The Tortured Masks of the Intermediaries

Christopher Hayes had a discussion of a  story gone viral on the internet about a Halloween party at a “foreclosure mill” law firm with clients including all the giant mortgage lenders:   Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.  Hayes had Glenn Greenwald as a guest and after some of his elaboration about the alternate cognitive reality of the 1%, Hayes defty introduced a segment on the Halloween story (see last 15 minutes).  Thinking carefully about the meaning of this, the material can take on a surreal dimension.

There is something about people putting on masks that allows them to be dropped. Something about loosening the constraints of identity, where the categories we have for ourselves are relaxed, and the contradictions are on parade. Greenwald spoke of the distance between the elite and the reality of what is really going on. That function is everywhere- and the elite use intermediaries such as those at the law firm of Steven J. Baum. In “Margin Call”, the technocrat who understands the risk models is aware of the dissonance, but no one in a position of authority has a clue what the numbers mean (youtube @3:20). It dawns on us that maybe the leaders don’t want to know. It is easiest for those in power that are deluded, who are incurious, unaware of the dissonance, or who aggressively maintain their ignorance. These people are mistaken for leaders because the clash of a multiplicity of modern categories- the gay soldiers, the billionaires who are progressives, the televangelists who are revealed as corrupt- not of it appears to be confusing to them. They appear confident in their identity and project certainty.

For those within the bubble of power, the dissonance is hardly perceived. The dissonance is heaviest at the peripheries, where the functionaries are called on to carry out their duties: The cops at the protests that are asked “who are you protecting”. The soldiers in Afghanistan who know what the locals think of them. The legal aides that serve foreclosure notices and know what is happening to families losing their homes. The financiers inside Goldman who joke about the “sh*tty deals” they were selling to their customers (Levin hearings).  The dissonance of facing two opposed accounts of the world, speaking to two separate sets of people holding the opposed viewpoints results in a split between one face they put on themselves versus another.  It’s no coincidence that two opposing faces is the symbol of Janus, god of boundaries and portals.

Sometimes this extreme dissonance comes home. The leader that everyone wanted to have a drink with, a businessman from Yale, who championed use of American force-the appearances suggested to the American public that he was a man of character that the US needed.  Instead of harmonizing, extreme dissonance was the result- the character instead sounded the notes of a destroyed economy, 8 million out of work, retirement funds annihilated, peoples homes being foreclosed on, two pointless and horrendously expensive wars based on lies.

When the dissonance becomes this intense, we mull questions of Identity, and issues like Voter ID become a proxy for doubts about who the others around us are, and even who we ourselves are.   We are a schizophrenic nation of individuals able to live with completely irreconcilable sets of values- where the categories of adultery and drug escapism are active on Saturday, and the categories of fidelity, duty and honesty are active on Sunday. Issues are reduced to questions of morals and character, but we are of two minds on them.  We decry the loss of American industrial strength while we load up on Chinese goods at Walmart. We want the best educations for our children but want lower taxes resulting in teachers being laid off. Conservatives want a candidate who is electable but are riveted to a soul searching quest for authenticity as they rejects the candidates whose positions are not drawn along the starkest categorical lines.   Progressives want more US jobs and union rights to be a high priority, but not if it means Wall Street profits, higher consumer prices or increases in global warming.  Both conservatives and progressives wonder why politicians they backed cannot deliver on their oftentimes completely contradictory expectations.  The fact is that we are of two minds on most everything.  We cannot make rational our inconsistencies let alone face them, so we project our conflicted expectations on a conveyor-belt of leaders we prefer to blame for our cognitive disharmony.  Ultimately cognition itself has multiples faces at it attempts to re- present our sense feelings from the world and ourselves into some coherent model of reality.  Neuroscientists tell us that we are unaware of 98% of our cognitive activity.  And yet we behave as if achieving a categorical cleanliness to the 2% we know about is the key to solving the worlds problems.  It is a Fairy story from the 18th Century Enlightenment, and its dark side haunts us.

This Halloween, the ghoulish nature of who we are as a nation comes out. Since ancient times, such festivals have provided ritual cathartic release of stresses caused by such social and cultural cognitive dissonance^§.  The release can be a safety valve to maintain corrupt systems. Alternatively, perhaps we can bring something more durable from the carnival- from the modern bacchanalia of masks in full display such as on the Sunday talk shows.

