Here are the two contradictory facts you must keep in your mind if you wish to understand American politics today:
- Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
- by Thomas Frank
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- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
1. We are entering the fifth year of a profound economic slump that was brought on, in large part, by our government's failure adequately to supervise financial institutions – a matter of deliberate national policy that was justified over the years by the familiar neoliberal faith that market forces would cause financial institutions to regulate themselves.
2. The main political effect of this slump has been the strengthening of the right wing of the Republican Party, with its doctrinaire insistence on further deregulation; in fact, of the various Republicans who have a realistic shot at the presidency, each one has publicly declared that regulation is one of the greatest evils facing the nation and has sworn to liberate banks and financial institutions from government supervision.
Now, maybe you are one of those inclined to dismiss Republican politicians as preening hypocrites whose moral posturing is possible only thanks to their followers' apparent separation from reality. And once you get over their absurdity, it occurs to you that they are also dangerous. Their ideas, if implemented, would crash the economy, wreck the regulatory state, exacerbate the already outrageous gap between the rich and everybody else. This can't be happening, you conclude. These people can't possibly win. But of course this is what's happening, and there's a very good chance that in this year's election, one of these Republicans will be chosen to be the next president of the US.
Bank deregulation was, for decades, the consensus wisdom of both American political parties. Visionary, tech-friendly Democrats joined with stern, patriarchal Republicans to circumvent the country's banking rules and to mute its supervisory agencies. In the noblest spirit of bipartisanship, they either repealed basic banking laws outright or took steps to ensure that such laws were no longer enforced. Self-interest is what would make bankers play fairly and oil companies drill safely.
Under the guidance of this doctrine, America's leaders exempted certain derivatives from regulatory oversight; they watered down requirements that banks balance their risk with safe assets; they overruled state-level predatory lending laws; they exempted credit default swaps from regulation as insurance products and they dialled back the Federal Reserve's regulatory powers.
In 2008, it all went wrong. The country's financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result – as nearly every serious observer agrees – of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. Unregulated lenders, we now know, pushed millions of Americans into home loans they could not afford. Much-deregulated investment banks packaged those lousy loans up into investments that the nation's ratings agencies promptly declared to be of the first quality. Insurance companies issued totally unregulated financial instruments against the possibility that these crappy investments would ever fail. And when the real-estate bubble inevitably burst, all of it plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the 1930s.
The reaction to these excesses was the feeble Dodd-Frank act that Congress passed in 2010, which is supposed to prevent some of the more outrageous financial misbehaviour of the last few years. And the reaction to that is the great crusade against the very idea of regulation that is presently burning its way back and forth across the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, whose elections began this month. It has suddenly dawned on Republican leaders that government supervision of the economy is a liberty-strangling imposition.
And so, almost exactly three years after the meltdown of the stock market in 2008, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the man who may well be our next president, saw fit to blame virtually the entire business slump on Dodd-Frank – it "kills the economy", he intoned. Representative Michele Bachmann, the Pasionaria of the small-business way, frequently reminded the voters of Iowa that she made the first attempt to repeal the hated Dodd-Frank law. "Our biggest problem right now," she has also declared, "is our regulatory burden." Texas governor Rick Perry agrees: "It's the regulatory world that is killing America," he told a debate audience in November (the transcript tells us that this line was greeted with "applause"). Perry's fellow Texan, representative Ron Paul, tells us we need to repeal not only Dodd-Frank but also the feeble regulatory law enacted in the wake of the Enron disaster a decade ago. Rick Santorum, former senator of Pennsylvania, has informed the nation, "I'm going to repeal every single Obama-era regulation that costs business over a hundred million dollars. Repeal them all." So intolerable is it that former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich suggests that we need to put the bill's authors – Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank – in prison.
Set those markets free – the 'true believers' (from top left): Mitt Romney; Newt Gingrich; Michelle Bachmann; Ron Paul; Glenn beck; Rick Perry.
Photographs: AP (2); Getty (2); Reuters; AFP/Getty
To rage so violently against financial supervision is, admittedly, a peculiar way of responding to a severe downturn brought on by a largely unsupervised financial sector. It is not how Americans reacted in the past. Up until now, the social patterns of hard times were thought to be a simple thing, as impersonal and as mechanical as the forces that shutter our factories and bid down the price of our stocks. Markets disintegrate, layoffs mount, foreclosures begin, and before you know it, the people are in the streets, screaming for blood. We grow desperate, anxious, rebellious. We demand that the government do something about it – that they punish the perps, that they rescue the victims. We look for insurance against further catastrophe, and stricter regulation of the economy, to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But that's not what happened in 2009 and 2010. What we saw is something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times. Before this recession, people who had been cheated by bankers almost never took that occasion to demand that bankers be freed from "red tape" and the scrutiny of the law. Before 2009, the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.
