ROMNEY AGONISTES

ROMNEY AGONISTES

I am from New York. 

But last week went to Virginia.  

And was finally in a state where there actually is a Presidential campaign.

Here is New York, safely blue, we are besieged with information from the under-ticket.  No Presidential candidate need apply.  I know, for example, that one of my Congressional candidates,  Sean Patrick Maloney (he always uses the Patrick, though I doubt anyone questions his ethnicity), will preserve Medicare and the right of women to make their own health care choices, and that his opponent will not.  I then find out, however, that his opponent, Rep. Nan Hayworth, a so-called Tea Partier elected in  2010, will do the same, or so she says.  I know she was for the Ryan budget, and so have more than some doubts about this.  But all her fellow-travelers in the GOP are singing from the same hymnal, doing their best to convince us that they are . . .

What they clearly are not.

Mitt Romney, of course, has written the book on this.  

And added yet another chapter to it in his debate this week with President Obama.  

The topic this time was foreign policy, but the same feigning Mitt showed up.  In Denver, the candidate for the $5 trillion tax cut, $2 trillion defense increase, and junking of Obamacare, became the candidate without the cut or the increase and with a ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions and an extension of parental coverage for kids.  In Boca Raton, the policies changed but the approach did not.  This time,   pace his recent and not so recent past, there was no red-line on Iran's nukes and certainly no war, no disagreement on the 2014 deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, and no disagreement on Pakistan.

In his previous life, Romney had so berated Obama for weakness on Iran that, given the actual strength of the sanctions regime (it is literally putting the Persians on rations), his policy alternative had  to be viewed as favoring a military strike.  He had also joined John McCain in committing to not violate Pakistan' sovereignty without their permission (which would have made the bin Laden raid either impossible or ineffective).  In Boca Raton, however,  the candidate (and party) that ignored Osama bin Laden for ten years was forced to praise the President who didn't,  and sanctions-shaped diplomacy replaced neo-con sabre rattling as the policy of choice on Iran.

Even when he went off topic, Romney stayed in character.   

When the debate strayed into auto company bailout territory, laser-focused as both candiates were on the bailout's positive impact in Ohio, mutating Mitt claimed he was actually for federal assistance to the auto companies in 2009.  This was a lie, or as they say these days, a post-truth.    In fact,  at the time the bailout was proposed, Romney said the auto companies should be forced to re-organize in a bankruptcy court.  Unfortunately for Mitt, this is neither a place debtors go in search of federal assistance nor one where that assistance is given out.

In truth, the only real contrast the entire night was the one that blew up in Romney's face.  

Earnestly -- but inaccurately -- asserting that his proposed defense increase was merely opposition to the sequestration that may occur later this year (the latter of which, by the way, neither he nor Obama can stop without Congressional action, which the GOP is now holding hostage so as to preserve Bush II's tax cuts for the wealthy ), Romney claimed our Navy was woefully under-equipped, noting that it had fewer ships today than in 1916.  Obama's rejoinder was that the force structure had been set, in consultation with the Joint Chiefs and all three branches of the military, based on strategic concerns and that, in the line that broke records on Twitter, "We also have fewer horses and bayonets."

At which point, Romney just went back to agreeing with Obama, looking "Presidential", and trying to make sure he didn't turn off the the last two undecided voters in Ohio . . .  or Colorado . . .  or New Hampshire.  

Which was his only purpose from the outset.

Now, to be frank, there is a Shakespearean "doth protest too much" quality to all of us who lambast Mitt Romney for tacking to the center in a general election.  They all do it and Romney is not the first, nor will he be the last,  to raise political posturing to an art form.  In fact, if that were all his 11th hour, 59th minute metamorphosis amounted to, it might very well say much that was negative about his character (as in "I'll do or say anything to get elected"), while at the same time saying a lot that was positive about his brain (as in "OK, I am really not that crazy and won't drive us off the cliff by actually implementing all that right wing stuff").

Here,  however, is the problem.

If elected, Romney  won't be able  to govern from the center, even if he has undergone a sort of road to Damascus conversion to common sense.  

