Everybody’s talking about what I think of as a pretty pathetic New York Times article by Eduardo Porter, Business Losing Clout in a GOP Moving Right. Ed Kilgore notes, “Even if Corporate America does lose a few political battles, it is doing quite well in the war.” Jonathan Chait writes, Republicans and Business Are Getting Along Just Fine. And, as usual, Dean Baker calls it right that business doesn’t need to spend money on politicians since they already get pretty much everything they want.

I have a slightly different take on this. Or perhaps it is better to say that I have a deeper take, because they are all right. There is no fundamental economic difference between the two major political parties. They both believe above all that the business community should pull its pants down so that they can give it a great big smooch. The only real difference between the parties is that the Democrats want to keep more or less the current bad status quo and the Republicans want to make things even worse. All the business lobby cares about anyway is keeping taxes on the rich low and destroying all regulations. Democrats are pretty much on board with that and the Republicans are very much on board with all that.

This is all about the Overton Window. The economic debate in this country is pathetically limited and skewed ridiculously far to the right. Republicans now want to take our economy back to the Gilded Age and Democrats are too afraid to even consider Clinton era policies that were themselves far to the right. Or even worse. Obama wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28%. And the Republican proposal is to reduce it to 25%. Wow! Three percentage points is the difference between the Republican and Democratic positions. (Note: the effective corporate tax rate—what they actually pay—is about 15%. That is down from 50% in the 1951.)

And it isn’t like all of these policies are just theoretical the way social conservative policy is for those pushing it. Corporations are doing really well. As Dean Baker says, “After-tax corporate profits are at their highest level in the post-war period.” So what do they have to complain about? They have effectively co-opted both political parties and are getting almost everything that they desire. It seems only that Democrats are a little cheaper to buy than Republicans, thus the business community gives twice as much to Republican candidates as they do Democratic candidates.

There is one bad aspect of this for Republicans, however. Since Democrats are only marginally worse at pushing the business communities perceived interests (I think they are often wrong and don’t do what is best for their long term interests), the Republicans really could lose support from them if they did something stupid like make the government default by not raising the debt ceiling. That extra three percentage points of corporate taxes might be a small price to pay for the insurance of having politicians who aren’t bat shit crazy. From my perspective, it hardly matters. Whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge, we see the same thing (from Chait):

This morning, Paul Krugman correctly noted, The Austerian Mask Slips. In it, he referred to an article yesterday by Simon Wren-Lewis, France and the Commission. The European Union has a Fiscal Compact that requires all countries to reduce their budget deficits to 3% in the next two years. France is in the process of doing this.

Now I don’t think this is a good thing. For the umpteenth time: an economic downturn is not the time for governmental austerity. Most of France’s budget deficit is from the economic downturn, not from increased spending. Pro-growth policies will fix the budget problems. Austerity policies do not work that well because they reduce demand and thus economic activity. I’m not an economist, but I understand this because I took Econ 101. Also: I don’t have an ax to grind.

But okay, France is doing what the Fiscal Compact wants. So the austerity crowd should be cheering, “Hooray for France!” But no. The European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn is not happy at all. You see, France is not closing its budget deficit the right way—the way that Rehn wants it to be cut. France has been raising taxes rather than making savage cuts to government spending. Rehn said, “Budgetary discipline must come from a reduction in public spending and not from new taxes.”

This is pure bait and switch. It is also something that I’ve been writing about for a while as it relates to the United States. People like Olli Rehn are not interested in budget deficits. They just use the idea of budget deficits because it is a way to sell what they really want: low taxes on the rich and small governments. What choice do they have? People really like government programs and they really don’t care about the taxes of the rich.

It is also the case that this idea of low taxes and small government is a really bad idea. It dates back to a time when the world was much simpler. There are very good reasons why governments are bigger and it has nothing to do with resentment of the rich. In fact, the rich have their money thanks to the stability that our governments provide. It reminds me of Daniel Davies principle of good ideas and truth:

Due to their great power and their aggressive use of lies, the austerity crowd has been able to test their ideas for the last five years. And their ideas have failed miserably. But we continue to hear them pushed with the usual Milton Friedman to Chile refrain, “There just hasn’t been enough austerity!”