The achievement is even more remarkable when we remember the prevailing opinion-climate of 2008. After the disasters of the George W Bush presidency had culminated in the catastrophe on Wall Street, the citizens of Beltway consensus-land all agreed upon the direction in which the nation was travelling. Conservatism's decades-long reign was at an end. An era of leftwing activism was at hand. The thinking behind all this was straight cause-and-effect stuff. The 2008 financial crisis had clearly discredited the conservative movement's signature ideas; political scandal and incompetence had wrecked its ethical claims; and conservatism's taste for strident rhetoric was supposedly repugnant to a new generation of post-partisan voters. Besides, there was the obvious historical analogy that one encountered everywhere in 2008: we had just been through an uncanny replay of the financial disaster of 1929-1931, and now, murmured the pundits, the automatic left turn of 1932 was at hand, with the part of Franklin Roosevelt played by the newly elected Barack Obama.
All of this was reasonable enough if you accepted assumptions that were thought to be obvious in those days: when a political group screwed up, people didn't vote for it any longer. When elected officials wandered too far into the fields of ideology, some mysterious force of political gravity always pulled them back to the "centre". The right, under its beloved and calculating leader, George Bush, had disgraced itself; now it was the other team's turn to bat. There were supposed to be 30-year cycles for political epochs, and the Republicans' 30 years were up. That they might seek a way out of their predicament by turning their back on the centre and peddling an even more concentrated version of their creed was not, by the conventional thinking of those innocent days, a viable option.
But, as it turned out, the direction the parties moved was less important than how they explained the catastrophes facing the nation. And conservative Republicans had an explanation. Everywhere you looked, they declared, you saw a colossal struggle between average people and the "elites" who would strip away our freedoms. The huge bailouts that followed the financial crisis, they said, were evidence of a design on our savings by both government and Wall Street. Regulation, too, was merely a conspiracy of the big guys against the little.
Rather than acknowledge that they had enjoyed 30 years behind the wheel, they declared that they had never really had their turn in the first place. The true believers had never actually been in charge, the market had never truly been free, and therefore the disastrous events of recent years cast no discredit on conservative ideas themselves. The solution wasn't to reconsider deregulation; it was to double down, to work even more energetically for the laissez-faire utopia.
Pure idealism of this sort is unusual in American politics, however, and the jaded men of the commentariat sat back and waited for the system to punish the wayward ones, for the magnetic pull of the "centre" to work its corrective magic. But this time the gods didn't intervene in the usual way. In 2010, a radicalised Republican party scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades. In the House of Representatives, an amazing 63 seats changed from blue to red. It had been only two years since Barack Obama's own great victory, but now the populist fury was all on the other side.
The story was the same across the country. Liberals were wiped out, and the rightmost reaches of the Republican party rode to triumph. National Journal went through the exit polls in January 2011 and discovered that, nationwide, blue-collar whites chose Republican congressional candidates by an amazing margin of two to one. In a demonstration of "profound resistance to Obama and his agenda", the demographic that had been moved by capitalism's last systemic crisis to hand the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt four times in a row now resurrected the politics of Herbert Hoover.
How did the traditional views of the great bankers become the rallying cries of a populist revolt – a populist revolt ignited by the outrageous misbehaviour of said bankers? Well, by focusing not on the decade of folly preceding the collapse, but on the culminating event of the financial crisis: the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009. No one seemed to know what credit default swaps were, but these bailouts were a villainy Americans could understand. They would be costlier, Americans were told, than the entire Vietnam War, or the Louisiana Purchase, or just about anything else. And they were unmistakably bad: the bailouts were the avenue by which our government obligingly moved the financial industry's losses over to the taxpayers.
In different times, the bank bailouts might have become the rallying-point of a revitalised left. After all, the bailouts were clearly of a piece with the misbehaviour that had come before: the deregulation of the banks, the bonus culture, the wrecking of the supervisory state. Business-friendly conservatives had been behind each of these, and then business-friendly conservatives had knitted together the bailout bill for the same rotten reason: to give the bankers whatever they wanted. Reformers might have depicted the bailouts as the final chapter in the great book of fraud, the episode in which Wall Street used the captured state to transfer its debts to the public.
But of course they didn't. Democrats did the bidding of the Bush administration and passed the bailout bill, and then Obama obligingly continued Bush's bailout policies without interruption. This was supposed to be statesmanship, but it also allowed the right to grab the opportunity to define the debate, using bailouts to shift the burden of villainy from Wall Street to government. For them, the bailouts were the only part of the crisis story that mattered – not the derivatives or the deregulation – and its conservative-Republican parentage made no difference.
For this sleight of hand to work, conservatives had to surmount an enormous cognitive barrier. By and large, the people who designed the hated bailouts – and the banks that benefited from them – had played on the conservative team. It was no problem to cast the Democrat Obama as a freedom-crushing dictator. But what to make of the fact that the ones who hustled the nation into this state of tyrannical un-freedom were, a few short years ago, free-market paladins themselves?
