Month: February 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 7, 2021
by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

If There’s No Fear of Inflation, Why is GOP Against More Stimulus? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth — Transcript here

Mark Blyth. ….arguing about deficits is just a footnote on the wider agenda of power for the sake of power. Why do they do this? Because they know that existentially Republicanism has run its course. As Rana just said, there’s only so much you can give to business before they’ve got everything, which is pretty much where we are now. There’s nothing more to give. We need huge amounts of infrastructure repair. We need huge amounts of social investment in the economy and elsewhere. And this is anathema to everything the Republicans have stood for and delivered on for the past 30 years, which is simply more money for me and to hell with the rest of you. So they’re not going to turn this around….

Rana Foroohar. I completely agree with that. And I think it actually brings up something I’m quite worried about, which is the fine line that the Biden administration has to walk right now in executing even part of their Build Back Better, Reward Work Not Wealth strategy, without creating such a bumpy ride from here to there that the Republicans can say, well, look, look what Joe Biden did. Now the markets have crashed… because if you think about what we’re trying to do, if we pull way back, this administration is trying to shift the American economy structurally from being an economy that is based on debt and asset price bubbles to one that is based on income and wage growth. And that’s a laudable goal. But it’s also like turning the Titanic.

….you might actually know when the markets crash that things are getting better in the U.S. economy because certain things have to be done. Raising taxes on companies, the labor share rising, some of the push for union labor that’s coming with the Defense Production Act. All of that is going to dampen profits. It’s going to frighten investors and the hot money is going to run.

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Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On February 6, 2021

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Please use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Default to Kindness

By Ian Welsh

On February 4, 2021

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If there is one policy point I’d like to make it isn’t a policy point, it’s an ethical one: default to kindness.

Or try kindness first.

In policy terms, the kind thing to do is usually the right thing to do. I’d go so far as to say, almost always.

Treating prisoners with kindness nets Finland half the recidivism rate the US, with its punitive prisons gets. That is, only half as many prisoners, once released, commit a crime in Finland.

Single payer or comprehensive universal healthcare has costs about a third less than the US system, and produces better results.

Not committing war crimes makes people much less interested in killing you. Not torturing enemies means they are far less likely to torture your people.

Helping other nations improve their standard of living makes them less likely to kill us, and better trade partners.

Happy employees are more productive and produce more profit, yet we deliberately treat employees horribly in the assumption that we get more out of them that way, despite reams of evidence to the contrary.

High minimum wages do not decrease employment, there is even some evidence that they may increase employment.

Torture does not get useful information out of people compared to regular interrogation. It is extremely unreliable, this is understood by most professionals in the business. You torture to send a message, and that message is “we torture”.

The first thing you should do, in any policy situation, is ask “what would the golden rule have me do?” Most of the time, this will be the correct policy, which will produce the best results. People who are treated with kindness, in general, reciprocate and are productive. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

Further, kindness is the default position even with the worst people. If you allow rapists to be raped, you become a rapist. If you torture torturers, you are now a torturer. You do not, in the old phrase, sink to their level. That doesn’t mean being a pushover, it doesn’t mean no justice, it does mean that the State has no business seeking revenge and that the rules, which should default to kindness, apply equally the worst people and the best. This is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do, because the State often decides the best people are the worst people, as even a cursory examination of history will attest, and it very often makes mistakes, as the many errors in capital cases have brought to light. But, again, even if someone is the worst of the worst beyond even the shadow of a doubt, they must be treated with kindness even as they are incarcerated, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because doing anything else degrades those who do it. Torturers are always corrupted by torturing, occupying armies always become weak, corrupt and brutal. You cannot do evil and not be, yourself, scarred by it.

Be kind, and remember, what you insist on your government doing to others changes your government, and will effect its treatment of you.

Originally published Nov 26, 2012. In some ways this is the most fundamental piece I’ve ever written, or ever will write.

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AOC Is Right About Hawley and Cruz & America Is A Coup-able State

By Ian Welsh

On February 3, 2021

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Hawley and Cruz encouraged the January 6th riot.

That riot put AOC and other Congresspeople and staff’s life at risk. They were lucky to escape. We know that one rioter was texted that Congress had fled to the basement and that he was to turn on the gas and kill them.

