Obama on Debt: I Don't Recall

When David Letterman was interviewing President Obama a couple of days ago, he asked him about the debt clock at the Republican National Convention.  "Do you remember what that number was?  Was it $10 trillion," asked Dave?



Replied the president: "I don't remember what the number was precisely."



Mr. President.  Do you mean to say that you don't know that the national debt is north of $16 trillion?



President Obama went on to say that the debt is a problem long-term and medium-term.  But that the only way to we have found to deal with it effectively is with a balanced approach, cutting some spending, making programs work, and for folks like him and Letterman to "do a little more."



Actually, Mr. President, the best results on budget balancing came from Finland's efforts in the 1990s which included spending cuts and tax cuts.  You could call it an overbalanced budget program.



The reason why it worked well is that all government spending is a weight on the nation's economy.  All of it.  And all of the government's taxing is a weight on the nation's economy.  So the more you take the weights of taxing and spending off the economy, the faster it will bounce back.



And let's not forget government regulation.  That's another weight.



So the best policy moving forward is to reduce government spending and reduce government taxes as much as you can without provoking riots in the street.



Now the president also wants his balanced program to avoid placing the whole burden on the backs of the middle class.



Sorry about that, Mr. President.  But the overwhelming majority of government spending is shoveled out to the middle class.  In Medicare.  In Social Security.  In education.  Then there's welfare, but most of that money goes to pay for middle-class government workers.



There is, of course, plenty of crony capitalism out there, billions and billions of it. Let's cut it.  Let's cut all of it. But the middle-class spending programs amount to trillions and trillions.  Whatever politicians like you say, the major cuts will fall on the backs of the middle class.  And if we don't do it now it will be worse in the future.  Think Greece.  Think Argentina.



But there's another problem.  Maybe it's even bigger than the government debt problem.  It is the worker problem, according to Nick Schulz.  Younger workers just don't have the basic skills to work.  So what is the problem, apart from "finding people that can pass the drug test?"

In the Manpower Group's 2012 Talent Shortage Survey, nearly 20% of employers cited a lack of soft skills as a key reason they couldn't hire needed employees. "Interpersonal skills and enthusiasm/motivation" were among the most commonly identified soft skills that employers found lacking.

Yes.  Apart from the problem of finding people with "an elementary command of the English language" there is the problem that "'professionalism' or 'work ethic' is the top 'applied' skill that younger workers lack."



What about that problem, Mr. President?  And what would the attitude of the striking Chicago teachers be doing to solve that one?



The two great hits against the modern era are its ruthless discipline: the ruthless factory and workplace discipline and the ruthless mechanism of the government bureaucracy.  But the question is, what happens when the government lacks the discipline to keep its accounts and its debt in order?  And what happens when the rising generation lacks the discipline to keep a job?



What's your take on that, Mr. President?  Do you remember?

When is a Gaffe not a Gaffe?

A political gaffe, Michael Kinsley wrote years ago, is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Well maybe, but I suspect that we can narrow it down a little.  A gaffe in the good old USA is when a Republican says something that liberals have forbidden us to say.

That explains the Romney Libya gaffe.  You are not allowed to criticize the liberal foreign policy of appeasement.  That makes you a warmonger, someone that shoots first and aims later.

It also explains the Romney 47 percent gaffe.  You are not allowed to express the truth that liberal politics comes down to giving people free stuff, from Julia to Wall Street, and that, sensibly enough, people that want free stuff tend to vote for the Free Stuff Party.

It is impossible for President Obama to utter a gaffe, because nothing he says will outrage liberals.  Conservatives were outraged by the president's "bitter clinger" remark, but it didn't count as a gaffe because the mainstream media didn't all line up to highlight it.  You can tell when a gaffe has occurred because Rush Limbaugh will be able to set up an audio tape of about seven mainstream media newsreaders saying almost exactly the same thing, almost as if they were reading Democratic talking points.

The reason that our liberal friends think that the 47 percent remark is a notable gaffe is summed up in the headline for New York's Jonathan Chait: "The Real Romney Captured on Tape Turns Out to Be a Sneering Plutocrat."  Well, Mr. Chait, I listened to the tape and what I heard was a results-oriented businessman discussing the campaign dynamics.  There wasn't much use in the Romney campaign targeting the 47 percent that don't pay income tax with a promise to reduce income tax rates.  That's what he said.