For the conservatives of 2008 and 2009, that left only one possibility: to swerve farther rightward and declare that the previous generation of conservatives had never really been true free marketeers at all. They even excommunicated their old hero, George Bush, as a traitor to the cause of freedom. Bush helped matters along by confessing that, "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system", a line that will forever live in infamy on the websites of the insurgent right.
And thus did free-market disaster give rise to a bitter but utopian faith in free markets. A particularly telling expression of the new attitude can be found in a 2009 pamphlet called Spread This Wealth. In order to teach readers about the nature of capitalism, author C Jesse Duke, who also sells a Tea Party flag of his own design, follows the doings of an imaginary primitive man who finds a stick, kills a deer, and trades things with other primitive men. Mr Duke then makes this pronouncement: this whole process of free markets and the trading of time and energy is just the natural order of the world. A tree exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide. A fire exchanges heat for oxygen. Atoms exchange electrons to become other atoms. Plants collect light to make chlorophyll, which nourishes animals, which become food for other animals and man, and so on. Everything in nature is constantly exchanging. So the free exchange of time and energy between people is the God-designed, natural order. Conflicts erupt when this order is upset.
Remember the larger situation in which Duke felt moved to pen these remarkable words. Our economy was in ruins thanks to complex, unregulated financial derivatives. Monopolies and oligopolies were everywhere. Hourly wages had been falling for decades. But according to this voice of protest, the way to make sense out of it all was by imagining a state of economic nature. By presuming that God Himself wants government to stay out of it.
That we don't have pure capitalism in America is not a revelation vouchsafed to the great Tea Party awakening. For decades, the idea has been a staple of the left, where the limited-capitalist model is generally understood as a good thing. The state is involved in the economy all right, the libs say, but that's because it has to be. A complete free market would be a disaster, something not even the business community itself wants to try. The real problem, from the liberal perspective, is that government doesn't go far enough – it merely doles out public subsidies of one kind or another while shareholders of private companies walk off with the profits, in the now familiar scenario of socialised risk and privatised gain.
The revitalised right simply turned this argument upside down. Yes, government had its finger in every segment of the economy, and that's what was to blame for everything that had happened. Market forces had never been truly free, and therefore they bore none of the blame for our current predicament. And so the obvious answer arose from a thousand megaphones: get government out of the picture completely. Until the day free enterprise was totally unleashed, capitalism itself could be held responsible for nothing.
In order for markets to deliver us to our destiny, we had to become mindful of their freedom. And ordinary people by the millions heard the call. In October 2010, the populist TV personality Glenn Beck exhorted his host of alienated followers to donate money to the US Chamber of Commerce – the biggest, baddest business lobby in all of Washington, DC – on the grounds that "they are us". Ordinarily, of course, gifts to the Chamber are denominated in the hundreds of thousands and are made by enormous corporations, but such a deluge of small donations followed Beck's appeal that it crashed the Chamber's servers.
And thus are our choices spread before us. On the one hand, "socialism"; on the other, the laissez-faire utopia. One system is "capitalism", the "American Way of Life"; it is in harmony with the rhythms of nature itself; but the other is something alien, something impure, something dishonest – and something that props up Wall Street banks when they should rightfully have failed.
Taking this tack has allowed the renaissance right to do a very remarkable thing: to pretend to be an enemy of big business, on the grounds that big business is insufficiently capitalist. This was the point of an amazing 2009 essay in Forbes magazine penned by Congressman Paul Ryan and entitled, Down With Big Business. The giant corporation, Ryan wrote, could not be counted upon to defend capitalism in its hour of need: "It's up to the American people – innovators and entrepreneurs, small business owners… to take a stand."
And take a stand they have done. From a thousand Tea Party gatherings, the revitalised right learned to mimic the historical left. At FreedomWorks, the influential free-market pressure group run by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, there is reportedly a deliberate effort to look and sound like a leftwing organisation. Activists that the group trains are asked to learn the leadership secrets of the Communist party and to read a book by the famous neighbourhood organiser Saul Alinsky; their idea for a big march on Washington came to them from another favourite text: a famous history of non-violent protest. To fill the streets with demonstrators rallying for free markets – why, according to Armey, "In Washington, DC, this is known as radical. Even dangerous." It is so radical, so dangerous that "the establishment doesn't like it one bit".
On the surface, the newest right sounds remarkably like the old, old left. The most extraordinary pseudo-populist enterprise has been that of the aforementioned rightwing TV entertainer Glenn Beck. In 2009 he launched what he called the "9-12 Project" with a tribute to the "forgotten man" (a favourite phrase of the Depression-era left) and an invitation to meet people from "all across the country" – that is, "regular people like you". The movement was to be a thing of local chapters, mass rallies, mosaics made up of thousands of snapshots, and saccharine talk about how capitalist salvation lay somehow in the collective – that when angry citizens got together to revel in their Americanness, they would no longer "feel powerless". The proposal soon went from all-American solidarity to a dark vision of the insiders who are manipulating us: once you pull away the curtain, you realise that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don't surround us at all. We surround them.