Perhaps stumbling out of that kaleidoscope of artifices, our heart and intuition will lead us to the character we “already know what we truly want to become.” Jobs made a speech challenging us to not delay this quest. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Merry Christmas, Zuccotti Park

… Seriously guys, you just can’t say stuff like this:

“You spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money.”

It’s un-America.  But it this goes further, claims National review:  Zucootii Park is overrun with Communists (source).    Although the quote above was officially identified by the FBI as Communist propaganda ¹, and could have been spoken at Occupy Wall Street, it’s actually  from the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”.   George Bailey (the good financier) says these words to Henry Potter (the evil financier).

What?  One of the most beloved movie of Christmas was considered Communist propaganda?  Really?  What was the FBI thinking?

The fact that both George Bailey the Hero and Henry Potter the villain are both capitalist financiers goes without notice: such “nuances” have never been in the interests of the right wing to acknowledge.  Let’s face it.  This is a very very old story.  Whatever the regime in power, throughout history conservatives have  portrayed complaints against excesses of the powerful as the delusions of a mob seeking to pull down the entire system.  The tactic seeks to gather around them the public who naturally  self identify as the responsibly rational as opposed to all those of the irresponsible / irrational rabble.  This is Nixon’s silent majority against the rabble  of McGovern.  It is the Loyalist majority lawfully following King George against the rabble complaining about unequal government policies.

It is not just the National Review who is portraying the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street as anti-capitalist.  What gets reported is that there is a strong feeling of resentment towards arrogant Wall Street laissez-faire financial practices.  What goes unreported is that few have any problem with the Steve Jobs kind of capitalism.  The Occupy Wall Street protesters cry out against the financial casino of  naked default swap gambling, but is it true that the protesters are anti-any-kind-of-finance?  No.  They are for all the George Baileys engaged in responsible finance activity that makes loans to small businesses and low income families buying homes.  Microloans are cool, Citigroup screwing the public isn’t.

The fact is that the public has always had a much more balanced view of finance, and this should come as no surprise.  In “It’s a Wonderful Life”, every viewer  makes a big distinction between the kind of  finance that George Bailey and Henry Potter are involved in. When there is a run on George’s Savings and Loan, it is clear that all of the townspeople are investors, and all of them are getting interest. (Potter “magnanimously” offers to buy the townspeople’s shares in the Bailey S&L for 50 cents on the dollar.) George explains the complexity of the finances to the people, but what wins the argument is that George appeals to everyone’s sense of sticking together, trusting one another, and making sacrifices during hard times. George chooses to behave honorably, while Potter’s behavior is regarded as dishonorable.  The message is moral, not political.  It is not left vs. right horizontal, but up versus down vertical.

George and his “miserable Savings and Loan”  is part of the 99%.

As benevolent as this film was, it was regarded by culture warriors of the period as part of a communist conspiracy. Secret FBI memos described Capra’s movie as communist, advocating “an irresponsible economy in the name of moral responsibility.” (source) Capra was indeed suggesting it was good to have an economy that was built on positive human traits rather than being predicated on pure self interest.

Ironically, the system of Wall Street that the Right is defending is in fact Socialism.   It is hard for conservatives to accept that the business models of AIG, Goldman and Lehman all relied on implicit governmental support for their positions. Ultimately with a wink and a nod everyone knew that it was a game they could not lose- whatever happened the government could not let them fail.  Now, conventional wisdom is that investors should be allowed to take as many risks as they like, so long as they not threaten to take down the entire global economy if one or a group of Wall Street firms go bankrupt.  But with Dodd-Frank we only marginally less vulnerable from that sort of scenario, as in 2008 when Wall Street had the “Too big to fail” gun to America’s head.  Because we will not allow our economy to be bombed back to the stone age, the de facto situation continues to be that the US government is still providing an implicit backstop to  Wall Street financial institutions.

The reality is that there are socialists here- but the National Review has it backwards.  The socialists  populate Wall Street firms and not Zuccotti park.   This inconvenient fact violates the narratives promoted by the Right-   the narratives that seek to demonize traitorous  liberal industrialists  like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs,  Steve Case, Bill Gates,  Eric Schmidt.  Unlike the Right’s darling Wall Street sponsors, these individuals are the real capitalists:  The real job creators  building the real economy.