America's real sneering problem begins with the word "plutocrat."  If you check the Oxford English Dictionary you will see that the first use of "plutocracy" dated 1843 and the first use of "plutocrat" is dated 1850.  We know what that is all about.  It is about the Napoleonic post-war baby boom starting to flex its oratorical muscles.  And the word has been used as a pejorative, a term of abuse, ever since.  In particular it is used by intellectuals to sneer at businessmen.  The pejorative use stems from the double meaning of "plutocrat."  It means rule of the wealthy, but also rule of the underworld, because Pluto was the god of the underworld.

Actually, businessmen tend not to sneer at the workers or the poor.  They tend more to shake their heads in perplexity.  That's what the bourgeois owners of the coal mines in Zola's Germinal did when the miners went on strike.  Businessmen also get ticked off when the workers occupy their factories and start breaking stuff.  But I don't think they sneer at the workers.

Longshoreman Eric Hoffer wrote his piece about sneering, so we might as well quote him, since he backs up my point.

[Y]ou are reminded of what British and French colonialists were saying about the natives... "Wait until you see what a mess these savages will make of things."

We know that rule by intellectuals... unavoidably approaches a colonial regime.

We now realize that government by persuasion has been an invention of the traders rather than of the educated. The trader is usually more interested in the substance of power than its appearance. The intellectual wants not only to possess power but to seem powerful.

It is well to remember that all through history the masses have found the intellectual a most formidable taskmaster.

A ruling intelligentsia... treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

The truth is, as Candidate Obama told his fundraiser in San Francisco, the mass of people are a bit of a problem for liberals.  They cling to their guns and God in their little towns where the jobs left 20 years ago.  In other words, Obama thinks of the American people exactly the terms developed above by Eric Hoffer 40 years ago.

Back to Mary Douglas and her Purity and Danger.  We all develop a system that explains how the world works and how to live successfully in the world.  A gaffe is something that sits crosswise to our cherished system, and therefore threatens it.  The gaffe is therefore experienced as pollution and the party that dared to utter it has to be removed.

Of course if the offending gaffe-meister persist in his heresy, his pollution of the purity of the system, then who knows where it may end.  It may end in the end of the current ruling class and their system.

But that's another story.

QE3 Means That Obamanomics Has Failed

The Federal Reserve announcement last week that it would be buying $40 billion in mortgage bonds a month with no time limit means one thing.



It means that the economic policy of the Obama administration has failed and the federal government has embarked upon a policy of inflation.



That means that the American people are going to get screwed.  Twice.



First of all the American people are going to get their savings shriveled in two ways, first by the artificially low interest rates and secondly by the declining value of the dollar.  Of course, we may end up in hyperinflation, and the dollar will end up worthless.



Secondly the American people are going to suffer terribly when the inflationary boom ends and we have a cruel depression.



So that is what the glorious vision of President Obama's 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention adds up to.  Inflation.  Depression.  Cruelty.  Injustice.  A divided nation.  God knows how it will all turn out.



The question that lurks behind all of the late dynasty failure and incompetence and "bad luck" is what comes next.



Can we refound the American experience on a new birth of freedom?  Can we build a new civil society on the ruins of big government compulsion?  Can we inspire the American people to believe that government is not the answer to our problem: government is  the problem?



Nobody knows.  All we do know is that the liberal elite has thrown in the towel and admitted that its model of governance doesn't work.



That's QE3 means.  That is what a policy of inflation always means.  It means that the government has deliberately decided to steal money from the American people.  It means that the government has to steal money from the American people to pay its supporters.



It means that the Obama years are not going to end well.  They are going to end in tears.  Or worse.

First Get the Grand Strategy Right

In the incompetent muddle of the Obama foreign policy, it is well to step back from the tactical fog and think about the bigger question.



There is not much we can do about the local Middle East politics where political groups jockey for local support.  No doubt it wouldn't hurt to pull back a little aid from countries that don't protect our diplomats.



And maybe it doesn't matter much which Arab nation we align with and which Arab nation we oppose.



The bigger question is the grand strategy.  Do we believe that our democratic capitalism culture and economy and politics is better than the pre-modern culture of the Arab Middle East?  If we do then we should act on it.



In a way, it probably doesn't matter what we do about it.  All we need to do is support democratic capitalism at home and abroad and make things difficult for non-democratic non-capitalist actors.  But first of all we have to believe that our way is best.



If you look at things that way then you start to understand why the Obama administration is having problems at the tactical level.  You can start with the documentary 2016: Obama's America.  It tells us that Barack Obama believes in the notion of anti-colonialism, that the problems of the former colonies of European empires were caused by the imperial oppression of Europe.



