Month: August 2011

Two vignettes from American political discourse, Summer 2011:

1. Warren Buffet, patriarch of the "celebrity CEO"/Kindly Market Oracle phenomenon, took to the nation's op-ed pages to state, "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice" and raise taxes on millionaire households, including capital gains and dividend taxes. He discussed the 400 highest-earning households, the "Super Rich", with authority; he is not only one of them, but he knows the majority of them personally. I choose not to participate in the kind of idolization we are urged to direct toward men of great wealth like Buffet, but it is clear that in this instance he is making a reasonable, obvious, and economically sound argument. This is what the kids might call a no-brainer.

2. Chuck Asay of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, a syndicated columnist described as, "one of the few quality conservative cartoonists working in the industry today," offers this take on the same situation (click to embiggen):

It matters little how cogent an argument Buffet can make – this much more accurately reflects the way we see the plight of our social betters. The heroic Job Creators (and their friend Free Market) are being asked to carry the weight of the rest of us, be we the elderly, Unions, or god forbid College.

While the cartoon is easy to interpret, it is at the same time baffling. The scenario implies that Job Creators actually want someone to take over the oars or would allow that to happen if Entitlement Nation offered to help. And of course Entitlement Nation doesn't want to take the oars; it only wants to stare and say "Oh, help me, Popeye!"

Moreover, what exactly is Entitlement Nation supposed to do on a boat with two sets of oars? Perhaps the Job Creator and Free Market could bear the blame of using such little foresight when designing that product. Most importantly, though, is this Entitlement Nation-to-Job Producer ratio representative? If so, this only highlights what a small share of the population our political system, as Buffet points out, is catering to.

Job Creator and Free Market love this situation. They wouldn't have it any other way; they want control of the oars and great masses who are docile, worshipful, and compliant. Just look at the numbers and you'll see why. If everyone finally wakes up and realizes that the boat is going over the edge, guess who's getting thrown overboard or getting brained with an oar first. This is, in short, a very stupid metaphor that depends on the patently silly pretense that we all want nothing more than for our Job Creators to save us. Something tells me that everyone would chip in if the opportunity to do so existed, but since the Job Creators and Free Market only made oars for themselves I guess we're all going over the damn edge.

I have a sense of impending dread about the "Super Congress/Committee" stronger than any I have felt in quite some time. This is not because I fear the outcome of its decisions, which are essentially preordained (There hasn't been this much suspense since we wondered what the Simpson-Bowles commission would recommend!). It is because I fear the three months of total idiocy and saturation, blow-by-blow media coverage that will precede its utterly foregone conclusions. The Great Negotiator has been his usual brilliant self, admitting before the process even begins that, ha ha ha, of course we won't be cutting the Pentagon budget OR raising taxes, so I'm not exactly on the edge of my seat here as the media breathlessly announce the draft picks starting lineup members of Congress who will make up the 12 person committee.

Look. It's pretty clear at this point that we can't win. Obama, sadly enough, is probably the most liberal candidate America could tolerate enough to elect at this point in its political evolution. Our choices are limited to the psychotic teabagger and the fake progressive "bipartisan" who will do whatever the psychotic teabagger would have done minus one or two of the craziest bits. Face it: we are going to pursue a protect-the-Job-Producers, tax cutting, government dismantling, Hayek-worshipping, quasi-supply side economic policy until it brings us to our utter ruin. There will be no change in direction until we hit bottom, until the economy and state of the nation literally cannot get any worse. This is no different than the Gilded Age, and it will end the same way. There is no point at which common sense or the Democratic Party or the American public or the media are going to turn back from the post-1980 Beltway elite consensus politics of Government is the Problem, free market worship, and tax cuts piled upon tax cuts. This is it. If the most liberal candidate who could plausibly be elected is an Eisenhower Republican trying to outflank the GOP on austerity, things aren't going to improve until we are indisputably and comprehensively screwed.

People like Harry Reid, Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic "leadership" are serving no purpose except to make the process of decline as long, laborious, and excruciating as possible. We are putting off the inevitable. The worse the news gets and the deeper the depression (psychologically and economically) we are suffering becomes, the more I wish we could fast forward to the end. Let's just get this the hell over with. Tea Party 2012. Let's go ahead and elect Michelle Bachmann. Crown Paul Ryan. Get Scott Walker to Washington as quickly as possible. Put two or three more Scalia clones on the Supreme Court. Make Ron Paul the Fed chairman. Bring on the floods and the plagues of locusts. Let the Earth open up and swallow our country whole.