He won't be able to do this because no President governs alone and Romney's party has no one in it who can implement a set of centrist policies.  On the one hand, as Grover Norquist -- he of the "no tax" pledge in exchange for beaucoup de campaign contributions -- has made clear, the only job a Republican President has is "to sign [the] stuff" the right wing sends him.  On the other, if you look for potential Republican cabinet secretaries who could implement a non-right wing agenda on either domestic or foreign policy, there are none.

To a man (and woman), the current crop of GOP governors has preached at the altar of tax and spending cuts, eliminating public sector unions, opposing cap and trade to bring down carbon emissions, and favoring oil and natural gas over renewables.  Put simply,  a set of Republican centrists to run HUD . . . or the Departments of Energy . . .  or Health and Human Services . . . or Labor . . . or the EPA is  unavailable.  And on foreign policy the situation is even worse.  Romney's Secretary of State in waiting is John Bolton, and he is not against either going to war on Iran or out-sourcing the job to Israel.  

So what Romney believes, or more importantly whether he believes anything, may not even matter.  

If he is, as he pretended to be for virtually all of this and the last Presidential campaign, a once moderate governor now become a garden variety Republican right winger, the voters will reject him.  But if he is the vague but discernible moderate whose mantle he donned in all three presidential debates, a guy who answers "Never left ya" to Bill Clinton's "Where ya been these last few years, I missed ya", the elites in his own party will reject them.  

The reality is that Romney sought and obtained the nomination of the most conservative and extreme Republican Party in the modern era.  It is layered with true believers running through Congress, the well-funded right-wing think tanks and corporate lobbyists, and the right-wing media of Ailes's Fox and Murdock's NY Post.  Its policies would take us back to the economics of the 19th century and the foreign policies of the first decade of this one.  Romney could not have won the nomination without them.  That was his problem.  Ours is that he has no one to govern with . . .

Other than them.

THE MULTI-TASK CANDIDATE

THE MULTI-TASK CANDIDATE

I am a little late to the party this week.  I could not really choose between baseball and the Vice-Presidential debate last Thursday.  So I had half an eye on each.

These days, that is called multi-tasking.

A lot of folks are very proud of their ability to multi-task, and they let you know it.  When you complain about requests to do more than two things at once, the multi-taskers upbraid the singularly focused.  Multi-taskers are vigorous, dynamic, engaged.  Those who resist are lazy, static, uninvolved.   Multi-taskers create the impression they are problem solvers, always willing to add a puzzle to their plate and have at it.  Their opposites avoid those opportunities, compulsing a single trial or tribulation to death.  Multi-taskers embrace the speed of light pace of our post-quantum world.  They count in nano-seconds. 

Everyone else is ponderous.

Lots of businessmen are constantly multi-tasking.  And even when they aren't doing it, their demeanor evokes it.  Just take a look at Jack Welch, GE's former CEO.  In the space of about five minutes last week, he was for Romney, against the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their lower-than-8% unemployment rate, for the notion that this constituted a conspiracy, and then against the notion he was "blaming" anyone for the conspiracy he pretended to unearth.

All at the same time.

A multi-tasking home run, if you will.

Mitt Romney is a multi-tasker.  All those pundits lambasting Mitt for his lack of specifics, or for his herculean ability to completely change his mind in the space of, if not a moment, then most certainly an election cycle, are missing the point of the man.  It's not hypocrisy, or the greasy wheel of a false politics that promises what can't be delivered.  It's not even the  re-awakening of an erstwhile moderate self (though Bill Clinton did have a lot of fun with that possibility). It's none of that.  What it is . . . is . . .

Multi-tasking run amok.

Multi-taskers never get criticized for this, but their real problem is that they cannot focus.  They have very short attention spans.  My guess is that, were you to assemble a statistically valid sample of multi-taskers, a group diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder would not be far behind.  It, of course, flies in the face of conventional wisdom to suggest that CEO Mitt or any of his successful confreres can't focus; that is ostensibly what they are paid to do, and the better they do it, the more they make.  But run that reel a second time and look carefully.  The Mitts of the world are not the ones doing the focus-ing.  That work is being done by the brilliant back office guys and gals.  Mitt is only the "closer", the guy they send in to seal the deal at the end. 

Probably can do a bunch of them in a morning.

After all the non-multi-taskers have crunched the numbers and spent their all-nighters in the weeds.