Herman Cain: Yes We Can Too. But not really.

Herman Cain is the multiple choice answer to a True False question about the Identity question for conservative voters:

Pollster: Are you a Bigot?

□ Yes, in the privacy of my car I laugh at the hair net jokes, the Obama the magic negro song, and the portrayal of the president as a pimp and the first lady as a whore. Come on. It’s hilarious.
□ No, I deeply believe that Obama is legitimately the President of the United States. He won fair and square.
□ My current first choice is Herman Cain.

Deconstructing the God Game

Old woman or Young woman

Rachel Maddow used a trompe l’oeil image to illustrate how people from opposite ends of the spectrum could hear two completely different things when listening to Elizabeth Warren talking about the relationship of the wealthiest 1% to the rest of society.  Neuroscientists tell us that the brain has mechnisms called mental maps we use to create models of reality in our minds.  From primitive creatures we as predators developed more sophisticated brains that could take rich sensory data and construct moving mental maps to model prey.  The better we could model their intentionality the better our odds of survival. What we believe other creatures are doing allows us to respond with survival-effective responses (flight, attack, procreation and so on). These narratives of what role these other creatures play and what we can do in response to them are understood by neuroscience to be common not just to hominids but to all mammals.

The image on the right can be modeled by our mind as an old woman or a young woman.  Unlike the image, when we model the intentionality of a politician, the politician probably did not mean to entirely different things.  Yet we can listen to the same words and walk away with multiple different models of what they were talking about.

If it was possible to influence which model the public chose when listening to a politician, such knowledge would be a source of significant political power.  The more one can control the narrative that people think in, the more one can control what they see, and how they think about what they are seeing.

In evolutionary terms this only became possible when narratives could be communicated to others. The network of ideas in the mind that is the narrative could be transferred to other minds via communication networks.

It gets scary when the vertical networks represented by mass media into the homes is allowed to be consolidated into the hands of the few. Folks like Bob Schieffer ladle out the bromides about how we can rely on good old American common sense, assuring us that it doesn’t matter how much money the nefarious scallywags use, or how much a particular network pushes a particular narrative- Americans are pretty good at figuring out what makes sense.

There is good reason to be skeptical of Schieffer’s confident claims.  Jane Mayer at the New Yorker illustrated just how deluded that perspective is. Her story boils down to this: a member of the 1% (Art Pope) targeted 22 democrat legislators who were running  in North Carolina elections. He succeeded big time- knocking off 18 of the dems- simply by spending heavily on communications that created false narratives about the democrat candidates.

There is a huge threat when the wealth of vertical communication networks are monopolized by the few. To modify Supreme court Justice Louis Brandeis‘ warning:

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth of communication concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

That is why we must do all we can to enhance the nexus between the vertical and the horizontal networks of the internet and social media. It is here that the democracy of the viewers exercise their power to remix and interpret what is downloaded to them

Mass media sites are incorporating blogs and twitter feeds so that communication can be bidirectional as well as horizontal.   Some are experimenting with allowing content generated by viewers influence the reporting.  As for horizontal social communication, this medium allows viewers to generate news themselves, as is the case with the global Occupy Wall Street events.

Industrial Policy and China- Keystone vs. Solar

House Energy and Commerce committee chair Cliff Stearns made the surprising assertion that President Obama does not understand economic matters.

“We should invest in and provide incentives to companies that can exploit our competitive advantages in technology and innovation … and not subsidize industries when these other nations have cheaper labor, no environmental or safety standards, less regulation and easy access to raw materials,” the statement added. “We should not be picking winners and losers, which is a fundamental flaw in his stimulus scheme.”

A confusing proposition. How does one “invest in companies”, and yet not “pick winners and losers”?

The truth is that China is picking winners and losers. GOP philosophy in general has been that industrial policy or anything resembling it is socialism and  the US should not have any of it.  In the 80s,  in response to the Japanese dumping memory chips at below manufacturing cost in the US markets, many in the GOP argued that the US should do nothing. In theory, the government should not intervene if one companies in other countries are simply being a better capitalists.  Counting on this anti-industrial policy philosophy, it was a smart business move on the part of the Japanese companies to wipe out US semiconductor industry so that in the long term no one could compete with them.