We're in a tailspin and the only thing our political system is capable of doing is to take the failed ideas of the past and do them again, only harder. If ten rounds of tax cuts didn't work, try ten more (but larger). If a war didn't help, start a couple more. If the Job Creators aren't creating jobs, cater to more of their whims. If slashing the safety net didn't help, slash it twice as much. There is no FDR or third party or Good Democrats or Sane Republicans coming to save us. If hitting bottom is our destiny, grease up the rails and let's get it over with. From rock bottom there might be some glimmer of hope that things could improve, which seems preferable to our current dilemma of sitting around watching Rome burn and waiting for things to get worse.

An old Soviet-era joke:

Svetlana works at a factory that makes the finest beds in the Soviet Union, more comfortable than any bed in the world. But neither she nor any of the workers have a bed. At the end of a long shift they return home and sleep on the floor.
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The correct application of socialist principles dictates that the beds first go to the hospitals, then to the army, then to the universities, then to the collective farms, and so on. The workers understand that they must wait their turn and none are bitter.

One day Svetlana's sister Olga visits and is stunned to see that she sleeps on the floor. "Svetlana," she said, "you work in a bed factory!
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How can it be that you have no bed?" After hearing the explanation, Olga says, "But you are missing the obvious answer. You're strong and good with your hands. Steal one small part from the factory every day and smuggle it home. In a few weeks, assemble them and you will have a bed.
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"

"We tried that several times," Svetlana said, "and every time when we finish we find that instead of a bed we have an AK-47."

I don't expect much out of a guy like Joe Lieberman. Watching him take the Senate floor to tout his legislation (cosponsored by Tom Coburn) proposing to reallocate money from Social Security and Medicare to prevent the Pentagon budget from seeing any cuts, the ignorance of history is a little stunning even for him. When a nation is at the point of liquidating its domestic infrastructure to maintain its grotesque, bloated war machine, some historical parallels should be apparent.

When the USSR was doddering through its twilight years, it poured money and resources into a pointless war because saber-rattling and military hubris were futile efforts to stay the irreversible decline of an unsustainable system. The Roman Empire rotted from the inside and collapsed under the weight of the barbarian horde it paid to enforce Pax Romana long after it ceased to be able to afford it. That the U.S. could be in the terminal stages of empire, blindly shoveling money into an outsized military to combat boogeymen both real and imagined, seems impossible for our political class to comprehend let alone consider. Sure, analogies are fun. But people like Lieberman understand that there's a difference here: Muslims are scary and America is goddamn awesome.

A recent Huffington Post article on the phenomenon – although it is not at all clear if this is anecdotal or widespread – of college graduate women resorting to "sugar daddy" relationships to pay off student debt is making the rounds. I can't be certain of the author's intent, but the final product is offensive in ways she probably never intended.

Briefly, the article covers websites that connect older, wealthy individuals with young women (note: it mentions young men in passing as well) who are willing to provide "companionship" in exchange for "being taken care of" financially. If this sounds an awful lot like prostitution, I agree. And let me clarify one thing before everyone jumps all over me: I have no moral, legal, or ethical qualms with whatever consenting adults agree to do. If a young person is willing to provide an older person with "companionship" in exchange for money without either force or coercion being involved, then in my mind everyone is fully informed and participating willingly. Fine. If men or women, young or old, are comfortable entering into such an arrangement then that is their right and my feelings about it are irrelevant.

But here is the aspect of this story that bothers me. A lot.

"I'm honestly surprised there aren't more college students doing this," says Jennifer, not blinking. She's a 23-year-old recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.

Fed up with young, unemployed men her own age, Jennifer recently began trawling for a sugar daddy to pay down about $20,000 in student loan debt. She also wouldn't mind a clothing allowance or rent money for her studio apartment in New York's East Village.