Multi-taskers, however, make bad presidents.  Bush II was a multi-tasker.  You could tell given his love affair with his schedule.  He ran the White House by the clock and was never late for the next  meeting, regardless of what went on in the last one.  That's discipline.  The discipline of a multi-tasker . . . 

Who multi-tasked us to a near disaster.  

Clinton -- contrary to appearances -- was not a multi-tasker.  It's not that Clinton did not get a whole host of things done in a single day.  He did.  But he took his time on each.  He is even like that when he campaigns.   Just ask his scheduler.  If Clinton meets you -- and I have met him at least three times --  he focuses and the watch stops.  By the time you're done, he'll remember your name two years later.

A multi-tasker can promise a 20% across the board tax cut that doesn't add up.  Or a $2 trillion defense increase that doesn't increase the deficit.  Or a ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions that doesn't require a mandate or raise premium prices.  He (or she) can do this because, by the time he has to confront the contradictions he has embraced, indeed even while confronting them,    he  is on to the next . . . problem.

While some aide is cleaning up the mess.

That's multi-tasking.  Doing two or more things at once . . .

Poorly.

 

ROMNEY REPEALS ROMNEY

ROMNEY REPEALS  ROMNEY

Both Presidential candidates went to the University of Denver on Wednesday night .  President Obama went there to debate Mitt Romney.  Romney went there to debate . . .

Himself.

All the pundits pronounced Romney the so-called winner.  

The liberals on MSNBC were apoplectic at the President.  Ed Schultz repeatedly bemoaned the President's failure to come at the former Massachusetts governor, whether on the issue of privatizing Social Security (which Romney has been for), or cutting Medicare (which Obama did not really do and which, in any case, Romney in fact does), or obstruction (which the GOP practices with Prussian-like discipline in Congress), or just being preternaturally out of touch (as evidenced by Romney's 47%-are-dependent claim).  Chris Matthews said there was no "Bobby Kennedy" in the President (Matthews remarked that before the first JFK-Nixon debate in 1960, Bobby told Jack to "kick him in the balls").  And Rachel Maddow noted the total absence, in a debate billed as one on "domestic policy",  of conversation on a host of domestic issues where Romney is weak -- abortion, reproductive rights, environmental policy.

While, of course, the left was exasperated, the right was ecstatic.  For the first time in the fall campaign, they thought they had something to crow about.  And crow they did, in typical fashion.  Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was his old obnoxious self, pronouncing Romney's ostensible victory "devastating" on the one hand, while insulting the President as "befuddled," "surprised" and "looking for a teleprompter" on the other.  Having gone ad hominem (the Mayor calls it "ad personam" but needs to brush up on his Catholic school Latin) on the President, there was rich hypocrisy in the air when he blasted Chris Hayes for asking whether money from Homeland Security to Giuliani himself amounted to exactly the sort of "feeding the [government} beast" for which Giuliani derides the administration.  Rudy denied he ever had any Homeland Security contracts, but that was mere wordsmithing.  His firm, Giuliani Partners, has made millions advising firms that themselves have millions in Homeland Security contracts. 

In any case, the right thinks Romney triumphed, the left thinks Obama fell asleep.

And they're both wrong.

Here's why. 

When all the dust settles, the long term story on Wednesday's debate will be Romney's debate with himself.  On issue after issue, the former Governor was an act of re-invention of self in progress.  If Obama seemed befuddled, I can't blame him.  I was a little bit befuddled too -- at, yes, the sheer audacity of Romney's effort at self-redefinition, but mostly at the unrecognizable story now being told.  On issue after issue, a new Romney emerged.  When his campaign manager told us last spring that general elections present a veritable "etch-a-sketch" moment to wipe the old slate clean, he was not kidding.

Because for Romney, this was an "etch-a-sketch" debate.

On taxes, Romney has for the past eighteen months told us that he plans to cut federal income taxes across the board by 20%.  By simple math (Bill Clinton's vaunted "arithmetic" in Charlotte last month), that adds up to (1) a $5 trillion dollar cut that (2) disproportionately favors the wealthy.  Last night, however, Romney said, "I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut."  He then followed up with "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people."  Both statements are false.  The first is flagrantly so.  A 20% "across the board" cut in rates equals $5 trillion no matter who is counting, but all the GOP nominee was banking on is the notion that those 40 million watching the debate would not realize Wednesday's Romney was at total war with Tuesday's.  