Michael Lewis observed that the United States is peculiar in the OECD because we alone do not have an industrial policy.  Representative Stearns reflects this confusion in his self contradictory statement today.  The GOP attempt to portray the Solyndra failure as a failure of industrial policy is nonsense.  If 95% of the investments made by a venture capitalist payed off, then it could be strongly argued that the venture capitalist is not taking enough risks.

Currently, China actually imports  $1.9 billion in PV panels from the United States.  It is a battle we have been winning.  United States PV is the lowest cost per watt- not Chinese.  (Panels from First Solar). This is true despite the widespread belief that the Chinese are dumping panels on the world market (source) and enjoy heavy governmental subsidies.

Politicians opposing  green technologies- are not just those aligned with oil and coal companies- it’s also the teamsters and pipefitter unions who see thousands of jobs laying the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf.  Not building the pipeline does not mean that the markets won’t find a way to buy, refine and burn that tar sand oil.  If the Canadians allow it to be dug, the money will find a way, and the Chinese among others will be eager customers.  The same principle is true for Solar PV panels.  Surrendering US technology and allowing its fledgling PV industry to be strangled in its crib by the Chinese does not mean that the Oil industry wins. It means the Chinese win.

Chairman Stearns must figure out whether he cares more about American industrial strength or whether he wants to go down in history as playing the fool to Chinese strategy for besting the United States.

A Consumption River Pumped Dry

Does America need more Apple’s? Celebratory writers like Thomas Friedman in his book, “That Used to be Us” assert we do.  These writers apparently did not notice that high tech is not labor intensive.

That has some major policy implications.

Studies show that rapid growth of high technology businesses have not led to job growth as was the case with low tech industries of  the 19th and early 20th centuries.  21st century technologies tend to remove middle class jobs, not create them as MIT researcher David Autor has been pointing out (eg in this paper).  There are jobs for the few highly educated workers necessary for high productivity businesses, but by definition, not enough to hire the displaced middle class workers even if they were retrained with the exact skills needed.  Prior to this, such heretical statements got a person labelled a Luddite for doubting the theology that new technology always created as many jobs as it destroyed.    Researchers are not so sure any more that the “Luddite fallacy” is really a fallacy after all.  The Luddites may simply have been 200 years too early.

In today’s technology, just 300 employees at Twitter delver a product to 200 million users. What about high tech manufacturing? Same thing. In 2006, iPod employees in the US earned 7.5 billion in sales, but Apple paid back into the US economy barely 10% of that- $750 million in wages. (source)

While that profitability is good for Apple Shareholders, this is not so good for jobs in America. What it means is that companies can extract much more purchasing power from the economy than they return in the form of wages. Picture the purchasing power of consumers as a river. If all the companies along the river are taking more water out than they are returning, what happens?

That’s right. The river dries up. It is clear we cannot return to a housing price spiral to pump more purchasing power into the river. We need to attack the problem a different way.

At a macro level, we have a system wide market failure since businesses are not directly feeling the long term cost of refusal to return purchasing power to the Consumption river. The system incents businesses to drain the river as quickly and efficiently as possible through the wonders of high technology.  Using efficiency managers like Mitt Romney, successful businesses do it with progressively fewer and fewer workers than before. (NYMag article: The Romney Economy)

We have to go beyond gimmicks like inflating credit to address this underlying mismatch between how much stuff a worker can create versus how much stuff we can possibly consume. One idea is to treat the river of purchasing power as a public resource, and that companies not be allowed to pump more water out of the river than is going in.

In order to keep businesses healthy, the consumption river levels must be maintained.  They will either become regulated in this regard, or they will die from lack of consumers.  So which bitter pills do we choose:

• Approach 1: Companies must retain sufficient employees to match their extraction of purchasing power. Companies are required to retain sufficient employees so that the river is resupplied with purchasing power in the form of wages. Nothing about the mechanism of enforcement is implied.  This could be a self regulated “privatized” structural mechanism, or an overt governmental intervention- aka a “socialist” regulatory scheme.
• Approach 2: Redistribution.  Purchasing power is extracted from companies through higher corporate taxation and returned to the economy with public sector jobs- Better pay of teachers, long term infrastructure jobs.

