Summer                                                        Under the Lily Moon

So.  The Republican critique looks at the failing European states and the creaks and groans of our own economy and concludes that the culprit is the liberal welfare state.  Interesting.

Here’s what I appreciate about their analysis.  They have nailed a high level of angst;  the contagion exists in Europe and if we knew more of the mind of the average Chinese citizen, I imagine we’d find it there, too.  The Japanese perhaps have lived through the economic angst and become inured, but have had to add nuclear anxiety.  So, almost nobody’s good.

The demagogue is the political figure most apt to emerge in times of extreme angst.  I heard Rush Limbaugh yesterday screech on a clip played by NPR, “Why can’t we get justices who once we get them appointed do what we want them to do?”  Why indeed?  In a puppetocracy that would follow, perhaps, but in a representative democracy it had better not and on in a branch of government with lifetime appointments to allow freedom of thought and action such doing would violate the compact.  Though it happens all the time.

How you define is how you solve.  In that case, let’s take another look at the symptoms, Dr. Brooks, and see if our differential diagnosis might lead us to a different spot.

As I scan the US, my impression is that job loss, inability to get a first or new job and the longitude of current unemployment lie at the base of our collective fears.  I say collective for even those employed and adequately-cared for must worry about the health of a nation unable to optimally employ its citizens and worry even more if it finds itself unable to employ them even sub-optimally.

The slow moving and long running financial calamity that surfaced in 2008 had been building for years.  Financial institutions had depleted their capital reserves by increasingly lending and investing money in exotics; surprisingly, many of them backed by subprime mortgages created and bundled by banks and mortgage brokers.

At the same time, what I’ll call late stage capitalism had begun to fonder on one of its predicted icebergs.  That is, as productivity gains began to come increasingly from robotics and other computer assisted processes, the good jobs for the blue collar folk, the ones that had employed 98% of the people in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana in post WW II America, began to disappear.

This process has been underway in a fashion felt at home (Alexandria) as early as 1974.  The insistence on union busting and the exportation not of goods and capital, but of jobs, reinforced and accelerated the trend.

These trends make good economic sense.  Reduce the cost of labor.  But, there’s a problem here.  What is the engine of the American economy?  The consumer.  That is, somebody like you or me who buys things.  If your job is now in China or Mexico or Thailand, you might find a job at a reduced wage, after all that’s the point of this exercise, but you won’t be able to stoke that engine nearly as well.

Then, imagine a large number of the folks negatively effected by those same smart economic moves saddled with unusual debt instruments known as subprime loans.  Can you see where this is heading?

If you accept that the financial institutions and corporate decision makers (all people now under the difficult to make sense of Citizens United ruling.), have done the things I have outlined above and that they have effected people in the manner I suggest, then you might go somewhere else for your solution than unburdening Gulliver.

The Gulliver I see has a smirk on his face since all the while he’s been held down by the chains of regulation, his ally Clever has sent his business overseas while concocting a way to suck the most out of the poor folks left at home.

If you find this line of analysis closer to your own, let’s look later in the week at how we might start to solve the very real anxiety here and abroad.

Hint:  one aspect of this solution would be removing health care from the list of things people have to worry about.

Summer                                                             Under the Lily Moon

David Brooks, in a column titled What Republicans Think, says, “…many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes.”  He quotes from a longer essay, “Our Age of Anxiety”, by Yuval Levin, published in the Weekly Standard.

“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. … We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism.”

Brooks then goes on to say:

“To Republican eyes, the first phase of that collapse is playing out right now in Greece, Spain and Italy — cosseted economies, unmanageable debt, rising unemployment, falling living standards…

This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. It needs replacing.”

This is the first analysis from the Republican side I’ve seen that makes sense of the large disconnect so apparent in Congress and among American voters.  How you define is how you solve is an analytical tool I learned long ago and it applies here.

The Republicans smell blood in the water and are rising for a feeding frenzy.  That makes sense of the strangely apocalyptic and weird debt limit tangles between the House and the President; it makes sense of the Tea Party which wants, paradoxically, to shrink government and strengthen their social security and medicare.

