For the Record

The comprehensive scoop on U.S. economic inequality

Via Slate, a don't-miss historically and statistically informed read: Timothy Noah's The United States of Inequality.

Want the good life? Live in a social democratic country

Call it what you want, but on indexes of what everyone wants the SD-ers knock it down cold.

Sharp downward revision

I've been blabbing about this a bit but don't think I've blogged about it:

To better gauge the status of the world’s largest fields, the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, is conducting a survey of the top 400 reservoirs. Although the survey is not due to be published until November, early drafts of the report have been leaked in The Wall Street Journal – and the prognosis is not promising. “The world’s premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast,” the Journal reported in May, “a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.”

(I read something else to the effect that the delay to November was to avoid messing up the US Presidential election.)

It's natural to speculate that this will cause a sharp upward revision in the costs of things directly petroleum-related, such as gas at the pump and plane tickets (philosophy job candidates: buy your APA plane tickets now!). Also costing more, although this might take a bit longer to shake its way through the market, will be everything that depends on petroleum for its production -- namely everything! Ramify this throughout the economy and we're looking at lean times for those of us without direct access to black gold.

The big hope is that people won't freak out too bad as the recognition of the new economic reality dawns, so that most of us will keep our jobs.

Bumpy ride ahead, kids.

Read this book (or at least the review!)

Larry Bartels's 'Unequal Democracy' reviewed here. Looks to be a treasure trove of interesting and/or surprising and/or hopeful info about the attitudes Americans hold about various political issues -- eg the alleged "rightward shift" in the US is pretty much entirely at upper income strata. (Not too surprising, when was the last time any high profile sources paid the slightest bit of attention to the "little guy"?)

"fingernails on the cliff"

Great lecture here by Harvard's Elizabeth Warren. It's an hour long so I'll summarize. She's compared household expenses today and in momndad-time, finds all sorts of creepy stuff. Eg, spending is down on all fun stuff, way up on unfun stuff; the latter eats up all the $ from working women and much from dad. Unfun stuff hasta be paid so need two jobs to avoid fail. Add decreased safety net and increased ed costs and you get rise in bankruptcy, esp for fam with kids. Scary portent: the lucky pull away from the unlucky, eventually Brazil.

Obama's speeches

The MLK day/economic justice speech here.

"A More Perfect Union" here.

Farewell

We started For the Record on 6 December 2003. This was an especially dark time in US politics: the Iraq war was only nine months old at the time, 9/11 just over two years old. The Bush Gang, and the right wing more broadly, still maintained an incredibly intimidating stranglehold over the national discourse.

Many of our interlocutors still bought into all those comfortable political myths of the 90s -- the third way, globalism, corporations are great for prosperity, the rising tide lifts all boats, the Dems need to give up on the New Deal, efficiency is the prime institutional virtue, the US government is controlled by law and basically wisely stewarded by competent technocrats acting in the public interest, US foreign policy is basically benign, American exceptionalism, the institutional goal of big corporate journalism is to speak truth to power and serve as the fourth estate.

We had recently discovered Chomsky and Krugman, so we had replaced those comfortable myths with ugly and depressing realities. We felt that the nation and the world were going down the tubes in terms of economic and social justice, the environment, and the ability of institutions to preserve and maintain a decent society. We felt that it was essential to shake people awake, to alert them not only to the long-standing Chomsky line that the US is not benevolent in foreign relations, that corporate journalism plays a propaganda role, that unregulated corporate capitalism is neither natural nor just, that comfortable myths blind us to the atrocities the state commits on our behalf -- but also to the alarming Krugman line that the Bush gang had summoned up a new era of corruption, amorality, immorality: that the US would now be brazenly vicious in foreign relations, that corporate journalism would distribute naked propaganda, that the economic system would be geared increasingly toward vacuuming wealth and power upward, that the public mind would manifest increasingly irrational jingoism.

At the time there were of course voices on our side -- The Nation's and Harper's's longstanding advocacy journalism; Kos, Atrios, JMM, digby, billmon, Gilliard, Needlenose; in the philosophical community, Brian Leiter, with whom we maintained a close and cooperative blogging relationship; and of course Chomsky and Krugman. Still, it was our feeling that we had a distinctive contribution to make, by focusing on issues and generating a narrative that tracked our specific interests, and by reaching a distinctive audience that at the time was, it is my sense, not awake to the issues we stressed.

Now, four years and 1200 posts later, we feel it is time to hang up our blogging pen. Thanks to the herculean efforts of many of the voices listed above, political blogging has become a full time job; fatigue finally set in for us. But on the bright side, we feel as though there has been a genuine shift of the tide in terms of political opinion, both in the nation at large, and among our interlocutors. Obviously the country as a whole has woken up to the hideousness of the Republican Party; in terms of our local social circle, I know of few people who encounter political thinking with the naive optimism of the 90s. To the extent that any of this was our work, we feel as though our work is done.

We intend, unlike Billmon, to preserve these records of the last four years, both since we wish to continue to endorse for the most part the stands we took during this dark period, and as a record for the future of how things can go wrong. However, it is not our intention to continue to update this blog.