The trend Autor observes applies to all OECD countries.  Are there other approaches for solutions to the Consumption river problem?

Walker’s Wonderland of illogic

Noted neuroscience researcher Antonio Damasio points out that Descartes’ Error was to assume that we are primarily thinking creatures.   This is false and causes us to conduct poor and ineffective analysis of politics.

We see politicians making logically absurd propositions  all around us, yet we are surprised when such candidates enjoy the support of many thinking voters.  To illustrate, consider the following: The state of Wisconsin’s legislature decided to impose a requirement that voters present photo ID before voting.  Progressives objected stating that there has been virtually no voter fraud cases and that the measure is instead politically motivated since it will disproportionately impact progressive voters.  The League of Women voters filed suit, to which the Governor’s office made this brief response.

For Immediate Release Thursday, October 20, 2011 Governor Walker Statement on Photo ID
In reaction to a lawsuit today challenging the law requiring photo identification to be presented when voting, Governor Walker issued the following statement:   There are more photo ID’s currently issued than there are registered voters in Wisconsin.   Requiring photo identification to vote is common sense—we require it to get a library card, cold medicine, and public assistance.  I will continue to implement common sense reforms that protect the electoral process and increases citizens’ confidence in the results of our elections.Ensuring the integrity of our elections is one of the core functions of government.  Photo ID moves Wisconsin forward.

If this were the legal argument the Governor intends to make, then any Judge would dismiss it out of hand.

1. Is this a valid Causal proposition?: Observing that one state document was acquired in greater quantity than voter registrations in the same period does not cause all individuals with the second document (registrations) to have the first document.   Unless some correlation is made based on the higher issuance of photo IDs, then we can’t assume there is a causal connection with anything related to voters.  The fancy name  causation fallacies  (Non Causa Pro Causa) with an uncorrelated factor in the premise is  Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.
   But that doesn’t seem quite right- so maybe Walker intended:
2. Maybe a Category proposition?:  The  governor’s argument might be restated that: registrations are given to voters, IDs are given to voters, therefore all registered voters have IDs, especially since more IDs are given out than registrations.   The fancy name for the part up to “especially” is a category error, like the syllogistic fallacy in Alice in Wonderland:  Serpents like eggs, girls like eggs, therefore girls are serpents.

If Walker actually intended a logical proposition, we are indeed in a Wonderland of preposterous illogic but the disturbing reality is that none of it seems to matter to voters.  Walker’s response is purposely vague in order to obscure the logical errors.  How the premise ties to the unstated conclusion is omitted, so it is impossible to classify the fallacy except with a catch all like “non sequitur” or Ignaratio Elenchi  (more on that classification here)

So is the solution to make the population more skilled in argumentation and logic?  The western democracies are highly educated and it doesn’t seem to be making much impact.  It will come as no surprise that Walker’s statement has nothing to do with logic, or a legal argument.  We often turn away from such propositions sometimes for valid reasons, when we trust our instincts that something can be legally valid, without being morally valid.

Both progressive and a conservatives feel that something deeply illegitimate is going on with the Walker story.  For many it’s part of something larger- a feeling that something is deeply not right in the world- That there are nefarious hidden forces at work that are undermining that which is good about the world. That is where we are as the 99%. Totally common emotional feelings.

Clothing our common emotion, the force of our feelings are channeled into utterly opposing logical propositions. Walker’s supporters believe that not all those who are registered to vote are all legitimate voters. There is a deep feeling that Obama is not legitimately their President, and their minds struggle for an explanation of how it could be that he is in fact their President. We progressives engage in the same thinking- we feel that a vote is not fair if the views of the population are being controlled by propaganda (progressives cite FOX propaganda, and conservatives cite the Left dominated mass media other than FOX).

On this particular issue, what Walker and other conservatives were capitalizing on were the following premises floating around in the minds of conservatives:

• Registrations are given to voters
• Identity cards were given to legitimate voters
• More Photo IDs were given than Registrations
• Legitimate voters have Photo IDs

There are two strong frames that provide structure for these disjoint premises.  Their strength is measured in their resonance with the same frames active in number of other conservative issues.  The first is identity.  “How is it possible our state voted for Obama”? sounds the Identity and Legitimacy themes.   “Who were these voters really?”  is merely the Identity politics variation of  “Who is Obama really?” (Kenyan, Muslim, radical militant?)  For conservatives in denial, the theme if illegitimacy is strong.  Obama as an illegitimate president (eg. the birther’s claim), elected by illegitimate voters.