It was a powerful invocation of the archetypal 30s image: the masses; the righteous millions; the people. Once again Americans were marching for liberty; once again they had their eye on a utopian economic scheme. But this time we had set off in entirely the wrong direction.
• This is an edited extract from Pity The Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, to be published on 26 January by Harvill Secker at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (including UK mainland p&p), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.
Comments
6 January 2012 8:25PM
The US Congress is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporations. That a government, wholly-owned by corporations, could possibly endanger corporations is a topic for the mentally ill and psychopathic folks who run governments and corporations to ponder.
One can't even slip Benito Mussolini's "cigarette paper between industry and government" in the US anymore-- it's too thick.
6 January 2012 9:48PM
Inevitable, in fact: it's exactly what they called Roosevelt. They were still calling him that when I was in school in the '50s.
This is the genius of the Tea Party. The Tea Party is the Republican base, right? Either it's the Republican base, or somehow millions of middle-aged and elderly independents just appeared in our midst overnight - which, by the way, many people really believe. But since they're now the Tea Party, they're against both the corrupt, elitist parties that have stolen our cash and turned it over to Barney Frank. And their message is, stop all that oppressive governing this very minute!
Talk to one: really, talk to one: oh, the Democrats and the Republicans are equally bad! There's not a dime's worth of difference between them, they're all as crooked as they could possibly be! They should all be thrown out - imprisoned, actually - and the government must be prevented from doing anything at all. Really, talk to one: that's what they'll tell you. Michele Bachmann isn't a Republican, you silly! She's a Tea Party Patriot, and just like me she wants her country back, because we've finally had just about enough of these crooked elitist usurpers.
6 January 2012 11:44PM
I know it's a cliché that Republicans claim that government doesn't work and then get elected and prove that it doesn't, but I appreciate the explanation. I've been watching in gap-jawed incredulity for several years wondering what in the hell has happened to my country when Ron Paul, who wants the federal government to do damn near nothing at all, can be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Of course most of the people who would vote for him would be horrified if his policies were actually enacted.
Much is made clear when you learn that the Tea Party was largely founded and funded by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers.
Too many Tea Party people are focusing their outrage on the government instead of, like Occupy Wall Street, where it belongs.
7 January 2012 1:09AM
How much money has Obama received from Wall Street?
How much money could he stand to lose in his re-election campaign if Wall Street turn against him?
Obama talks like he's on the side of OWS, while placating WS with the status quo. While Republicans accuse him of burdening WS with regulation!?!?!? It's a sorry, sorry situation.
7 January 2012 1:13AM
"The problem with the financial crisis wasn't that big business was too free from governance – it was the opposite. Or so says the Republican party."
That because most of the republicans own the very companies that are exploiting the worlds poor to make themselves rich.
Republican has become a by word for legalised modern capitalist facism that is disgusting and a word I really hate!
Obama is no different. I guess some senators in the US are correct in saying that both parties are the same just opposition in the media.
The rich protecting the rich and giving false hope to the minions who believe they are in opposition.
Its happening here too.
Which labour voter voted for Student fees??
7 January 2012 1:13AM
Obama should become a republican.
7 January 2012 1:16AM
They may say it, because it gets them votes, but aside from Ron Paul I don't think they believe it. Little or no regulation lets them make hay when the sun shines and get away with shady practices, but when they crash or their rivals start taking more of the pie US business is totally into regulation. They want government subsidies, bailouts, trade barriers, and other such things because they are not brave enough for the really free market.
7 January 2012 1:28AM
the thing about all modern democracies is the waste, the terrific senseless waste of resouces.. even when they do the right thing, they do it the wrong way.
I hope Ron Paul is elected ... because in all honesty I'd rather have governments do nothing, most are inept, a healthy amount are corrupt ... I live to see anarchy reign
they all tax like socialist, they spend on real front line essentials like misers
what's the point of it all, when they all look to profiteer from misery, there always money for bombs and bullets.
and use classic divide and rule tactics; its all immigrants spongers and cheats
7 January 2012 2:20AM
There's an article somewhere else in the Guardian referring to the ideological abdication by the riight the obligation to tackle climate change. I suppose part of the ideology is denial although that strikes me as special pleading.
Regulations control industrial emissions, workplace safety, building construction, use of the road, keep children in schools and out of chimneys. One wonders how far back these people want to turn the clock.
7 January 2012 2:41AM
What an excellent article. I essentially totally agree with the analysis.
I have been following this taking shape, though much less coherently than our author here, of course.
Well said. I'm glad someone else has noticed.
Ron Paul is a great example atm: he's the most doctrinaire free market fundamentalist and ideologue yet he's cast as the greatest threat to the status quo. His supporters see no contradiction between Occupy and Paul's extreme Austrian free-market views.
As the author suggests, there's a lot more behind these cries of "freedom" than it appears.