But more and more, we see examples like that from Olli Rehn. As Krugman noted: the mask slips. They show what they are really all about. And it has nothing to do with deficits.

On this day in 1695, the Baroque composer Pietro Locatelli was born. Here is his Trio Sonata for Flute, Violin and Double Basso Continuo in G Major:

Biologist Abraham Trembley was born in 1710. Canadian painter Paul Kane was born in 1810. Villain of 19th century business George Hearst was born in 1820.

Discoverer of the positron Carl David Anderson was born 1905. Actor Kitty Carlisle was born in 1910. Mural artist Bengt Lindstrom was born in 1925. And actor Merritt Butrick was born in 1959.

Cartoonist Mort Walker is 90 today. He created the comic strip Beetle Bailey. As my friend Will says, “It’s more influential than Bazooka Joe!” Actor Valerie Perrine is 70. The terrible head of the ECB Mario Draghi is 66. Film director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is 60. Charlie Sheen is 48 and crazy as ever. Independent filmmaker Noah Baumbach is 44.

The day, however, belongs to one of my long time crushes, actor Eileen Brennan who was born born in 1932. I especially liked her in Murder By Death and The Cheap Detective. But she was great in a lot of movies, like The Sting. She only died about a month ago.

Happy birthday Eileen Brennan!

Harold Pollack has a great article over at Ten Miles Square, The Butler and Ronald Reagan’s Race Problem. The film is loosely based upon the life of Eugene Allen, who retired as White House butler. Some of the film depicts Ronald Reagan when he was in the White House, and he is presented sympathetically. This is to be expected; everyone agrees that Reagan was a personable fellow. But four conservative writers wrote an OpEd in last week’s Washington Post, What The Butler Gets Wrong About Ronald Reagan and Race.

Pollack points out that Reagan gets a much better presentation than he deserves. But even he presents Reagan in a more positive light than I think he deserves. He claims that Reagan’s political philosophy just happened to appeal to racists. Reagan believed in certain libertarian ideals and those allowed bigots to be bigots. I don’t see this. If you really aren’t racist, then you would shy away from positions that appeal primarily to racists. At the very least, you would make a very big show of being against racism. I didn’t hear that from Reagan just as I don’t now hear it from Rand Paul. He will always add statements like, “I personally believe that racism is a bad business strategy.” That’s pretty weak tea and it works effectively like a dog whistle to racists. What they hear is, “I have to say that, but I’m with you!”

The OpEd brings up one typical bit of dog whistle politics, that pretty much everyone knows: the first stop in his 1980 campaign was at a fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi where the three civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK in 1964. The topic of the speech? States’ rights! The best apologia that the writers can offer is this, “But the former California governor, a strong believer in federalism, had been talking about states’ rights since the early days of his political career.” That’s right! And Reagan had been using racist politics since the early days of his political career. It is not just, as Pollack notes, that the comments were insensitive. No man of Reagan’s political brilliance could make such a boneheaded mistake. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Think back on the 1980 campaign. What allowed Reagan to win? The “Reagan Democrats.” These were white northern Democrats who voted against their economic interest because they were angry about blacks and all the advantages they were getting like poverty, lead poison, and short life expectancies. This was when the word “liberal” became vilified. That was when it became “tax and spend liberal.” And everyone knew who was being taxed and who was being spent on, even if what everyone knew wasn’t true then and is even less true now.

So was Reagan a racist? Let’s just look at his attitude toward African Americans. Reagan would never have been personally rude to a black person or otherwise treated them badly. I’m sure that he actually did have black friends. But his mind overflowed with stereotypes. And he was more than willing to demagogue those stereotypes for political gain. We are all members of our society and we can’t help but be tainted by racist thinking. You can fight that or not. But using it in such a calculated manner makes you a special kind of villain and Reagan was one of those villains.

Pollack ends his article by rightly noting:

That gets to the very heart of the problem with conservatives—even intellectuals like those who wrote the article. They can’t admit that past conservative icons were racist because the movement is still racist. Think back on Romney’s 47% comments. It turned out that this group was actually mostly retired white people. But the subtext was that it was lazy dark skinned people. It was just the most recent iteration of the welfare queen in a Cadillac.

I am not a pacifist. But on a practical level, I might as well be. The truth is that pretty much no country ever goes war because of any just cause. As we’ve seen very clearly here in the United States, wars are sold as surely though less explicitly as toothpaste and laundry detergent. This morning, I caught the last bit of Andrea Mitchell Reports. It was not as bad as Sunday’s Weekend with Alex Witt segment with Alan Grayson. None the less, on MSNBC—remember: the liberal network—the onus is on those who don’t want to go to war. War advocates are just given softball questions while anti-war advocates are tapped on all sides as though the reporters are looking for cracks.

Meanwhile, serious journalist who I normally agree with find themselves conflicted on the Syria question. Ed Kilgore at Political Animal says he is trying to sort out his own views. To some extent, I understand that. If it is true that the Assad government is using chemical weapons, it’s terrible. But this gets to a point I made a couple months back, On Being an Asshole and Possibly Right. There are so many tragedies going on at any given time. I’m skeptical when authorities tell me I should worry about this tragedy. I don’t think I’m wrong to believe that they have other reasons for bring it up.

And look: the United States has hardly been pure when it comes to chemical weapons. We did, for example, help Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. And what about our widespread use of cluster bombs? One thing is certain, if Assad were an ally, we wouldn’t be talking about this. It would hardly have made a bleep on the news and government officials would have assured us that it was accidental, a rebel plot, or never happened at all.

What really bugs me is that people as brilliant and insightful as Paul Waldman at The American Prospect falls for this stuff. He wrote, Syria Turns into a Political Story, about why everyone wants to talk about this as a political story rather than a tragic story of civil war. But he pushes the “no good options” canard. And he says something that is flat out wrong, “Assad killed 100,000 Syrians quite adequately with guns and bombs before everybody got really mad about the 1,400 he killed with poison gas.” I agree with the point that he’s making. But Assad did not kill 100,000 Syrians. I don’t question that Assad is a despot, but these deaths are due to a civil war. As I reported yesterday, roughly half of the deaths have been Assad’s own forces.

So I’m not a pacifist. But my gut instinct, when someone presents evidence in favor of another “bloody good war,” is to call bullshit. Can’t we all just admit that the only reason we are talking about this is that Obama blew it by defining a “red line”? Everything follows from that. All the people who want to attack Syria have their own reasons. But MSNBC is pushing this war for that one reason: Obama made a mistake and now we have to kill Syrians so he doesn’t look weak. That is as purely evil as anything we see in politics.

Our Secretary of State is one class act, ain’t he? During his conference call yesterday, he said that the United States faces a “Munich moment.” That’s a reference to the Munich Agreement between Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. I don’t even know what Kerry means by this. The situations are not at all the same. But when hawks start talking about the Munich Agreement, what they mean to convey is the idea that diplomacy doesn’t work. “We couldn’t trust Hitler therefore we can’t trust anyone!” Kerry’s rhetoric has been repugnant throughout this entire thing.

According to Politico, “In a 70-minute conference call on Monday afternoon, Kerry derided Syrian President Bashar Assad as a ‘two-bit dictator’ who will ‘continue to act with impunity’…” These are not the words of a country that is trying to fix anything. These are the words of a country that is hell bent on war. I remember the exact same rhetoric coming from the Bush administration in 2002. At that time, people wondered if we were really going to war. I was shocked because it was clear we were going to war. You don’t publicly shame foreign leaders if you want them to change their behavior.

Another of Kerry’s “arguments” was that Israel backed the need for an American attack. That’s rich! First, Israel is pretty much always in favor of bombing any place. Second, they don’t like the Assad government! By this reasoning, we ought to attack Iran. In addition to Israel, Kerry said other governments would support us—governments like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Maybe France and Turkey too. This is sounding a hell of a lot like Bush Jr’s Coalition of the Willing: except this time we don’t even have England with us.

I’m still trying to figure out if Kerry is a loose cannon or he’s just playing his part for the administration. His rhetoric is clearly out of balance. I could see being so upset if we were talking about saving people who are directly in harm’s way. But that isn’t it at all. As Representative Janice Hahn said, “This is really only about sending this message to Assad.” Assuming that Assad really did okay a chemical weapons attack (explicitly or implicitly), I think he’s gotten the message. I doubt he’s thinking, “Well, they didn’t do anything last time; I guess I can go hog wild!” On our side, this whole thing seems to be about saving face, with almost no consideration of its danger to get us more involved in a conflict that could eventually lead to war with Iran and even Russia.

