experience and aspirations; it's about getting a mob together based on who and/or what they despise and/or fear.

Crooks and Liars

Oh, and BTW -  it's all Obama's fault.

We Are So Fucked

Labor problems aren't going to get any better any time soon.  We've been pumping out MBAs by the carload, and they're working up thru the system with a kind of single-minded focus on Productivity Improvement as the one true path to profitability.  "Do more with less" is all well and good - everybody needs to be mindful of conserving resources and keeping costs down.  But when you take any one aspect of good management and turn it into an obsession, you're asking for trouble.

Here's today's formula:

  Economic Growth
- Productivity Growth
  Employment Growth

So, you're either making the same amount of stuff with fewer people, or you're making more stuff with the same number of people.  The thinking is that it doesn't really matter which way it tips, if you concentrate on Productivity, the bottom line stays healthy.

If you view it from inside the US, then we're just cannibalizing ourselves, and before long the whole thing craters because there aren't enough workers who can afford to buy the stuff they're making.  But Capital has no respect for political boundaries or any other civilizing conventions.  A market of 300 million Americans matters a lot less when your Potential Customer Pool is close to 7 BILLION.  Of course, that means we're cannibalizing the whole world now, but we believe strongly that by spreading the stress over a much broader surface, we minimize the problems and (most important) we postpone the crash long enough to find some solutions.  Color me dubious.  In the long run, it's still not sustainable.

We have to figure out how to rebalance.  There's always tension between Private and Public; Individual and Collective; Labor and Management; and and and.  It's a Yin-and-Yang universe, but that doesn't make it strictly binary, where it's always and only a choice between one extreme or the other.  It's not a Net Zero thing.  You don't have to lose for me to win.  And if everybody has to lose for me to win, then what's the point?  I can scramble to the top, slaying my competitors along the way; chasing down the gazelles according to my leonine instincts; cracking bones and sucking out the marrow of every deal, blah blah blah - but what have I accomplished?  In the end, I'm standing alone on a hill in the middle of a dead world.

I reject the premise that Economics has to be bloodless and dispassionate and without heart; that business has to be about conquest and consumption.  I expect people to conduct themselves honorably.

Employment etc

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, government accounts for about 8% of jobs in the United States. Here's the breakdown using numbers easily accessible on the BLS website (all numbers from 2006 or 2007):

1,774,000 Federal government civilian employees, excluding Post Office
615,000 Post Office
1,172,913 Military enlisted
230,577 Military Officers
2,424,000 State government (excluding education and hospitals)
5,594,000 Local government (excluding education and hospitals)
That's a total of 11,810,490 government jobs.

The total number of jobs in the U.S. in 2006 was 150,600,000, so government employment makes up 7.84% of all jobs.

In 2007, the U.S. population (according to the Census Bureau) was 301,621,157, so about 4% of Americans are employed by the government.
According to a study by Paul C. Light, a government professor at New York University, the Federal Government also employed 14.6 million contractors in 2006. This was an increase of 2.5 million since 2002, and the study attributes the increase directly to contractors hired as part of the war on terror. (reported in the Washington Post)

So the logical next step is to see what the numbers are for other countries.  If I ever get that together, I'll let ya now.

Read More

Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.  From the late 1600's thru about 1875, it was a recognized clinical condition; a mental illness.  It fell from grace as Clinical Psychology grew into a real thing.

In light of some of the cultural and political developments over the last 20 years or so, it seems maybe we'd do well to bring it back as a diagnosis.

Bill Boyarski has a great piece at truthdig a while back that hit a couple of chords:

What the tea party, the House Republicans and Noonan have in common is something very simple: They believe the United States should not be led by Barack Obama and that we should not accept the change and progress that his election represented. This belief goes beyond arguments over the debt and the deficit. It is deep and irreconcilable. It is the reason why the right won’t compromise.

But when I look at the Tea Partiers playing their little games, and TheoCons who bomb women's clinics and shoot doctors, and the Islamic idiots who insist on operating under 10th century rules, and now this Breivik dipwad in Norway, what I see is a major spasm of panic that a lot of people experience as they get more desperate to maintain their positions of privilege and power.  In "the west", we get to add the complicating factor of people trying to maintain the supremacy of white folks.

Trends of the last few years indicate Tom Friedman is indeed the wrongheaded douche his reputation says he is. So maybe once we wake up and realize we're all 3rd-worlders now, we'll start to see that we're more similar than different after all.  It's possible that the economy forces this reality on us.  The study of Economics (and the management of an economy) are more art than science, but "the economy" is reality itself.

Cultural struggles and political games get us caught up in a lot of wishful thinking.  We start to believe that slogans and bumper stickers will somehow change the law of supply and demand.  Or that by voting for a particular candidate, we can actually get something for nothing.  Or that the natural business cycle of expansion and contraction can be negated if we adopt a particular economic ideology.  But guess what - that up and down business cycle?  That's the economy breathing - and it's generally considered a bad idea to stop breathing.

I don't know how to tie this up in a neat little package - I'm just making some observations right now.

(Re)Stating Some Of The Problems

Fix yourself a sandwich and let the awesomeness wash over you like the warm autumn sunshine.

This is kind of a golden oldie now, but it seems never to grow stale - I guess I'm a hopeless wonk with a shameless crush on Elizabeth Warren.

Part Of The Problem

A complaint that I find fairly typical on the part of a lot of Americans who consider themselves "regular folk" is that Government is filled with people they disdain as elitist, while at the same time, they spout the virtues of evolving an elite class of leaders in the private sector.

Why is Darwinism commendable and preferable in Business, but dangerous and damnable in Government?

You can try to argue that Government has the power to coerce thru the threat of violence, but I think it's obvious that as Business captures control of Government, then it acquires the coercive powers of Government and you end up with the same effect.

Again: If your basic premise is false, then your conclusion cannot be true.