Whilst the Republican party (and Ron Paul in particular) have benefited from changing/manipulating the debate, the far-right has been pursuing the same (Imo the far-right bears much responsibility for the propagation of this inversion of reality - because it suits them too. Notice how they dig Ron Paul?)
One of the main vectors for this transmission imo has been 911 Troof - a movement which embraces a remarkable mix of elements of organised fascist propaganda and that of the Austrian Miseian uber-free-market crew. There's been a real crossover there, and 911 Troof was instrumental.
The inversion even carries into the idea that the liberal-state is fascist. [The false notion that fascism=corporatism is widespread in America - hence any economy with a mix of private and public can be considered "fascist" (in their view) and hence a target for suitable opprobrium.]
This is partly why Ron Paul is so popular with fascists, and why Paul's supporters are so open to fascism (even though they deny it, of course, and even though they are especially fond of attacking "fascism".) What they're actually attacking is not fascism, but rather a mixed and interventionist economy. Seems confusing, but it need be understood that Nazi's can happily attack Eco-fascists, Femi-Nazis, Liberal Nazis, 'Nazi-like' Israel and Nazi-like Jews, etc.
Anyway. The fact Republicans and free-marketeering 'libertarians' can now popularly pose over-regulation as the culprit for our economic travails is astonishing: surely a case of double-think.
7 January 2012 2:49AM
I'm not sure how lack of federal government works. Does it mean you fire everyone in all the federal agencies except for those charged with the defence of their nation? That would make a reality of the theoretical sovereignty enjoyed by each state. Voters in state elections would actually come closer to imposing control over those elected. particularly on economic policy. This would, of course, presuppose each state was responsible for setting and enforcing local taxes. No redistribution of a federal tax would be required. The Pentagon would be funded by a surcharge on the revenue collected by all states. This would make political leadership based in Washington unnecessary. There would no longer be an federal institutions to run and no law-making powers because that conflicts with state sovereignty. The only possible survivor would be the Supreme Court. Like the Privy Council, it would offer a final level of appeal from a state.
Or does this misunderstand the Tea Party's position?
7 January 2012 3:16AM
Romney might well be our next president? hahahaha! good one!
7 January 2012 3:22AM
@natashafatale What does it mean to say "I want my country back"? what is it that you want "back"? Do you want us to return to the days of Vietnam and the draft? do you want us to return to the days when there was no Medicare? do you want us to return to the time when women couldn't vote or when there was no ERA? do you want to return to the 1980s, when so many of us were terrified Reagan was going to lead us into a war with the USSR? do you want to return to 2001 and that horrible autumn? If the Federal Gov't was to lose much of its power and your state, whatever it is, was given more control of your life, how would it impact you? You might see your local public education system fall apart, you might see taxes skyrocket since the state won't get any Federal dollars to help pay for anything, you might see your streets go unpaved and streetlights unlit. So tell us, what exactly do you envision?
7 January 2012 3:46AM
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7 January 2012 3:55AM
Well, there's some dispute about that. What I hear is, I want that N-word out of the White House, and I want him out now. But I know people who actually say these things and they swear that it doesn't mean that at all, not at all... they just, you know... want their country back. We've been taken over by - or handed over to - some unnamable foreignness, and we need to get so upset about it that it will go away.
And it's just a coincidence that it happened during the unconstitutional reign of the usurper from Kenya.
7 January 2012 5:03AM
Really sharp analysis; I think I'll buy Mr Frank's book. The thing I would say you have to keep in mind if you wish to understand American politics is that the myth of the 'rugged individual' makes an appeal to libertarian absolutism a trump card.
It's difficult to get the point across in Europe that many Americans are opposed to high-speed rail not for the cost, but because a preference for rail might somehow limit their ability to drive wherever they want on a whim. The fact that some banker somewhere is being limited in his ability to 'pursue happiness' (a phrase which is taken to mean 'make as much money as you can') is an affront to the national religion.
And so Republicans are able to go to this well whenever it suits them. 'Freedom' will always beat the alternative, even if the freedom in question (say, to offer poor people loans they can't afford at interest rates even legitimate gangsters would be embarrassed about) isn't fair or doesn't make sense.
A few Republicans maintain this Paulite libertarian absolutism no matter what, which is a sort of anti-societal nihilism that you can respect, even if you don't like it. But most will switch their appeals from the national religion to the Christian one when there's something the hippies and fornicators are doing that upsets them, whence legitimate charges of hypocrisy.
7 January 2012 5:35AM
It's the fault of the American media. They are the most useless, cowardly, and egoistic set of journalists the world has ever seen. They will report obviously false premises as facts. Wonder what will be written about them in a couple of decades.
7 January 2012 5:57AM
To understand the United States of America it is important not to underestimate the ignorance of the American people.
It is a country where around 40% of the people are young earth creationists. If you believe that the earth is 6000 years old you are not only rejecting evolution you are rejecting science as a whole. You might as well be convinced that the earth is flat.