There's a grain of truth in the anti-colonialist notion.  European culture has devastated pre-modern cultures all over the world in the last half-millennium.  Europeans sailed all over the world in their ocean-going ships, and they traded and colonized.  Nothing was ever the same after the Europeans arrived.



Was the devastating change due to imperialism?  Or due to the wealth-generating miracles of capitalism?



Put it this way.  The facts on the ground are that, wherever European capitalism caught hold, prosperity has gone from $1 to $3 per person per day to $130 per person per day.  What would have happened if the Euros went all over the world and didn't make an economic difference?  Would the Europeans have conquered the world?  I doubt it.



The point is that capitalism has transformed human life on this planet wherever it has touched down.  Almost everywhere that transformation has included traumatization of traditional cultures and economies.  Because capitalism means constant creative destruction of the economy and the culture: not just for the peoples of Africa and Asia but for the peoples of Europe and North America.



The people of the Middle East have made a very small adjustment to the new capitalist order, and the discovery of oil has allowed their peoples to live without making the capitalist adjustment, by just making money off oil discovered and developed by western oil companies.



But now the rules have changed.  Now that horizontal drilling and fracking has revolutionized oil and gas exploration and brought in resources all over the world, the geopolitical importance of the Middle East will subside.  Thus, the people of the Middle East have to figure out how to connect to the global economy by making and doing stuff that other people want to buy beyond their present suite of hydrocarbon products.



The future is going to be ugly, but there is no reason why the West should truckle to the Islamic countries as they struggle to prosper in the modern world and deal with the humiliation of their backwardness.   Let's get our grand strategy right, let's believe in ourselves, let's tell the world, and let's leave the tactics to take care of itself.

The Problem of the Knee-Pad Media

You tell it like it is, baby!  Or, as the saying goes: You go girl!  Yesterday a concerned citizen in Virginia had something to say to the media assembled at a Romney event:

I think you’ve been suck ups…I think you've got your embroidered knee pads from the White House, buddy. That’s what I think.

Welcome to the Age of the Knee-Pad Media, Jan Crawford of CBS News, Patron and Founder!



No, that wouldn't be fair to Jan who, according to some chap at the American Spectator, is a fair-minded journalist.



Look, we all know that the mainstream media runs interference for the Democratic Party, and liberals generally.  Hey, that's life, and that's why Republican presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan can appear out of nowhere in the polls and win.  Because for a brief interlude every four years, paid media can push back against the relentlessly liberal free media and win.



But there's a Bigger Problem here.  When the mainstream media and the educated elite gang up to produce a single, vetted view of reality, it means that the whole place could be going to hell in a handbasket and nobody would know, because nobody in the knee-pad media was writing stories about hell and handbaskets.



My favorite poster-boy issue for this is the collapse of marriage in the lowest 30 percent.  Back in 1960, 66 percent of the white lowest 30 percent aged 30-49 was married.  Now it's 48  percent.  What about the top 20 percent, the educated class?  Marriage down from 90 percent to 83 percent.  This problem manifests itself in a retreat from work and marriage among lower-class males.  What do liberals do?  They write about how well women are doing like Hanna Rosin and her End of Man: The Rise of Women.  Don't you get, Ms. Rosin, that the whole point of modern society is to put the men to work so that they will stay out of trouble.  The word "career" is a clue to the cunning plan, because it comes from the French for racetrack.  Make the men run around a racetrack instead of raping and pillaging, and selling women and children into slavery.  Get it?  Yet you brilliant liberals are all pushing women into the working, career world, while men wither on the vine.  You just don't get it.



The fact is that the liberal welfare state is collapsing.  That is the truth behind the Crash of 2008 and the death-throes of the Euro.  There. Is. No. More. Money.  The Crash of 2008 was caused by egregious subsidies for mortgage debt combined with government penalties for lenders that didn't lend to sub-prime borrowers.  But liberals are still wittering about greedy bankers.  Don't you read history, liberals? Governments always blame the bankers when their finances go south.  They punish the bankers then go right back to borrowing from them.



Government education?  A disaster area from government K-12, especially in the inner city, thru the college education bubble where gullible students are picking up $100,000 in debt for a degree in Communications just so that Democrat-voting professors and administrators can stay in the pink.



Government healthcare?  Obama's brilliant ObamaCare has provoked business to go on a hiring freeze, because nobody knows what it will all cost.  Anyway, health care doesn't really make that much difference.  It's the basic stuff, from public health to asepsis to vaccination to antibiotics, that makes the difference.