So pealing back the skin on this issue, the real premises are not from logic but from the emotional feeling something is deeply wrong, and something must be done as Walker’s release states, to restore  “integrity” and “citizens’ confidence in the results of our elections.”

If this is what significant portions of the population sincerely feel, it is like saying the last elections were rigged.  It is silly to confront the Walker at the level of logic and measures of legal merit and simply mock the right’s crazy talk.  An effective analysis must engage the emotions from which the issues spring and defuse them.

Our country’s founders in the 18th century were children of the Enlightenment and like Descartes assumed we are something we simply are not. The republic is founded on an inverted assumption. It is in fact quite irrational to insist that we are rational creatures. It is not that issues make us feel one way or another.  It is that we all have strong emotions about how things are, then we frame issues around those feelings.

At the bottom of it, we are emotional creatures.  We start with our feelings- from deep in our brain stems, guiding the organizing of sense data into perceptions, proceed up to  our  frontal lobes which help us amplify and refine our feelings about our world,  and what others mean, dressing them in the clothes of intentionality, rational propositions and so on. But in our nakedness we are all emotional organisms, not logic machines balanced on two sticks to propel us through life on trajectories without meaning.

It matters not one tiniest bit whether or not we have a convincing rational proposition  to bludgeon the opposition with. This is the delusion of the children of the enlightenment. The children of political science departments. The children that believe themselves to be performing penetrating commentary and analysis.

Two different women are visible

They are not speaking to the emotions of those who do not share their points of view. In fact, what they are doing is helping the opposition entrench their supporters  further into their foxhole perspectives, rather than getting them to understand other emotional vantage points from which alternate gestalts are possible- to see the young girl in the picture rather than just the old lady, or vice versa.

That is the path towards common action, and that is what the president was directing himself towards in his self criticism about narrative in Suskind’s book on Obama. A common narrative is at the heart of it. People look at narratives and frames as a way to package a policy. That is completely backwards. You start with the narrative- the emotional frame- and your existence as a leader and our existence as a nation sufficiently united to achieve legislation stems from that narrative.

Literature in real time

A few days ago, @ChrisLHayes tweeted a request for recommendations of folk tales with a theme of trusting ones own perceptions versus those of authority.   He wanted an alternative to the emperor who has no clothes narrative- and who knows maybe it has something to do with his book on authority.

I wonder if the simplicity of such narratives are more appealing to cognition, or whether we live by them due to our lack of sophistication.  Like the rigid archetypes of many strict Jungians, folk tales have this cartoonish caricature feel to them.  So I was thinking- why go to simple literature- why not the more complex. Instead of similar folk tales – why not the struggle of Hamlet to trust his own perceptions, and not buy into the collective truth projected by  his mother and step father the King?  There is something rotten in our Denmark and the analysis is not well served by narratives from two dimensional folk tales. Hamlet himself if in a position of authority and others around him are also in the position of questioning their perceptions of him, just as we question our perceptions of who we believed Obama to be in 2008. Drew Westen sees a Hamlet, and is not sure if Obama even knows who he is. Westen can be forgiven his myopia because he does not understand the challenge of a leader who is not just adept at acting within the literature of politics, but goes far beyond the actor role of Reagan. Reagan didn’t write his parts. Obama does- but this is not the ancient art of political deception using language to dress up the unpalatable.  The literature is not decoration added as a finishing touch, but instead is at the beginning- forming the very spirit of the political activity.

Obama’s impact  goes far beyond the historically inevitable event of a first nonwhite President.  Regardless of his race or his political positions,  Obama is historic because of this new quantum level in the literature of politics.  By  shear accident we have elected a young Shakespeare who both writes and plays his part acting and managing the stage for making real what we only imagined was possible. Obama states that establishing the national narrative is something only the president can do, and something he told Suskind that he lost sight of. I believe he was misdirected by some of his clever technocrats, and personally I cannot fault him for an inexperienced leader erring on the side of caution and going with the technocrats with the credentials and experience. In my political life I saw Bill Gates constantly misdirected by the clever Nathan Myrvold.