Combine the science illiterate population with a two-party political system where it costs a billion dollar to be elected president. A country where corporations are regarded as people with “free speech”. The result is an utterly corrupt political system. The author is not saying anything about how Obama has also been bought by the financial industry and kept the same anti-regulation gang from Goldmann in power.
The basic message to take away from the US educational system, political system and its FOX type propaganda media is that it is what the corporate interest wants it to be and the corporations get what they pay for. Well done Koch brothers .....
7 January 2012 6:28AM
David 91 writes:
Yes, David, you are misunderstanding the Tea Party. It, and so called Libertarians like Ron Paul, want the federal govt to have ever more power over the reproductive rights of women. They are busily engaged in trying to pass laws (both at the federal and state levels) to make not only abortion but most forms of birth control illegal.
In the US most states already have state income tax as well as sales tax. States also receive help from the federal government. As things stand, the more progressive states (the blue states on an electoral map) have been supporting the red states. That is, the most conservative states asking for "smaller government" would be bankrupt without federal help.
A striking example is Ron Paul, who decries the power of the federal govt yet ranks fifth among House members in the amount of "earmarks" he has and is requesting for his Texas district (check out the nonpartisan website "Fact Check" among other sources). (earmarks are reqests for money for special projects in a Congressmember's district that are added to a bill dealing with an unrelated topic).
Of course if the agenda you describe would come to pass, there would no longer eny need for an armed force to "defend the nation" because there would no longer be a nation. Why do suppose the Supreme Court would somehow still be there if the states secede from the union? Its purpose is to interpret laws in terms of the constitution implemented when the US became a nation as well as the constitutional amendments voted along the way (constitutional amendments have to be proposed by a two third majority in both chambers of Congress, and then ratified by three fourth of the states. The president, contrary to what some Teapartiers seem to believe, has no role in this process). So what would the purpose of the Supreme Court be if there was no longer any constitution for it to interpret? The present powers of the states and the federal government are defined in the constitution. What you think Teapartiers propose is the repeal of the US constitution. For what reason would the states maintain the US Supreme Court and appeal to it? And by whom would the judges be appointed?
Incidentally, why would the Pentagon obey the states? The Founders were concerned to insure that the military be controlled by democratically elected civilian leaders. In the situation you describe, there would be nothing to prevent military leaders to take over and turn the country into a military dictatorship which the states would be powerless to fight. Remember the US system of government is based on the division of power between the three branches of governmnet: legislative, executive and judicial as well as between the federal and state governments. The founders felt that this division of power despite, or actually because, of the inefficiency it builds within the system would prevent a dictator from taking over.
Actually my own viewpoint is if Texas and some other states want to secede from the union, let them.
But, in spite of Ron Paul's and Texas governor Rick Perry's pronouncements, I don't think this will come to pass. For instance, Rick Perry fired one third of Texas first responders. So when wild fires hit his state (that is suffering from a severe drought for the past several years inspite of Teapartiers denial of climate change) he had to appeal to the federal govt for help..... and that help came thanks to the taxes I pay the federal govt. If Texas were to secede, perhaps it could ask for help from the UN in time of natural catastrophe? I don't think, given the prevailing hyprocrisy, that reactionaries' hatred for the UN would keep them from requesting and accepting that help, do you?
7 January 2012 6:30AM
Maybe it needs to happen. Put all their precious policies in place, in full. Bring down all the corruption, pollution, exploitation and death on the people, untempered by any sort of restraint. Unleash pure Republican ideology.
Then one day, when there can be no possibility of doubt remaining as to the suffering and misery they have caused, they can all be taken to the guillotines.
7 January 2012 6:52AM
Does de-regulation mean the end of anti-abortion legislation ?
7 January 2012 7:22AM
Oh thank goodness I thought I was alone.
7 January 2012 7:29AM
Perhaps we should show the Republicans some small degree of mercy: if you were them wouldn't you want to forget all about Dubya's Presidency?
7 January 2012 7:29AM
The definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect a different outcome...
7 January 2012 7:50AM
Every republican candidate is so unpalatable to the majority of voters that I doubt any of them will budge Obama from his perch, especially with the likely even more unpalatable running mate the winner will choose. Even more likely is it won't make any difference in the end which party wins the next big one because by then there will have been a major market collapse that will see the U.S. and the rest of the world sent into an economic tailspin - only the exact timing and trigger are unknown at this time. If the financial sytem doesn't buckle under already unsustainable debt then "an unexpected event" from the sidelines will do the job, a good bet is it would have something to do with unavailable oil due to war or a supply peak because of geological limitations.
7 January 2012 7:54AM
Welcome to the mental hospital.
I believe this is what Karl Marx meant by 'False Conciousness'. But of course, bringing up Marx in US political debate would get oneself nailed to a cross in short order.
But to believe that the Democrats believe anything fundamentally different, is to indulge in delusions. The chronic problem with the US is how it's politics are funded. If you get the lobbying money out of the system, and you reform campaign finance, and you'll getter a better quality of politician.