As to the second, it is likely to turn out to be a gross distortion as well.   While the "share" paid by high-incomers could stay the same even if cuts are passed, Romney has told us his tax cut will be "revenue neutral" and will not increase the deficit.  The money to fund the cut, therefore, has to come from either spending cuts, closing loopholes or eliminating deductions. He hasn't identified loopholes and his base will oppose eliminating the big money deductions (in the day leading up to the debate, he floated the idea of capping deductions at a certain amount, but last night he just invited us to "pick any number" for that amount; apparently he hasn't polled yet on which number will be least offensive to voters).  So, really, spending cuts it is, and since he wants to raise defense spending and swears he won't cut Medicare, the reductions have to come from everywhere else -- food stamps, public housing, student loans, education, basic research, etc.  

Most  of which  does not benefit the rich.

But all of which benefits the middle and lower middle classes, and the poor.

And all of which, taken together, would still not be sufficient to fund his tax cut without increasing the deficit.

Reinvention continued on health care.  For the entire campaign, we have been told that a President Romney will repeal Obamacare "on day one."  He routinely decries the individual mandate (even though he passed one in Massachusetts).  Now he says that he will not repeal all of Obamacare, promising to retain those parts of the law which forbid insurance companies from excluding applicants based on  pre-existing conditions and allow parents to continue to cover kids until the kids turn twenty-six.  At the same time, he (1) proposes to allow the states to create their own plans to bring the costs of health care down, (2) guarantees Medicare will not change for those fifty-five and older, and (3) wants to voucherize Medicare for those who are younger.

These are circles that cannot be squared.  

If, in fact, Romney repeals the individual mandate while retaining the ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions and the parental coverage extension, insurance premiums will sky-rocket and no one will be able to afford policies.  The only reason companies can accept the ban and the extension is that the mandate guarantees them millions of additional customers, many of whom will be perfectly healthy and thus premium paying non-users.  That, moreover, is the essence of insurance.  You create a pool and then spread the risk.  The larger the pool, the larger the spread, the lower the individual cost.  

The notion that states on their own can manage this problem is sheer nonsense.  While they've been trying for the last thirty years, costs have routinely gone up at rates exceeding inflation and insurance companies have monopolized the individual state markets.  In fact, the only state that succeeded in stemming this tide is Romney's Massachusetts, which became the template for Obamacare.  In the debate, Romney claimed he wanted to defer to the states, which he praised as "laboratories of democracy, " using a phrase he borrowed from the Progressives of yore.   He should know, however, that when those state "labs" come up with experiments that work, there's nothing wrong with  allowing the rest of us in on the success.

Then there was Romney on Medicare.  He falsely accused the President, yet again, of cutting $716 billion from the program (even though his own program does exactly that).  What Obama in fact did, however, was cut payments to insurance companies -- the middle men -- so that the money could be re-directed to benefits.  Next up was the claim that Romney would preserve the program for seniors (or those close) who now have it, but voucherize it for the young, the latter of which is a bad idea he hopes the young won't notice.  Romney glibly asserted that his privatized Medicare world would be one where citizens could choose Medicare over private insurance, but he knows that sort of competition will be entirely illusory.  Instead, the well off will use their vouchers to supplement their own payments and buy high end insurance, while the less well off will be left with Medicare.  In the meantime, nothing will have been done to lower costs, so the pressure on Medicare to cut benefits will be ineluctable and cut they will.

Some might even call it rationing.

By economic class.

On tax cuts and health care, Romney and his seconds think he etch-a-sketched his way to a good night.  On others as well , they think he did the same.  In the wake of the 2008 financial implosion that effectively caused a lesser Depression, Romney has been for repealing Dodd-Frank, the rather anemic re-regulation passed to combat the worst excesses that led to our recent rendez-vous with 1929.  Last night, he changed that to repeal and replace.  With what?   Who knows.  He falsely claimed that Dodd-Frank preserves "too big to fail",  but it doesn't.  It simply recognizes that certain large institutions are "systemically" critical and therefore have to both satisfy larger capital requirements and come up with appropriate plans (so-called "living wills" in the parlance of the regulators) to reorganize or liquidate in the event of any future imminent collapse.  Contra Mitt, Obama  was not endorsing "too big to fail."  He was simply following "too important to be ignored."