It was a coup attempt. Because Trump is incompetent and tends to hire incompetents (with a few rare exceptions), the coup failed. The army wasn’t onside, only a few cops were willing to help, and so on. The best the coupsters could do is make sure that the outnumbered cops weren’t reinforced by more police or by the national guard.

Anyway, if AOC had been caught by the crowd, the best she could hope for was a beating. The crowd wanted to kill Pence, their own VP, as a traitor and AOC has been far more vilified than that. A beating would be the best case, death after some horrible abuse is the more likely case.

So AOC is right, and since she understands, correctly, that Hawley and Cruz and some others were part of making the riot/coup happen, she doesn’t want to work with them. After all, they did something that could easily have gotten her beaten, raped and/or dead.

It is also true that since there have been no consequences for those who aided, planned and abetted the coup attempt, just for the suckers they used, so there may be another one in the future. She is correct about that also.

What is not true is that this is particularly new: my judgment is that Bush Jr. could have pulled off a successful coup, he just chose not to. He would have had the military onside, and while he was personally suffering from some sort of brain damage, he had many subordinates who were, in their own narrow ways, competent. They knew how the bureaucracy and power works, and were brilliant at making it do what they wanted. The 2000 election was unquestionably stolen, and that was a coup without the theatrics.

America’s met the social conditions for coups for some time now.

In the present, however, it is also true that Cruz and Hawley; Hawley in particular, remain possible votes for things that AOC will want passed. Hawley pushed $2,000 checks hard.

Some of what Hawley wants done will help AOC’s constituents avoid poverty or death. This is a conundrum, and it is best answered by accepting their votes but not letting them take lead if at all possible. Hawley wants to be President, and AOC doesn’t want a man complicit in a riot/coup that could have killed her to have that sort of power. This is reasonable.

What happened January 6th was serious. It is not best answered the way that our political elites are answering it, with an increased security state which will not work when the threat is, as the horror movie line runs, “inside the house.”

But those who are mocking AOC for her fear and for her determination to not work with those who encouraged Jan 6th are missing the actual danger she was in. The protestors beat a cop to death, who they had nothing personally against. They’ve been indoctrinated to hate AOC.

And AOC is right that people who face no consequences for a coup, may well try again if they see no other way to get what they want.

But the problem is too far gone. The correct response is to expel those members and Senators involved, but since Congress operates on an entirely partisan basis, with no actual institutional or democratic loyalty, that is not possible.

This is part of why I say the US is in a pre-coup state: that the conditions are met. The responses required to remove the conditions are not possible.

In the meantime, there is a crisis, and it will be used, as all crises are, to do what those who actually have power wanted before anything happened: crack down on the internet, increase police state powers and so on.

And the abuse of the population, by both parties, will continue, until an elite faction does manage a coup, using the resentment that Democrats and Republicans have built and earned over the years as fuel, OR until America finds a way to be good to the majority of its population.

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Biden Is Determined To Lose Congress In 2022

By Ian Welsh

On February 1, 2021

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One thing I admire about Biden is his principles. He’s spent his life hurting little people, and something as minor as holding Congress isn’t going to make him change his ways now. Make a promise, win an election, break your promise in the most weasely and public way possible.

I’m talking about $2,000 checks. There is no question this is what Democrats promised if Georgia elected two Democratic Senators.

And Biden promised this specifically:

A day before Georgians head to the polls to decide control of the Senate, President-elect Joe Biden sought to cast the election as a choice between immediate stimulus relief or months of gridlock, promising that victory by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff would mean $2,000 stimulus checks would be sent out “immediately.”

After Georgia did, indeed, give Biden two Democratic Senators and control of the Senaate. Biden walked this back to $1,400 — saying that the previous stimulus bill had already paid $600. Now he’s been saying that perhaps the checks should be means tested, so only some people will get $1,400 checks.

This is all weaseling. It is recognized as such by ordinary people. Biden is proving that he simply can’t be trusted to do what he says, when he makes a clear promise.

Now perhaps the bill can’t pass: perhaps. But you still do it: you bring and simple up and down bill with only the checks and make people vote for and against it. Odds are some Republicans will vote for it (Hawley, for one) so you can lose a Democrat or two.

Failure to do this will be remembered. People thought they were going to get $2k, they aren’t going to get it, and they will hold a grudge on this. No ordinary person will trust a word Biden says from this point on.

Nor should they.

Billionaires, on the other hand, will find he remains a good friend.

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