A week ago, she boarded a plane to Florida to spend the weekend with a 30-something banker she met on SugarDaddie.com. He told her his house was undergoing a renovation and instead drove her to a nearby hotel, where they spent the night together…At the end of the weekend, the man handed her 10 crisp $100 bills. They next plan to rendezvous in Orlando in August.
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Jennifer doesn't label what she's doing as prostitution.
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"I'm not a whore. Whores are paid by the hour, can have a high volume of clients in a given day, and it's based on money, not on who the individual actually is. There's no feeling involved and the entire interaction revolves around a sexual act," says Jennifer, who wears a $300 strapless dress purchased with money from her most recent conquest. The rest of the money, she says, went towards paying down her student loans.
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"My situation is different in a number of different ways. First of all, I don't engage with a high volume of people, instead choosing one or two men I actually like spending time with and have decided to develop a friendship with them. And while sex is involved, the focus is on providing friendship. It's not only about getting paid."

To most of today's undergraduates, this is the biggest benefit of a liberal arts education: learning how to intellectualize their own life choices in a way that belittles others and enforces class barriers. Again, in my mind there is nothing wrong with "Jennifer" or her choices. These are willing adults. But I subscribe to the Call a Spade a Spade school of logic. Jennifer, you are fucking someone in exchange for money. That is called prostitution. Deal with it.

Instead of looking into the mirror and saying "OK, this is the choice I made," we see the wheels of a six-figure private school education turning in her head. People who go to Sarah Lawrence and meet rich men on websites aren't whores – whores are poor people!
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Brown people! Whores are people who live in ghettos and bang guys for $20 or some rock. I'm certainly not one of them! Look at my expensive lifestyle. Look at how effectively I can segregate us into clearly defined groups. I am a good person. They are not.

If the only way you can defend or feel good about what you're doing with your life is to demean or denigrate people of a lower social class in order to elevate yourself, there is an excellent chance that you're trying to placate yourself as much as you are trying to convince others. Oh, and as a general rule, much like the phrase "I'm not a racist, but…" is used exclusively by racists, anyone who feels compelled to explain why "I'm not a whore" is probably exactly that. Lobbyists, take note.

Let's say you have a child. We'll call him Billy. Because of your schedule, you and your working spouse/partner decide that it's time to hire a nanny to help with childcare.

You hire someone who seems very nice.
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She promises to do a lot of things that you think will be good for your child – no TV allowed, an hour of reading time every day, outdoor activities, healthy snacks, and so on. This sounds promising, so much so that you don't even feel as guilty about leaving Billy in the care of a virtual stranger.

After a few months you realize that not everything has gone as well as you hoped.
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The nanny isn't bad per se, but she's not following through on some of the promises. She gives him more snacks than you would like. She arranges playdates with the children of adults you don't know. Billy seems to have picked up a few four-letter words from her. It's a lot of small things, not one big thing. But Billy bonded with the nanny and you don't want to fire her.

So you hire another person to help care for your child – a 47 year old schizophrenic convicted sex offender named Rich Crenshaw who keeps three knives on his person at all times. He promises to straighten that nanny right out.

Almost immediately you realize that things are not quite right. Billy seems to have a lot of unexplained cuts and bruises. He reverts to sucking his thumb and gently sobbing himself to sleep. The nanny has stopped doing the things you disliked, but it seems like she stopped doing the things you liked as well. She's sort of a non-entity.

You have a little sit down with Rich and the nanny, letting them know that you don't want Billy to be given snacks but you don't want him to be starved.

You don't want him playing with strangers, but that doesn't mean he should be locked in the closet. You want him to behave, but you don't want him threatened with a knife. In your mind these are reasonable demands.

Rich pulls out his knife, grabs your child, and runs into the attic. He holds the knife to Billy's throat and insists that he'll ventilate the little SOB unless you let him do whatever he wants. After a tense standoff you figure that it's better for Billy to be messed up than dead, so you negotiate.

Clearly the right thing for Billy lies somewhere between the two approaches. Neither the nanny nor Mr. Crenshaw did the right thing, so you realize that both are at fault. You work out a compromise: your child will get healthy snacks and outdoor playtime in the morning, and then in the afternoon Rich will beat him with a broken table leg, slash at him with a broken Night Train bottle, and dangle him from the roof.

Deep down you're not happy. You know that this isn't exactly "good" for your child. You feel indirectly responsible for this situation but you can't quite figure out what you did wrong. Isn't moderation good? Splitting the difference between opposing viewpoints? Finding balance? But try as you might, you just cannot understand how things went so wrong. When you hired that knife-wielding 47 year old schizophrenic convicted sex offender, you trusted that he would do the right thing. Instead he turned out to be crap-eating crazy, precipitated a hostage crisis, and acted like some kind of violent sociopath.

It truly is an outcome that could not be foreseen.