7 January 2012 8:00AM
This is like saying we dont need any laws ... i didn't realise the Republicans had taken up anarchy as their main economic policy ... an interesting way of attempting to win the next US election
7 January 2012 9:20AM
Unfortunately for Americans (and the World), for American politics to change, for there to be real political debate in the USA, for the average American to find that they can use their vote to make a difference, America is going to have to learn the hard way. It is going to take things to get very much worse for American politics to become become more representative, American politicians to have imaginative and original ideas, open and debate without the debate turning into a circus or slanging match, for the American left to grow some balls and stop being cowed by the extreme right.
However, if a Republican candidate is elected president, the game-changing event on a par with the Great Depression, that is needed to wake Americans up politically, to make them angry, politically activated, less naive and more-aware, will happen very much sooner than might have been the case. The outcome of such an event however, would be unpredictable. It may result in a better form of democracy, greater scrutiny of American politicians and accountability, but it could lead to another US civil and break-up of the USA, or even world war.
7 January 2012 9:22AM
Laws?
Laws are for other people to obey. Laws are what are used to keep the lower orders under control. Laws are for the little people to obey, not us.
This is how the Right thinks it the USA, the UK and all over the world.
7 January 2012 9:36AM
Echoes from 1930's Germany. the rise of National Socialiism and Hitler there with the idea that the state of the country was the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
There is no other words to decribe you other than racist, paranoid, bigot and fascist.
Last century, more than 40 million people died in Europe fighting this kind of idiot fascist thinking. A large number of these were Americans.
7 January 2012 9:37AM
It seriously disgusts me that people could even vote for these disgusting sons of bitches. Dirty, foul, rotten eggs, the lot of them.
7 January 2012 9:45AM
One thing to remember. Republicans rail against all the regulations and laws strangling businesses. They rail against all the lawsuits that the poor struggling businesses have to face,
But if you look at the US civil courts cases, the vast majority of the cases are... businesses suing other businesses.
Who do you think employs all the lawyers we have? Businesses. Because regular people can't afford to pay them. Businesses sue each other all day long for any and every infraction in contracts and other disputes etc. And the cases goes on for years taking up the court systems.
Are businesses really the ones who don't want regulations? Cause so far they seem to be using them every chance the get.
7 January 2012 9:51AM
I really think one thing behind this is religion.
Glen Beck is a Mormon for example. Mormons in particular seem to have a disdain for government. mostly because they seem to have their own functioning quasi government in Utah. And that's not even including the Fundamentalist Mormons, forget about them.
And their clout is growing, witness Glen Beck, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsmen. The more they can dismantle the US government, the more their own government, which they give a tenth of their wages to, will have more power to do what they want. The Mormons are trying to make common cause with other Fundamentalist Christian groups in their effort to dismantle the US government as much as they can.
Christians get this on some level, which is why the last thing they want to do is elect a Mormon. But Mormons such as Mitt Romney comes from deep pockets as the power of the church is behind him. So he is still making headway.
7 January 2012 9:56AM
Actually when you think about, the right does want to go back to the 1850's. In the 1850's, the rich did as they wanted to in the cities. The religious nuts could form all the cults and religions they wanted to in the country and the government didn't bother them. And the poor were subservient and of course some were slaves. To them, it was a perfect world.
7 January 2012 10:34AM
There's no such thing as a free market.
7 January 2012 10:44AM
I now know who is the 'Evil Empire' and the reds whom it was better to be dead than. Not only have the Greedy Old Party the colour red, but also the tactics of the Socialists. Unregulated capitalism is economic cancer and should be controlled.
7 January 2012 10:45AM
The new evil religous sect or Republican stalwarts make Scientologists look like schoolboys. In a true democracy religion and those spouting its dogma should be separated from the running and those running the state.
If religious dogma was the answer then wars and conflicts would have ended thousands of years ago.
It is just amazing how many people actually believe in fairy tales.
What did Michelle Bachman say
"God told me to run"
and then she won 5% of the Iwoa vote. People who say they talk to god should be locked up somewhere safe.
7 January 2012 10:45AM
You know Natasha is describing the sentiment- not agreeing with it, right?
7 January 2012 10:51AM
This 'confidence trick' is exactly parallel to the age-old narrative of the revival tent. Which is why the 'base', ie the poor Republicans, who don't have capital but do have evangelical faith, go for it like bluefish after bait.
Substitute 'The Invisible Hand' for God Almighty. Substitute Debt for Sin. All the rest follows.
The guy running the prayer meeting depends on his congregation blaming themselves for their sins. He knows if he makes them feel bad enough they will hand him most of the money in their pockets in return for the promise of absolution and redemption.
It's the Ur American story, the one that plays over and over in so many people's heads.