The challenge for Obama is literature in real time. It was a simple task for the Reagan character actor to stamp his black and white hat sort of folk narratives on every issue.  Can analysts keep up?  Will we progress to understand more nuanced narratives without plunging everyone into agnst about the kaleidoscopic nature of political reality? What overall national narrative will Obama settle on for the 2012 campaign? Will he go big, or will he be cautious about how ambitious a goal he sets for America. Personally, I think he should go for a mandate on going big. After 2012 Pelosi will have all the votes she needs for aggressive programs. Concerning the Senate, I think we need to push forward with rules reform regardless whether we win 60 votes there.

The Socialism of Goldman Sachs

The fact of the matter is that the GOP favors a socialistic system for Wall Street. Deregulation appeared to be the opposite of this, but what it meant was that Banks could now gamble with other people’s money in financial markets, with the implied backing of the US government. Until the 2008, the “implied” bit was hotly debated, because if it was true, then the system would be socialism. The meltdown ended the debate.

This system was sold to the US as a good deal- this would have the beneficial effect of allowing rapid liquidity and risk taking needed for bold economic activity. The idea was that the US backstopping the banks would never be necessary. The fatal flaw in this theory of Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan was that his libertarian philosophy was wrong- Wall Street was incapable of self regulation. The unintended consequence of the deregulation was that Wall Street created a massive domino effect: A complex thinly collateralized system of cross leveraging that tied all Wall Street players together like Alpinists bound by a rope. Due to the absence of regulators overseeing their balance sheets, none of their leveraged positions were sufficiently collateralized so that when one slipped into a crevasse (Lehman), they all started to slide in.

Wall Street knew that the US government recognized that the system was both too cross-leveraged and too big to fail, and realized this meant they were looking at a gold mine. The logical conclusion was that they could not lose: all their bets were backed by the US government. They had the perfect system. Heads they win, tails the US taxpayers lose. That is why the GOP actually is ironically the party of Socialism. Financial socialism for the top 1% of the population, with all benefits flowing to them when the bets paid off, but with the 99% holding the burden of the social safety net for them when they failed.

Ok. So dealing with that issue adequately will tend to retard Wall Street’s ability to drive our economy into the toilet again. It doesn’t get us out of the ditch.

The argument that America has had it too good and simply has to tighten its belt is a familiar one. The reality? Like it or not, 70% of our economy is based on consumption. No one is consuming because they don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing them. Because no one is consuming, businesses are shutting down rather than hiring. It is a self feeding death spiral. Austerity measures that you suggest at this point in time serves to accelerate that death spiral.

There is no question that either spending will have to be cut or taxes will have to be raised to bring the Bush’s lunatic balance sheet back into the black as it was during Clinton’s final term. We are low on gas now, but you don’t cut the gas to your engine when you are in a stall and crashing to the ground.

You may not have a solution, but the President does. It happens to be backed up by the academic community. Wall Street doesn’t like the prospects of having their socialized candy shop closed down. Their surrogates in the GOP have their back and really could care less what happens in the near term to the economy.  US corporations are sitting on 2 trillion in cash and can figure the best bet is to see if they can do everything they can to get a better deal in 2012. Therefore, they do not want any progress on the economy.

What I am saying to my friends on the right is that they need to perform an honest assessment of who is representing their interests, and who is not.

Issues as commodities from Politician vendors

Commentators from both the left and the right would benefit if they considered their roles in literary journalism. The intellectual laziness is stunning in its arrogance, as we hear speaker after speaker trot out the identical themes with minor variations.

Ok Ok. We heard the theme that progressives are disappointed in the president’s”failure” with [fill in the blank issue]. How does the drama play out? Insurrection against the once popular leader from his enemies and impatient supporters alike is a timeless drama. One might think that astute politicos would have sufficient access to history to avoid this cycle. Both right and left are united in casting the leader as a failure. It is unclear to me whether any but a handful of commentators are even conscious that they are story tellers and their choice of story has any relation to the story made real in elections and legislation. If the fingers are ever pointed in their directions, they absolve themselves of any responsibility. Oh No- they were not engaging in pro-cyclical mindless parroting of a narrative that gained currency in the 24/7 news cycle- They were simply reporting the facts that happened to be inconvenient for the leader. Donning the Lilly white garments of empiricist journalism, the commentator engages in the farcical pretension of floating above the fray, angelic, representing all sides with third person omniscient detachment.