Government pensions?  They have got all the states bankrupt, and worse to come.



Here we have a gathering storm of incalculable risks, and the mainstream media is focused upon Republican extremism and gay marriage.



Back in the day, lefty Antonio Gramsci fulminated about the injustice of the bourgeois "cultural hegemony."  He meant that the bourgeoisie got to define "common sense", what Juergen Habermas called the taken-for-granted culture, the reality that everyone agrees upon.  So he set in motion a lefty attempt at creating its own cultural hegemony, where liberals and lefties would define commonsense reality instead of the bourgeoisie.



The problem is that the bourgeoisie had never set up a Committee of the Whole Bourgeoisie to define cultural reality.  The common-sense reality that developed in the 19th century just growed.  When people like Marx and Engels insisted that reality was not what the bourgeoisie said it was, they had a chance to change hearts and minds.  And they did.



But in today's culture, with the left self-consciously trying to control the culture, we are in a situation where the cultural elite is consciously trying to prevent alternative voices from getting a word in.  Liberals are deliberately removing the canary from the mine, tying down the safety valve.  That is what the whole paraphernalia of multiculturalism and "hate speech" is for.  Suppose things are badly wrong. Suppose that we need to change our government radically before the US enters sovereign default and all the little people find themselves "eating the paint off the wall?"  How would anyone know before we drive off the cliff?


Look.  Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board announced that it would be buying $40 billion in mortgage backed bonds every month until the economy improves.  It is basically saying that the Obama economic policy has failed and that now, after 3 years of recovery, the government needs to goose the economy.  Is the knee-pad media writing about that?  Oh no, they are criticizing Mitt Romney for daring to criticize the brain-dead Obama foreign policy.  As the Wall Street Journal says today:

Mr. Bernanke is also tacitly admitting how lousy the Obama-Bernanke economy really is.  For all the back-slapping by the Fed and the White House about how they've saved us from a Great Depression, four years later the Fed is aknowledging that the \recovery is rotten, that job creation stinks, and that their policies haven't helped the middle class.

 "A bold plan" says the knee-pad New York Times.



If the mainstream media were doing its job, President Obama would be down 10 percent in the polls.  Instead we are still getting knee-pad reporting about how intelligent and wonderful the president is, this about a president, the nation's commander-in-chief, who attends about 50 percent of his daily intelligence briefings, and didn't attend one in the week leading up to the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

They Hate Their Jobs

If you want to understand the extraordinary sight of all those beloved teachers going out on strike, led by the delightful Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, I have four words for you.



They Hate Their Jobs.



In fact, I have a brilliant new insight for you.  Whenever you see a militant labor union, you are looking at people that Hate Their Jobs.



It took me a while to understand this.  Here is how I got there.



First of all, we must understand that in this glorious era of freedom, we western humans are yoked to the wheel of work like never before.  It all started with the Venetian slave sugar plantations on Cyprus right after the Crusades, where entrepreneurs learned to make big money from big sugar profits from their slaves.  The slave plantation business eventually developed the "gang system" where highly disciplined gangs of slaves under an overseer were put to work doing repetitive work hoeing or cutting or chopping.



Then came the industrial revolution in which entrepreneurs developed the "factory system" where armies of workers were put to work in highly disciplined teams doing repetitive work, eventually on assembly lines.



There wasn't much the slaves could do about their condition but the assembly line workers formed labor unions to fight the bosses that had, in the Marxian terminology, "commodified" them.  Our lefty friends call this "resistance."



Today, our liberal friends like to write nostalgically about the good old days of good union jobs at good wages, but Michael Barone begs to differ.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

What's the betting that those public school teachers Hate Their Jobs?  I've known a public school teacher or two.  They seemed remarkably cynical.  Why wouldn't they, working in a huge organization with rigid rules where the individual is just a cog in the machine?



Now here is my flight of fancy.  When a movement of "resistance" develops against something, it won't stop until it destroys it.  Private sectors unions destroyed the steel industry, destroyed the airline industry--PanAm, Eastern Airlines, anyone--and they are in the middle of destroying the auto industry.  Because the workers in those industries Hate Their Jobs.  I've met a unionized pilot or two.  And they Hate Their Jobs, because they are treated like numbers.