Which would have been nice to see in the last President, or the current GOP nominee, when all hell was breaking loose in 2007 and 2008.

So that was the debate.  

Romney v. Romney, really.  

One of them had to lose. 

CALL ME DEPENDENT

CALL ME DEPENDENT

So Mitt Romney, then contestant and now nominee, went to one of those fundraising salons of the rich and richer this past April and told them that 47% of the country was dependent on government and would never vote for him.  

I am actually being nice.

Here's the complete quote: 

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what . . . My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5-10 percent of people who are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion, whether they like the guy or not."

This secretly recorded confessional from Romney is now front page news.  

But it shouldn't be.

Because there is nothing "new" about it.

It was my sad duty last week to attend the funeral of the wife of the federal judge I worked for in 1982-83.  He was a Reagan appointee, and after getting a clerk who had knocked on doors for Ted Kennedy in 1980 (namely, me), a few more politically congenial ones followed.  In fact, a whole host of them -- freshly minted graduates of The Federalist Society (and our nation's elite law schools). For the record, the judge never cared what your politics were and ours has become a close bi-partisan friendship over the years; sometimes we think we are the last of a dying breed.  But self selection being what it is, the students apparently cared about his politics, and so the conservatives flocked to him.  And in conversations with more than one of them last week, "dependency" was the watchword.

As in, Obama is creating "a nation of dependents."

Now at one level, this is just silly.  For starters,  it is plainly inaccurate.  We are all beneficiaries of government programs, whether those programs come in the form of the military that defends us, the roads that carry us, the schools that educate us, or the clean air and water that sustains us.  Obama did not create any of that, nor does the "dependency" it entails capture only the putative 47% who Romney claims "will vote for the president no matter what."

In other words, welcome to the club, Mitt.  You too are a dependent.

But, of course, Mitt and my conservative co-clerks are not lambasting all of us.  Not at all.  Instead, they have a special view of dependency.  As Gov. Romney himself laid it out at that April fundraiser, it's a multi-step process, the logic of which -- in a sort of Cartesian politics -- leads inexorably to dependence.  So if (1)  you are a victim, (2) you believe the government should feed you, house you and medicate you, (3)  you think you are in fact "entitled" to all of this, and (4) you do not take "personal responsibility" for you life, then (5) you are a dependent and (6) an Obama voter, along with (7) slightly less than half the country.

Actually, however, you probably do not vote at all (that's way too responsible).   You most certainly are not part of a group that shares all of these characteristics at once, comprises "47%" of the electorate, and is inexorably wedded to Barack Obama.  

Because no such group exists.

So what gives?

This is demonization, pure and simple.  Romney's April confessional unearthed a lot more than his (or the GOP's) Thurston Howell political persona.  In fact, it unmasked the Willie Horton side of this campaign.  To begin, note that the logic begins, and ends, with a description of the entire group of us who "would never vote for" anyone but Barack (of which, I am one).   

We are all dependent bums.   

It doesn't matter that I just wrote a sizable tax check to the federal government, one of the five I write each year and have for the past twenty-five.  Or that, along with many others who count themselves among the 47%, I pay at a rate more than double Romney's.  Or that I paid off my student loans more than twenty years ago. 

If you are with him (Obama), you are with them (the "dependent").  

Note, secondly, the "them" you are with.  As Romney more or less put it, the dependent think the government owes them food stamps,  public housing and Obamacare.    The specific list of entitlements he chose to pin on Obama's base was thus decidedly narrow.   In fact, those entitlements benefit two -- and only two -- classes.

The poor .

And the sick.

So here's my confession, Mitt.

I'm with them.

Call me dependent.  

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

So I am now being told that we are in the era of "post-truth politics."

According to the pundits, this is an era where facts do not matter.  Instead, media reporting takes the form of "he said, she said" dueling quotations.  Every claim, however preposterous, is framed as the neutral report of an asserted proposition by the would be proponent, followed in turn by an equally anodyne denial of the proposition by the would be opponent.

It is not clear to me when, precisely, this new era began.