Consider the  October 2, 2011 Sunday show Up with Chris Hayes (video skip to 3:28).  In it we hear an echo chamber effect from 3 commentators. We hear the Obama-as-Poltician- generating-cover for a failure theme, the “Politician doing a bait and switch from what the LGBT community really want” theme, and the “Why is the poltician taking so long to fulfill my demands (wait my table)” theme. These sorts of acidic narratives are replayed both by the right and left.  From the right we hear from Tea party faithful about how establishment republicans have sold them out,  and on the left we hear similar refrains about sell out politicians in near perfect replication from the multitude of interest groups under the big tent of the democrats. The public gets a shiny new toy for a leader, and when it fails to deliver whatever golden egg they were expecting, they systematically take their frustrations out on the toy,  finally destroying and discarding it in favor of the next new toy. In many respects, this is what the excellent Vanity Fair articleabout California’s relationship with its action hero governor was about.Accusing the president of being hesitant to spend political capital is incomprehensible- was the president unwilling to spend capital on health care reform (something that has been in the democratic platform for 30 years but not delivered on until Obama)- was he unwilling to spend it to gain passage of the enormous stimulus bill that halted the economy’s free fall in 2008? I don’t mean to pick on Cohan- he wanted Obama to have spent the capital instead on the radical steps Cohan says should have been taken during the financial crisis (He makes a very good point, and his analysis of Goldman is important for everyone to understand). Regarding the other two commentators, I also assume good faith- I think they had the overt intention of doing something positive- of pointing out how much more there was to be done, and want to encourage him to use confrontation more.

What should not be overlooked was that the three were resonating a particular theme dominant in the right wing echo chamber.  This may have something to do with why #upwithchris twitter commenters decried the low quality of that particular Sunday show. I don’t think folks were looking for a cheering section for the President.  Instead they want to hear insightful issues analysis rather than the echo chamber,  pro-cyclic personality and motivation dominated “analysis” common on weekend talk shows. It was ironic that the solitary insightful  statement in the entire first segment made was not by a liberal but rather by conservative Reihan Salam. He reminded the panel of Frank Rich’s excellent point that the polling numbers have shifted dramatically on LGBT issues so Fox and other politicians were virtually silent, realizing that spewing homophobic rhetoric offers only political disadvantages. The narrative Salam is offering is that Obama is opportunistically picking low hanging fruit, and the other groups like Latinos with more difficult goals will be left to feel like “their back is not getting scratched”. It is a phrasing that corrupts the public’s attitudes towards public servants, but at least it is not in the tired narrative of the loser action hero who is discovered to be a phony.

I’m not sure which is worse. The cynical politician who only does the easy reforms first, or the superhero politician who is discovered to be an incompetent charlatan.

Fortunately, Hayes provides a positive narrative of how what he called “Obamaism” is actually a triumph over the divisive partisan warfare advocated by both ends of the political spectrum. He points out that the “Don’t ask Don’t tell” (DADT) repeal was a process victory, and how radical this shift in process was from Bush-Cheney political cudgel techniques. Cohan finds this process contradictory, using the terms of Pledges and so on as if Obama was playing by Norquist rules.

Hayes’s writes a new narrative of the slow walk consensus building that produces overwhelming political force around an issue to gain passage without resort to divisive partisan rhetoric. It is heroic, triumphal, hope filled and gives the public heart rather than contributing to the corruption of the public’s attitudes towards governance.

Journalists have a choice… They can continue to be the willing participants in the normal cycle that demands nothing of the electorate. We want services but no new taxes. We want aggressive change but want it for free- as if all that is required is a trip to the polling booth to eliminate entrenched sets of laws and regulations supported by vast networks of vested interests.

We believe Morph “Yes We can” into Yes He Can”, then turn on the leader when he doesn’t instantly save the day single handed with his superhuman oratory but no ruling majorities in either house of congress. Journalists are in a codependent relationship with a public unwilling to maintain an attention span longer than the tail end of an election campaign. Journalists who buck the ordinary narratives are tuned out- their producers become concerned about their sagging ratings.

That is until we run across Journalists of the caliber of Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow.