… is the condition upon which God hath given liberty to man, you know.
And while “liberty” is rapidly rising to the level of “patriotic” as a word as hollow as Annie Dillard’s frog, all of John Philpot Curran’s fury still holds when we’re talking the defense of our own minds in the face of the relentless, repetitive, numbing, booming bullshit machine of the right.
Case in point? The usually estimable David Leonhardt, economics correspondent and soon-to-be Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. In today’s Week in Review section, he’s written a mostly fine piece on the vexing question of why Bush appointee Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has led the central bank to its current state of inaction in the face of all the economic hardship the United States now endures.
Most of the piece is on the money — so go read it. In brief(ish…remember who’s blogging–ed.) Leonhardt notes, correctly, that within the academic community both liberal and conservative economists are having a robust debate about exactly what the Fed can and should be doing. But, he documents, the Fed has essentially collapsed the public debate to whether we should worry about essentially flat inflation at every waking moment, or merely most of them.
Leonhardt accurately diagnoses the incentives that make this intellectual vapidity the soft option for Fed chief and his colleagues:
Mr. Bernanke knows that if he errs on the side of passivity — worrying more about inflation risks than unemployment — he risks only a modest flogging from colleagues and politicians.
He even takes the next step and correctly identifies the reason why the penalty to be feared for taking action is asymetrically worse than that for the rolling disaster we now endure while the engineer dozes at the switch:
If he leans the other way, he risks being accused of, well, treason.
Yup: he calls out Rick Perry by name and the GOP by clear implication for creating a political context in which the price of acting to aid the economy is a traitor’s badge.
So, Leonhardt knows this bully-boy intellectual thuggery is happening, and he knows its bad, and he talks about options to be taken even now — and all this is a good thing for whatever chance we have of wresting the economic debate back from the strategically ignorant who are transferring wealth, public and private, from the middle class to the richest among us.
But despite this quite explicit truth-to-power approach, you can find in this piece evidence of just how destructively successful the right has been in conditioning the basic structure of political debate over the last decade and more. Leonhardt talks about the organization of the Fed as one of the real impediments to the adoption of policies that might trade general economic advantage for pain for the banks. He talks, reasonably enough, of Obama’s choice of inflation moderates, rather than doves for the appointments he controls. But then he says this:
The Obama administration has also been slow to fill some Fed openings. At least one of the 12 seats has been vacant since Mr. Obama took office, and two are now.
And whose fault is that? Leonhardt’s account clearly blames Obama and his administration. This is false. The Obama team was slow — that part is true; but the responsibility for current vacancies lies squarely with a GOP Senate minority determined to block any move that might lead to an effective economic policy.
Leonhardt himself certainly knows this.
How can I be so sure?
Because his own newspaper has fully covered the key events that expose Republican knavery on these appointments. First, Obama made appointments to all the vacancies more than fifteen months ago. The nominees were all economics thinkers of the kind that Leonhardt seems to feel is missing from current Fed discussions. What’s more, Leonhardt undoubtedly knows the story of my MIT colleague, Peter Diamond, an expert on unemployment and social insurance of eminence sufficient to have earned him the most recent Nobel Prize in economics, whom Obama nominated for a Fed governorship three times.
Diamond, recall, was blocked by career sucker-off-the-federal-teat Richard Shelby, point man for the destroy-the-country-to-save-it cabal now operating under the name of the Republican Party.
On his withdrawal from the nominating process, Diamond, again in the Times, pointed out what a disaster the Shelby doctrine for appointments would be for the future of intelligent policy making, of governance.
I’m picking on Leonhardt here not because he’s complicit in all that knavery. You can tell from his writing over several years that he did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday; he knows who’s doing what, and for what reasons, and he’s spent a considerable amount of time exposing lots of Republican nonsense on everything from — well, stupid inflation tricks at the Fed now to GOP misdirection on the healthcare debate. He is, genuinely, one of the good guys, and I’m extremely happy that he will be leading the Grey Lady’s Washington coverage heading into the next election cycle.
But that’s my point: the notion that both sides do it, seems to be almost surgically implanted in the current journalistic frame for political reporting — and that makes it hard to think and write clearly about contentious issue even for those who clearly understand that both sides don’t, at least not in remotely symmetrical ways. And the constant dinning of Obama’s culpability for more or less everything, including the damn four hours of rain delay in yesterday’s games at Fenway, makes it way to easy to grab the first factoid — Fed vacancies! — as evidence of mutual malfeasance.
But that means that Leonhardt’s readers don’t get the correct story. Just to belabor the obvious one last time: Leonhardt’s story boils down to the notion that the Fed is failing now for two reasons: fear of the pressure brought by Republican hacks shouting “treason!” and(at least partially) the Obama failure to appropriately populate the Fed board. But if you don’t know that the same Republican brown shirts shouting down reasoned deliberation are the ones making it impossible for Obama to execute his nominating power, then you can’t figure out who’s responsible for our current policy paralysis.
Eternal vigilance, baby.
Images: Jean Clouet, Portrait of a Banker, 1522
Rembrandt, Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, 1630
Corner Stone
Lots of words. Pretty pictures.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s very difficult to govern, even badly govern, when you can’t appoint people competent or not to positions because a piece of worthless treasonous shit like Shelby block it using arcane Senate rules that are no where in the Constitution mentioned, endorsed, or otherwise sanctioned, apart from the “advice and consent” clause. If the Senate Majority Leader had a spine, he could fix the rules to eliminate this bullshit and have the “up or down” vote that the party of criminal shit wailed about for six years in the first decade of this century.
trollhattan
It’s almost as though the bully pulpit(tm) is actually a dunking stool. Republicans busy themselves buying three throws for a buck. Patriots!
Tom Levenson
@Corner Stone: But, but, but, channeling my inner Firesign Theater:
“They’re good words!”
(I won’t discuss under what circumstances the original to that line was best encountered.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Villago Delenda Est:
Just the other day I got around to watching Sam Seder interview Al Franken at Netroots. Franken said there was strong opposition to reforming the rules from the old Dem bulls, who get all wrapped up in the “institution” and “tradition”, as if Daniel Webster, James Madison and LBJ are gonna get up out of their graves if they got rid of the filibuster and secret holds. They weren’t sure they could get to fifty, and if they could, they weren’t sure how Biden would vote if they did.
Yutsano
@Tom Levenson: Come for the pictures, stay for the commentary.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: Commentary? There is commentary?
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: Hee. That’s the theory anyway. Although I have lost myself in the artwork alone on a TL post.
gogol's wife
I think it’s a great post. It’s about what makes the NYTimes so frustrating to read. They have people there who know what’s going on, but they’re not allowed to say it. They always have to throw in the “But Obama . . .”
S. cerevisiae
One of the problems is that the damn Teabillies don’t know the difference between micro and macro economics. That’s why they keep buying the line about “families have to balance their checkbook”.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Isn’t the answer to “both sides do it”: “So”? (Yes, I know the answer to that question.)
More importantly, to speak in glibertarian terms, doesn’t this point out a failure of the market to correct something that is being done incorrectly? Newspapers should be going after both sides for doing it, not letting them off the hook.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@S. cerevisiae: Families might like to balance their checkbook, but the don’t all the time. People take student loans out in the hope that they’ll make enough money to repay them. They also take house loans and car loans so that hopefully it will allow them to live better.
Tom Levenson
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Except, of course, when both sides aren’t, which is the case now. For all the flaws of the Dems and the Obama administration in particular, they have not resorted to the “heavier than a duck” approach to policy. That’s a big f**cking deal, amirite?
JPL
@S. cerevisiae:
That’s just funny. Of course the average person understands that car loans, credit cards and mortgages add up to their own personal debt. Yeah, right.
Yutsano
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Balancing the checkbook in those instances means making sure there’s enough money left over to pay all the bills. Which is really all the US budget is, since we do have legal obligations we must meet due to laws passed by Congress. Anyone who thinks we should pay off all the debt at once is a huge idiot. Or a teatard in Congress. But I’m repeating myself…
Splitting Image
@S. cerevisiae:
The really frustrating thing is that the analogy is in fact accurate, but not in the way teabaggers think. The truth is that when faced with a sudden bout of unemployment, the first thing most families do is not “tighten their belts”. The first thing they do is to borrow money. If your job suddenly disappeared, one of the first things most people do today is think about upgrading their skills. For a lot of people that means a student loan. Back in the old days you took your jewelry to the pawnshop if you had to.
The second thing you did was to tighten your belts, but if there was a way to improve your chances of getting out of the trough, you took it, even if it meant borrowing money. You worried about the chequebook balancing when money was coming in again.
EDIT: Belafon beat me to it, but this needs to be repeated as often as possible. The teabaggers are completely full of shit on this one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Splitting Image:
You could have stopped at the word “shit.”
Cheryl Rofer
I’m wondering if a big part of the reason that people like Leonhardt, who clearly knows better, continue to use the “both sides do it” trope is that their editors enforce it.
So it would be silly for them to submit anything else, or maybe they do from time to time, and the editor “fixes” it.
And, of course, if you do something like that regularly, it becomes a habit.
I’m just wondering how far up (or down?) the media chain the responsibility for this behavior goes.
wrb
Annie Dillard’s frog
I’m just re-reading Pilgrim after 30 years. A magnificent book.
There was a snake in the quarry with me tonight[…]
I noticed its tail. It tapered to nothingness. I started back at the head and slid my eye down its body slowly: taper, taper, taper, scales, tiny scales, air. Suddenly the copperheads’s tail seemed to be the most remarkable thing I had ever seen I wished I tapered like that somewhere. What if I were a shaped balloon blown up through the tip of a finger?
Here was this blood-filled, alert creature, this nerved rope of matter, really here instead of not here, splayed soft and solid on a rock by the slimmest of chances. It was a thickening of the air spread from a tip a rush into being, eyeball and blood, through a pin-hole rent. Every other time I had ever seen this rock it had been a flat sandstone rock over the quarry pond; now it hosted and bore this chunk of fullness that parted the air around it like a driven wedge. I looked at it from the other direction. From tail to head it spread like the lines of a crescendo, widening from stillness to a turgid blast; then at the bulging jaws it began contracting again, diminuendo, till at the tip of its snout the lines met back at the infinite point that corners every angle, and that space once more ceased being a snake.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tom Levenson: I agree with you, but I guess part of my point is that the failure can easily be traced back to when they stopped holding anyone accountable, which I suspect can be traced back to when the first cave reporter failed to ask “Ugh?” when only one man in the clan returned from the hunt with five dead buffalo.
Ben Wolf
Balanced budgets simply don’t apply to the federal government; it isn’t revenue constrained the way businesses and families are, and cannot go insolvent or bankrupt. The Fed isn’t failing because of political considerations, it’s failing because it hasn’t correctly diagnosed that the country is in a balance sheet recession rather than a liquidity trap. Monetary policy can provide some help, but the ultimate solution is through fiscal policy that the Republicans will never agree to.
John Weiss
David Leonhardt thinks Rick “GH” Perry has an opinion about the Fed? My cat has more of an informed opinion. She doesn’t think that succession is an option, either.
Perry is a bag of quotable sayings, expensive hair-dos and half-baked philosophy. In his defense, he is a genuine good ‘ol boy, for what that’s worth.
Tehanu
@Splitting Image:
The old days? I got thirty dollars for my last pair of gold earrings yesterday so I could pay the gas bill. My chances of being able to redeem those earrings? Zero — the electric bill is overdue too.