We on the liberal/progressive side see this election, as we’ve seen most elections during my lifetime, as focused on adjusting the gears and levers of a system that more or less works.*

The Republicans see an economic Gulliver bound by the Lilliputian regulators, threads across its vast strong body, and stakes driven in the ground by statute to hold the threads taut and the vigorous giant in check.  If only they could rip off the bonds, they believe, then Gulliver would spring up and make all things new and profitable.

If this is the way you see the problem, the way you define it, then your solution is obvious, throw the bums out, take an axe made for your corporation (probably in China) and sever the cords.

There is another way to view our moment in history and I will discuss that in a later post.

*[Not true of the elections surrounding the Vietnam War. A New Left critique that wants broader economic democracy, a more socialist direction coupled with identity equality and more realistic immigration policies and universal health care, is the one I favor, but I don’t see the path to get there at this point in our history.  It is not hard to see that this is the polar opposite of the Republican vision. Perhaps this is the radical left’s moment for think tanks and analysis, building a theoretical base for a push later in the century when the failures of late stage capitalism’s blind climate change denial has brought the globe to its knees, panting.]

Summer                                                         Under the Lily Moon

Politics.  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Analysis from odd arenas has caught my eye.  We’re all trying to figure out how to deal with the political and economic mess in which we find ourselves, so folks take looks down many avenues.

Three that have struck me.  First, EJ Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post, has written a book, Our Divided Political Heart.  I’ve got it and haven’t read it yet, but I know the principle thread of the argument.  We are both a communitarian nation committed to the public welfare and a libertarian one dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  This makes sense to me since it shows we have a nation built on two different continents which split off from the European pangea of the Enlightenment.

Where do we inflect national policy and political will?  On the side of property rights, individual liberty or on This Land is Our Land, from California to the New York Islands?  Dionne, I believe, answers this question with a definitive yes.

And in so doing he follows an unlikely line of thought, that of multilevel selection in the field of evolutionary biology and championed by Edward O. Wilson, of Consilience and ants and several other books, fame.  Wilson suggests that human evolution reflects evolutionary pressures on behalf of the individual (the Selfish Gene idea), but that it also and equally, reflects the altruistic evolutionary thread that propels groups upward and onward through evolutionary time.

A third bit of analysis also caught my attention.  Gail Collins, a NYT columnist, wrote, in a column titled Running on Empty, that our current political struggle is between those who live in the empty places and those who live in the crowded places.

Our time reminds me, in a much milder form, of the Warring States period of early China, before the first true emperors who begin with the Qin dynasty.  It was in this desperate and violent period of Chinese civilization that the Tao Te Qing was written, Confucius lived, Han Fei,the legalist scholar most admired by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty.  Many, many other schools of thought emerged, all focused on how to bring order or peace to a people tired of conflict.

Somewhere in the creative ferment occasioned by those who want to bring order or peace or prosperity or justice to contemporary America will come at least a few visions for a future worth paying attention to.

In the next week I’m also going to comment on a very interesting David Brooks column, What Republicans Think.  Teaser.  He says Republicans believe the end of the liberal era is at hand and are not willing to compromise.

Beltane                                                             Garlic Moon

Reading a novel right now called the Hundred Days.  A fictional rendering of Ceausescu’s last months in power it offers a picture of Bucharest in 1989. Grim doesn’t capture it.  A genuine horror show.

Example.  Queues.  People would line up for whatever was available, even if they didn’t need or want it.  Buying the shoes or bread or meat or alarm clock would allow you to barter on the black market for things you needed.  You could never count on any particular thing being there.

Other examples.  Rampant corruption.  Bribery for even basic care.  In a hospital.  Women charged after a miscarriage for damaging the integrity of the Romanian family.  Beyond understanding.

Now.  What’s really beyond understanding is that Mariana and Vasily, Nicoleta’s parents, lived through this.  I sat in their house, shared food with them with only a vague idea of what is, in fact, the very recent past.

Only a block from the Best Western hotel where I stayed was a Carrefours with plenty of food, produce, meats, cheeses.  Sounds like this kind of grocery would have been available only to those in the party elite.  In 1989.  Less than 23 years ago.