This particular version is especially pernicious, though, because in this one the 'sin' -in the eyes of the TeaHead rabble- is not shared universally. And it sure as hell was not committed by the Holy Invisible Hand. It was done by the Others: the black and brown Democratic people who took out all those mortgages they couldn't pay, THEY are the sinners now dragging down all us good responsible whites. And look who THEY put in the White House!
All the Foxiscts know this. It's the only story they know, and like the slimy bastard in the revival tent, in his cream colored three piece polyester suit, who takes the dinner money out of his congregation's pockets (and then sleeps with their daughters and/or sons before he moves on to another town) they just keep on working the same old con. over and over and over again. Because it works every damn time.
Will their congregation finally call them out, and run them out of town on a rail? Like Hell they will. That would mean they would have to give up on the Invisible Hand, which would leave them naked and frightened and, most of all: RESPONSIBLE. No, much more reassuring to double down.
7 January 2012 11:03AM
--says Rick Santorum. So all this burdensome regulation has collectively caused all the businesses in the US an extra $100 million. The US economy is worth what, $12 trillion? This regulatory imposition is derisory.
7 January 2012 11:16AM
Consumerism, an extreme commodity orientated version of capitalism actually makes people selfish.
Efficient market theory, rational actors and self serving individuals have pierced our culture so deeply that our world view has actually shifted
Selfish self centeredness has actually won out over group consideration and empathy and become a creed all of its own
These are the only reasons I can think of as to why we're witnessing this unusual response to a historical crises.
Of course more material factors probably play quite a significant part too:
- A media more than sympathetic to the cause of deregulated capitalism, presenting alternatives as hell on Earth
- Declining educational standards due to religious interference and public sector marketisation
It could also be that people are so unsure, so scared, perhaps due to globalisation and rapid change, that they have seized up; they cannot conceive of a world in anything other that simplistic back and white terms, like children do.
To say that people are just more easily manipulated these days would be wrong, wouldn't it?
7 January 2012 11:20AM
these lot are no different from the Tory t***s!
7 January 2012 11:21AM
You can only put up with farce for so long, then it starts to eat away at you, and you start to look away longer.
Something will break in the near future, as has been happening round the world.The capitalist driven "greed rush" is being seen for what it is, hollow and morally bankrupt.
When you look at the state of Western Politics , and the motley crew of sycophants that posture as meaningful representatives of their electorate, then you know the wave of change fast approaches , for they will only speed the process.
That is the one lining in all this.
7 January 2012 11:23AM
These are the same people who would burst into tears if the government stopped enforcing their self-awarded entitlements and privileges.
"Get the government out of my life (except where it gives me the power to subjugate other people)!"
lolbertarians... *sigh*
7 January 2012 11:27AM
Ignorance is the problem. That's what happens when you do not invest in education. People get fooled into supporting nonsensical rubbish like the Tea PArty. I always remember that Louis Theroux documentary where he finds a lone woman protesting against Obama's health care reform and she admits that she couldnt afford treatment for a life threatening condition she had. She couldnt see the paradox such was her religious-like commitment to the anti-Obama cause.
That's where we're heading to in the UK.
7 January 2012 11:28AM
Only a Democrat would call it a con trick ! So everything you say should be ignored.
7 January 2012 11:29AM
Oh great, more left-right ping pong nonsense.
What we have at the moment is the worst of both worlds; a corporatist oligarchy, backed by the state. Capitalism without bankruptcy is live heaven without hell.
It's true that finance shouldn't have been deregulated in the first place. But then, what would one expect to happen when the government and the banks are largely one and the same thing.
Then we have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with implied guarantees from the government, backstopping the mortgage market, which as a result ended up taking massive risks and inflating the mother of all credit bubbles.
Oh, the government is the problem all right. But only because it works for *them* and not *us*.
7 January 2012 11:34AM
There's no such thing as a free market.
Spot on, but not only are people convinced that there is a free market, they think it's synonymous with capitalism!
What they don't seem to get is that capitalism is incompatible with the idea of a free market. The ability to gain control over things that other people need so they can be withheld until "earned" is not conducive to creating freedom or prosperity. It's all about privilege and removing competition and freedom from the system.
The thing that a capitalist fears the most is the loss of their ability to engage in private and economic tyranny. If everyone had the freedom to use the resources of their planet then more people could be productive and prosperous, which is why they don't want it to happen.
They like having privileges and they like using them to take advantage of people. They like people being desperate and having no meaningful choice. They like taking those they've disempowered and keeping them as servants.
There's nothing frightening about everyone having the chance to work without exploitation, except for the types who thinks having the vulnerable work while youthey reap the rewards is "earning" money.
7 January 2012 11:36AM
You, err, might want to reread your science textbooks you know...
Othe than that, great piece. I may have to buy this book.
7 January 2012 11:38AM
Religious-like is exactly right. The people who use the just-world fallacy rationalise so much injustice that they're in the realms of faith rather than evidence. The most anxious tend to be the most easily convinced without evidence - possibly why this ill woman was so fervent in her beliefs.
Apalling isn't it?