Now it's the turn of big government.  We conservatives are all complaining about the liberal politicians and the unions conspiring to bankrupt state and local government.  But I think we are missing the forest for the trees.  The basic problem is that government workers Hate Their Jobs.  They are tiny cogs in a great big government factory doing mind-numbingly stupid repetitive tasks.  So they have combined into unions and all they care about is getting their pay and getting out and getting their pensions.



As the government employee unions demand more and more, and the politicians promise them pie in the sky, the government employee unions are slowly but surely destroying government as we know it.



If government were run by the Republicans this would all be a national scandal.  But, of course, everything except the Pentagon and the highway department is a liberal program.  So the lapdog mainstream media keeps its lip buttoned.  No matter that government education of children in child custodial facilities is a disaster, and a double disaster in the inner city.  No matter than Medicaid is a basket case.  No matter that child protective services is a joke.  No matter that all the entitlement programs are broke.  No matter that subsidized wind farms are making billions of dollars on government subsidies and raising energy prices on ordinary consumers.  See no Evil, hear no Evil, speak no Evil.  That's the program of the mainstream media.



But, of course, the people are gradually waking up to the fact that they are being screwed.  Don't look now, but maybe there is a movement of resistance gathering strength: from Tea Party to Chick-fil-A to 2016: Obama's America.  Usually, a movement of resistance forms when it is far too late.



But maybe the conservative movement of resistance doesn't matter.  Maybe the government employee unions are going to destroy big government all on their own without needing the help of Tea Partiers and Chick-fil-A customers.



Just because the Hate Their Jobs.

Smart Ain't Enough

One thing about our Democratic friends:  in the day-to-day political trench warfare of sound bites and talking points, they are the champs.  As smart as paint.  That's what Long John Silver told Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island.  "You're a lad, you are," said Silver, "but you're as smart as paint."



But of course, politics is not just smarts, playing the game of sound bite tit-for-tat.  There are bigger issues behind all the combat and the day-to-day one-upmanship.



So it makes complete sense that less than a week after the successful Democratic National Convention--boy, how it helps to have the mainstream media singing in the choir--the whole narrative gets chucked into the toilet when Islamists in Egypt and Libya celebrate 9/11 by trashing US facilities and murdering US diplomats.  It makes No Drama Obama look like No Clue Obama.



I was looking up Antonio Gramsci today.  He's the chap who decided that the bourgeoisie had achieved cultural hegemony by making its ideas part of the "common-sense" culture of the nation.  Why shouldn't the left do the same thing in reverse?



Brilliant idea, Tony.  The only thing is that the bourgeoisie never self-consciously set out to create cultural hegemony.  The bourgeois lived as they lived, and they developed their cultural memes as they went.  They never said: wow, we need to develop cultural hegemony in order to dominate the politics of the western world.



But you, Tony, decided to do just that.  Lefties would set out on a long march through the institutions so they could achieve their own cultural hegemony, and then rule from the solid base of that cultural domination of society.  And, to a great degree, liberals in the US have achieved that cultural hegemony.  Liberals dominate the media, dominate the schools, the university, Hollywood, the foundations.  They hold a remarkable power in the land.



But suppose the American people wake up one day and decide that they hate the world that liberals have built for them?  That is the risk.  Every political dynasty holds power in part due to its cultural hegemony, because it gets to tell its story and others don't.  But eventually, of course, people may decide that the narrative doesn't match up with the reality, that the glorious vision of the future doesn't match the grubby reality of power politics.  Cultural hegemony does not give you a lock on power.  It is just part of the trappings of power, whether the ruling class set out to achieve cultural hegemony or not.



So it is one thing for President Obama to give a high-toned speech about progress towards our goals.  It is another thing if the next day it turns out that the unemployment rate is down because 400,000 people dropped out of the workforce.  It is one thing to talk about getting out of Afghanistan one day and have crazed militants attacking US consulates the next day.  With all the cultural hegemony in the world, "events, dear boy" can quickly make the story and the reality out of joint.



That is where our liberal friends are at in these latter days.  They have been spinning their narrative about all kinds of things: that supply-side economics is trickle-down economics, that the Crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers instead of GSE-driven mortgage subsidies, that President Bush was a mad deregulator rather than a middle-of-the-road compassionate conservative that passed government-centric No Child Left Behind and Sarbanes-Oxley.



There is only one problem with all that stuff.  It is rubbish.  It is liberals pretending to themselves that everything is fine and that the Republicans are a bunch of yahoos.



Eventually all this clever spinning and cultural hegemony catches up with you.  And it could be that it's catching up with liberals this year.