Chris
@Ben Wolf:
Agree with this and most of what was written above, but that last part is the truly remarkable one. We as a country are committing suicide – it’s that depressingly simple.
I know it happens, but watching it happen in your own country is a lot different from reading about it in a history book about a land on the other side of the ocean…
Chris
@Chris:
Or maybe suicide isn’t the right word, since a lot of us didn’t choose this. Maybe I should say we’re watching a kid from one of those religious families that still believes medicine is Satanism, dying of something eminently curable (say, appendicitis) while his parents patrol the front porch with loaded shotguns pointed at the ambulance crew, absolutely refusing to let them help.
wrb
@Chris:
this
wrb
Another place where the article shades the truth is here:
True, the outside boards are only partly made up of bankers, but all the members are elected by a vote of the regional banks. The regional boards are bank trade associations.
fuckwit
I’ve seen it written– can’t remember where– that the problem is that the “households” of the people in charge of this country have never, ever been faced with a credit card bill they can’t repay, or been in the actual position of having to make the “belt-tightening” choice between food and rent.
Everyone who HAS been in that position knows that borrowing and investment are the only way out of that particular hole.
Those that don’t borrow and invest to upgrade their skills, end up in an inescapable cycle of poverty that gets ever worse, in and out of jail, addicted to alcohol or drugs, and dead. And that’s where the fucking teabaggers are taking us all.
birthmarker
LOVE Annie Dillard.
Dave
i cannot say enough how i hate these fucking pictures
Tom Levenson
@Dave: I take pleasure in your suffering.
Chris
@fuckwit:
One of my more fabulously wealthy and politically active (and Republican) friends developed an infatuation with the slogan “spend less, do more” as the solution to all our problems a couple years back. After she’d done it enough times, another friend, this one from a working class background, observed to me exactly what you just did – she’d never been in situation where she had to do with “less,” and wouldn’t know where to start.
In the same vein, I remember Krugman’s anecdote about a group of wealthy New Yorkers who couldn’t understand why people wanted another tunnel from Jersey to the city – turns out every one of them flew helicopters to work.
The rich live a sheltered, insulated life. Get them out from behind their PR persons, makeup crews and scripted appearances, and the disconnect is phenomenal.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson: It is nice to see you finally entering into the spirit of this blog.
Tom Levenson
@Omnes Omnibus: Nothing like wrangling an 11 yo around the prospect of a return to regular schoolwork (i.e. work that must be completed before access to the computer and to Star Craft II is restored) to prompt all kinds of reactions to what goes on around here. ;)
bonkers
@wrb:
WOW! Wasn’t aware of Annie Dillard. Am about to order a few books right now. What a talent! Thanks.
Yutsano
@Tom Levenson: You can always just admit we wore you down. :)
@Omnes Omnibus: Speaking of worn down, I just got hooked in to the Book of Face. Wifey would have added me already but she’s indulging in international interspecies relations.
James E. Powell
Where are all the Democratic senators yelling “up or down vote” like all the Republican senators did? Where’s the Gang of 14? How come Leonhardt didn’t call one of them for a comment? How come he didn’t call all of them?
And, pace Obots, I don’t recall the president talking this up either. Does he care?
Tom Levenson
@Yutsano: Well, yeah. That too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: When she gets back to MN and adds you, I can be found in her friends list.
Bill Murray
@Tom Levenson: I keep waiting for the day you go with some George Grosz — Republican Automatons and Pillars of Society would have some relevance now and then.
ciaran
recess appointments? accoe=rding to delong if the leaders of the senate and congress disagree over when to go on holidays the president can take charge and decree recess and then just appoint however. of course that’d be all nasty and partisan so obama would never it.
Jonathan
It’s absolutely true that this is Obama’s fault. He’s the one that re-appointed Bernanke, a Conservative Republican, to the Fed chair in the first place… he didn’t have to do that. I’m with Matt Yglesias on this score… it was Obama’s single biggest mistake, and he made it in his first month in office.