In my lifetime, the modern starting point for overt media bashing was Spiro Agnew, circa November 1969.  He was Richard Nixon's Vice President and, like Nixon, was also "a crook."  Unlike Nixon, however, he never really denied it.  Instead, he resigned the Vice-Presidency in 1973 and plead "nolo contendere" to charges of having accepted bribes while serving as Governor of Maryland.  "Nolo contendere" is lawyer-Latin speak for no contest and really just constitutes a sort of linguistic way around having to actually utter the word "guilty" in a courtroom; the two more or less amount to the same thing.  In any case, before he nolo-ed his way to retirement, Agnew toured the land eviscerating the networks and the New York Times and Washington Post for their alleged liberal bias.  Over time, these claims became a settled part of the conservative political canon, ultimately spawning in their wake both Fox News, the post-truth era's example of "fair and balanced," and the snarky anti-media jibes prevalent at any GOP convention.

So, I am thinking, maybe  this "post-truth" period started back then, with media big feet ultimately inhibited into the neutral alley of claim and counterclaim just to avoid the charge of left wing bias.  Woodward and Bernstein, of course, would have none of this, nor would their editor, Ben Bradlee.  They followed the Watergate story wherever it lead, set out the facts, and ignored denials coming from the Nixon White House. 

But ever after, it really has not been the same.  

Reagan skated on Iran-Contra, as did Bush II on no WMD in Iraq.  And now, Romney and Ryan want to do the same on the economy, hoping to assert their way to the White House notwithstanding the plain factual inaccuracy of their claims.  

And it may work.

Here's why.

We are not any dumber than our confreres (and soeurs) from the pre-"post truth" era.  And that era was not one in which facts were always presented with pristine clarity, unalloyed or without varnish.  In fact, the opposite was often the case.  

In the 19th century, before Ochs and Sulzberger began to professionalize journalism, truth was not remotely evident in the broadsheets of the day.  Indeed, when historians tried to reconstruct the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, they relied on the pro-Lincoln newspapers to reconstruct Lincoln's remarks and on the pro-Douglas papers to do the same for Douglas's.  Had they done otherwise, there would be no accurate record for the simple reason that Lincoln papers made Douglas look like a fool while Douglas papers did the same to Lincoln.  Forty years later, things were not much better.  In 1898,  William Randolph Hearst's scandal sheets  more or less started the Spanish-American war all by their lonesome, inundating the public with the dubious claim that the Spanish had attacked an American ship -- the Maine -- in Cuba.  And a half century later, truth still went wanting in the red-baiting and black listing of Joe McCarthy.  

The difference between then and now is that we seemed to be improving.  Regardless of the overt bias of mid-19th century news sheets, or the egomania of Hearst, or the manipulative work of Joe McCarthy, Ochs and Sulzberger and Edward R. Murrow were still manning the barricades on the side of truth.  They weren't ducking the truth; they were searching for it.  And when they missed the mark, they called it a mistake, or an error, or a lie.

That's the problem now.  

We've labelled lies as something else.  They are no longer lies, not even mistakes or errors or just plain wrong.  They are now post-truths, data points in the dawn of an ostensibly new era.

So Chris Christie gets to say Republicans will save Medicare, when the voucher plans they endorse will simply turn this successful government run program over to insurance companies that for fifty years have had us spend more but get less than any other advanced democracy on the planet; or Rick Santorum gets to say Obama ended work requirements for welfare by acceding to waiver requests from GOP Governors, when he did no such thing; or Paul Ryan gets to say Obama "did nothing" with the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction recommendations, when Ryan himself killed them; or everyone at the GOP Convention in Tampa gets to claim Obama told small businessman and woman they did not "build" their enterprises, when the President never said that; or the GOP ticket gets to pretend that spending cuts in a world of near zero interest rates will create economic growth, when they will do the precise opposite.

These aren't "post-truths."  

They are lies.

And calling them post truths . . .

Is just another lie.

AUGUST 1912

AUGUST 1912

About a hundred years ago, all was supposedly right in the world.

Well settled in the predictable conventions of the 19th century, no one, it seemed, even contemplated the possibility that the century long post-Napoleonic order could or would be rent asunder.  European stability, coupled with attendant increases in trade and economic largess triggered by the greatest surge in labor saving gadgetry the world had ever known, seemed to have ushered in an unending era of relative peace and prosperity.  The railroads, telegraphs and oceanic steamers that made the world a smaller place existed in an easy camaraderie with the elevators, refrigerators and now-available-on-a-large-scale "horseless carriages" that made it an easier one as well. 

Sure, there were pockets of despair -- from the Irish nationalists demanding freedom from an imperial order that had unnecessarily killed millions of their countrymen in an if not created then certainly abetted famine, to the widespread poverty of an industrial order that produced a set of discordant notes running from Marx's manifesto to the Paris Commune to the nascent labor movement -- but things on the whole seemed always to be improving.

And then, two years later, a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian prince and the world blew up.

For well over ninety years now, historians have sliced and diced the causes of World War I from almost every possible angle.  They have lamented the failure of statesmanship that unnecessarily turned a crime into a cause.  They have unmasked the fragility inherent in inter-related monarchies, where Kaiser, Czar and King all had the same grandmother and, perhaps, the same psychoses.  They have plumbed the documentary record to expose the flaws in inter-locking treaty commitments that turned the heirs of Bismarck, Metternich, Gladstone and Disraeli into dominoes that mindlessly fell into their pre-assigned positions, as one after another erstwhile great nation mistook action for strength while dismissing thought as the province of the weak.  They have condemned the leaders who ignored America's Civil War, a stark and recent example of how total war would become in the new industrial age. 

But perhaps the most accurate assessment is this --

World War I happened because no one in any position of responsible authority really thought it could . . . or would.

And in that, there is a lesson for us in August 2012.

We are running around in circles today, and our arguments are often pointless, especially when it comes to the economy.   Neither the temerity of the European Monetary Union nor the austerity plans embraced by various conservative and/or creditor friendly  political parties or governments make any sense in the current economic environment.  When interest rates are near zero, demand has imploded, and growth become anemic, deficits are irrelevant and fiscal stimulus on a massive scale is really the only  solution.  To pretend this is not the case, or to ignore the transparently obvious realities that make it so, is the rough equivalent of assuming in 1912 that a world war lasting four plus years -- and costing tens of millions of lives -- can never happen.  To further assume that austerity will  somehow create a recovery under these circumstances is equivalent to assuming in 1912 that the cavalry will be be relevant in the coming mechanized war. 

Whether fiscal stimulus has to be administered through existing governments, as is the case here in the US and in Britain, both of whom still control their currencies, or must first traduce the barriers of a monetary union that needs to somehow get itself to the point where its supposed central bank is allowed to represent everyone and not just creditors, as is the unfortunate case in most of Europe,  is at this stage almost beside the point.  If it is not done -- both here and there -- there will be no recovery in any significant sense of that word.

What if the opposite is done?  What if Romney becomes president here and implements some version of Rep. Ryan's and the right-wing House of Representatives' budget? What if the European Central Bank continues to dawdle on having member states underwrite continent-wide bonds so that Germany can inflate as Spain, Italy, Greece and Ireland devalue  (growing their economies by making their products cheaper and improving their comparative competitive position)?  What if, in other words, everyone takes their assumed positions and, lemming-like, marches down the road to economic perdition?  What if this all occurs and, as is likely, the consequence is Depression?

The answer is, unfortunately, simple.

One hundred years from now, a new crop of historians will have spent their careers puzzling over the mindlessness of a governing class that ignored reality and assumed the worst could never happen. 

They will ask how it was that science -- in this case, economic science -- could have been so thoroughly discarded. 

They will lament the lives needlessly ruined, the assumptions mindlessly made, the history casually ignored.

And some may even recur to an earlier time and a different world -- the world of August 1912. 

Where a different hell was ultimately produced . . .

For the same reasons.

AURORA AND PENN STATE

AURORA AND PENN STATE

A week ago the big news was whether the statue of Joe Paterno would come down at Penn State in the wake of the university's report that he and other higher ups had covered up Jerry Sandusky's child abuse.  Then, last Friday, a gunman opened fire in a crowded theatre in Aurora, Colorado, killing a dozen people and injuring over fifty. 

The two tragedies seemed completely disconnected.  Different crimes.  Different places.  Different victims.  But they actually have one thing in common.

Denial.

By us.

We have created a culture where individual responsibility is a paramount moral imperative but social or collective responsibility is denied at every turn.  If you look at the commentary on the defrocking of Paterno or on this week's announcement by the NCAA of the penalties it will impose on Penn State's football program, you may be struck by the sheer number of individuals who think these results are unfair.  The football team never molested a child and the players should not be penalized, so the commentary goes.  Maybe it was acceptable to take JoePa off his pedestal, they continue, but that is where it should have ended.

Now fast forward to the commentary on the tragedy in Aurora.  The reaction of many to those who suggest flaws in a legal regime that allowed the killer to confront his intended victims with ammunition magazines that allowed him to get shots off at the rate of 50-60/minute is the same.  Guns don't kill, people do; if only some of the theatre goers had been armed, the carnage would have been abated; in fact, said some, the law was part of the problem because it allowed those theatre goers to carry concealed weapons but prohibited those same theatre goers from firing them.

This is denial on a large scale.  And until we confront it, the tragedies in Aurora . . . or Columbine . . . or Tuscon will continue, and the disgusting crimes committed by the Sanduskys of this world will never be completely unearthed and eliminated as future possibilities.

It is well and good to condemn the Aurora shooter and Penn State's perverted assistant coach.  It is also well and good to condemn the college officials and Happy Valley icon for their head in the sand cover-up. 

But after we have done all that, it might be a good time to look in the mirror.

Intercollegiate football is a multi-billion dollar business.  Those football powerhouses bring in enormous sums to the universities that sponsor them.  In western Pennsylvania, Paterno was untouchable, and so was the football program he repeatedly put on the national map.  When he was told to resign by the university's President years ago, Paterno just ignored the demand.  When he finally retired, he was given a multi-million dollar severance package, complete with access to jets and luxury boxes.  Why?  Because in our cost-benefit world, JoePa was a football entrepreneur whose program funded libraries, endowed chairs, and kept State College more than afloat. 

No one could afford to say "no" to him  until a former FBI Director unveiled what was really going on.

By then, unfortunately, it was too late.

Last Friday, it was also too late in Aurora.  

There is no rational reason anyone needs or should be permitted to buy an ammunition magazine that can enable a firearm to  be unloaded with the rapidity of a sub-machine gun.  None! And the notion that we can even the scales and avoid these tragedies by allowing Joe Average the same firepower as any would be killer is simply ludicrous.  The Aurora gun man had outfitted himself head to toe in bullet proof vests and  body armor.  One reason the hundreds of theatre goers could not escape was that he was able to spray the crowd repeatedly with deadly bullets from his fast action  ammo clips.  Under those circumstances, it's impossible to see what well-armed victims could have done  -- if they got up to shoot, they would have been killed; if they succeeded in shooting, the body armor would have protected their assailant.  

And how many others would have died -- in this proposed 21st century version of the shoot out at OK Corral -- is not even considered.

Guns too are a mutli-billion dollar business in this country.  Because there are no truly protective national laws -- the assault ban was allowed to expire in 2004  --  we labor in an environment of patchwork state laws where gun manufacturers in low-control states grossly overproduce given the demand in those markets, knowing full well that the supply will inevitably (and illegally) find its way to the high-control states.  

Nevertheless, it is considered impossible to pass national gun control legislation given the NRA and a Supreme Court that has turned the Second Amendment into something it never was -- a right to bear arms unmoored from any need to provide for a well-regulated militia, which was that Amendment's original (and only) purpose.  Meanwhile, President Obama says his administration will not propose any further controls, and Mitt Romney --- who actually signed an assault weapons ban in Massachusetts when he was Governor -- claims no new laws, not even renewal of the old assault weapons ban which limited the size of ammo clips, are necessary.

We cheered for Paterno and those Nittany Lions for years.  And we have voted in those NRA-fearing Senators, Representatives, state legislators and Presidents for those same years.  

If we think there aren't more Sanduskys out there in the untouchable venues of intercollegiate sport , or more Auroras in a future beclouded by a distorted Second Amendment, we are in denial.  And until we confront the reality behind those tragedies, they will not end.

Because, as Shakespeare once put it, the fault is not just in our stars . . . 

It's in ourselves.