Thanks for your attention.

How it works

Apropos of my recent post on what the pardon of Libby indicates, I bring you the brilliant James Adomian as Bush.

Here's a partial transcript... really, a tragic poem for our times.

[gives the finger]

My fellow America, welcome to the future.

I know a lot of you are pissed off about me computing Scooter Libby's sentence
I know a lot of you thought I let a good friend off the hook
because he was covering up my crimes.

That's stupid.  Why would I do that?
I commit crimes all the time out in the open
and nobody does anything.

I start wars for no good reason
against all kinds of laws.
I torture people.

I torture people.

Torture!

Nothin' happened.

That's why I computed Scooter Libby
Not to cover up for me
Just to torture you folks a little bit
Just to piss ya off

Cause I know I could get away with it

That's what you need to start learning.

Listen, I could walk outside of the White House right now
and shoot a kid!

Who would do anything about it?
TV?
heh heh.  I don't think so.

You see, I decide.
I'm the executive branch
and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only branch that exists

What else you have?
Ya got the Supreme Court.
I appoint them.
Ya got the, eh, whatever branch Dick Cheney is.
I picked him.

What else is there?
House?  House branch?
Run by a woman.  A girl.
That don't scare me too much.

So all you bloggers out there in blogland
need to quit whining and squitching and squawking
about impeachment, censure, and all that.

We all know that ain't gonna happen.

I can get away with whatever I want to.

All you complainers, all I gotta say to you folks is Fuck you.
Fuck you hard.

I ain't gonna do nothing I can't get away with.

You may think you're so much different than TV or radio
Let me tell you.    TV and radio print whatever I tell them to print.

You're not that much different.
You may be a little bit off the beaten track
But I still, I still got ya where I want ya.

MoveOn.org?
Guess what, MoveOn
I'm still here.

People like me and Scooter Libby's always going to be here.

And guess what?
We're gonna pardon each other
and we're gonna make each other rich
and we're gonna control shit.

That's the way it fucking works.

Watch your back, bitches.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

The U.S.'s 3 party system

Upon contemplating events like Bill Clinton's decimation of social services, or the  Democrat-controlled House's giving Bush yet another free pass at Iraq, one might understandably wonder just what concrete differences are supposed to separate Republicans and Dems.   Hence, as my mother noted, some of the best commentary on the vote explained it by the U.S.'s having a one-party system, with the infamous military-industrial-corporate complex in control. 

That's on the right track, but Pachacutec over at Firedoglake makes a strong case that there are 3 parties, not one, in the U.S.: the DC/K Street Elites, the Grassroots Theocrats, and the Grassroots Progressives.  The analysis has the ring of truth about it:

When we watch the election results on Tuesday, understand that we are watching three political machines at war with each other.

 

People commonly believe we have a basic two-party system, but we really have a three party system.  Each party machine has its own core constituency, its own philosophy of government and its own media megaphone.  While you're watching CNN or whatever on election night, here's the perspective you won't get from Wolf Blitzer or the pundits, who themselves are part of one of these machines.  Here are the three parties:

DC/K Street Elites: As the name implies, these are the people whose constituencies are the big money lobbies in DC.  Those lobbies are mostly big corporations, which include GE and Time Warner.  Their media machine includes establishment media outlets like the major networks, all the cable news stations, the major newspapers including the Washington Post, the AP and the New York Times, Clear Channel radio, defense contractors like Haliburton, Northrup Grumman and CACI, and the anti-net neutrality telecoms like Verizon and Comcast.

This machine has no natural voting constituency of note, so it needs to ally itself with some grassroots machine that can deliver voters in order to stay in power.  Because it has no real popular support for its agenda, it has to lie to sustain whatever political alliance it creates with an outsourced grass roots movement. Ideologically, this machine does not really care what grassroots movement it uses for vote getting, though it finds a more pliant ally in the right wing, since right wingers are authoritarians and unlikely to poke holes in this party's lies or Rube Goldberg Machiavellian contortions.  Because of all these deceptions and feints, this machine operates like the one in the video above.

This party has been in control of US politics for pretty much my entire life.  It made common cause with Barry Goldwater's right wing movement, and made a strategic shift to accommodate the Theocratic Grassroots movement described below.  However, it also does business with "third way" Democrats like the Clintons and their establishment DC allies operating under the label of the Democratic Party.  Rahm Emanuel belongs to this machine, as do Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Heath Shuler and most of the rest of the DC Democrats, especially, but not exclusively, in the Senate.  This party brought you Viet Nam and Iraq, because both were good for business and provided lots of room for war profiteering.

This party believes government is the tool of its elite constituents.  It seeks an equilibrium nationally with itself in power, and once this is achieved, it promotes "bipartisan" collegiality to sustain the status quo.  It equally favors John McCain, one of its members, and Joe Lieberman, another of its members.  It includes as well the so-called "Bloomberg Democrats" who favor big business, war and bipartisan comity, indifferent to party affiliation.  Its establishment media arm simultaneously favors its outsourced, right wing theocratic vote getting arm while presenting "objective" news under the guise of he-said, she-said "fairness" between establishment Republicans and Democrats.