Something else that bugs me about this is how much it depends upon classified documents. We aren’t able to see the documents; we just have to accept the administration that it’s credible. But those who have seen the documents are not so sanguine. Representative Rick Nolan said, “After a three-hour classified briefing and taking time to read all the classified documents, what I have heard and read has only served to convince me more than ever of the folly and danger of getting America involved in the Syrian civil war.”

The one thing that I know just as certainly as I knew it in 2002 is that this administration is determined to go to war. There is no amount of counter evidence that will convince it to change course. And look: I understand. This probably will be a limited engagement. We probably will just drop bombs for a week. But even if that’s the case, it does almost no good and lots of harm. Plus, there are all kinds of unintended consequences. For example, if I were a leader in Iran, I would think it a good idea to start back up the nuclear weapons program. Regardless, the bombing is likely to make an end to the Syrian civil war less likely.

So big badass America is going to “send a message” to weak little Syria? We don’t seem to give a damn about the Syrian people. They can just continue to die—now with our help! But this is a chance for Kerry and Obama to puff out their chests and pretend that both their dicks are hard. Liberalism in America!

Update (3 September 2013 10:32 am)

Jonathan Chait, who is generally for attacking Syria, pretty much agrees with me about the deterrence of doing nothing:

Is liberalism dead? It is if you get it from MSNBC. Yesterday, Alan Grayson was on Weekends with Alex Witt. And it seemed like he was on a Fox News. Really, it was quite a spectacle. It was almost to the point of Witt saying, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Grayson!”

First she wanted to know how much push back he was getting from his constituents. The implication was that of course everyone wants to bomb Syria. The facts are counter to that. This is (As usual!) a war that the power elites want. The people don’t want it. Despite the full court press from the White House and media, most people are still against bombing Syria. Of course, Grayson (who is really great in this interview and generally) pointed that out.

Next Witt countered him with the charge that he didn’t believe there was a chemical attack. He replied that with the new information, he did accept that there had been an attack but that it didn’t change things. What he didn’t mention was that he never said there was no attack. He only said that the evidence was ambiguous. Again, this stuff is right out of the Fox News playbook.

This is the point during the interview that it really got good. Alex Witt was clearly coming unglued because she started using the word “sir” a lot. It started with, “Do you question, sir, the president saying that this is a threat to our national security?” In the video she looks quite angry. As though what she really wants to say is, “Who are you—a mere Congressman!—to question our great and powerful leader—Mr. Hope and Change himself!—Barack Obama?!” Then she started listing allies in the region and Grayson just shot them down one after another, “They haven’t been attacked.” She does get him to admit that if one of our allies were attacked, we would be obligated by treaty to defend. But then he added, “That’s not this situation.”

When none of that worked, she went to a 30 second clip of Obama’s press conference. Then she glowered into the camera and said, “So what’s your response to that?” And, of course, Grayson had a very good response to that. The whole interview is Witt pushing, trying to find some place where Grayson will agree to the “bloody good war” that I guess all good Democrats now want. It’s an amazing bit of television.

MSNBC would not be reporting this stuff this way if a Republican were in the White House. And it shows where the political lines are. The “liberals” think bombing Obama rocks because he wants to bomb Syria and the “conservatives” think Obama stinks because he hasn’t done it already. Meanwhile, the American people are well to the left of our policymakers. As usual.

On this day back in 1661, Baroque composer Georg Bohm was born. He isn’t bad but he wrote a great deal for the organ, and I just don’t much care for that instrument. English poet William Somervile was born in 1665. Economist Henry George was born in 1839. There was a man working 150 years ago who was grappling with the problems of income inequality. And what was his solution: taxes. But somehow the “smart” conservative economists of today just know that won’t work, even though, you know, it does. One of the founders of physical chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald was born in 1853.

Multimedia artist Romare Bearden was born in 1911. The founder of catastrophe theory, mathematician Rene Thom was born in 1923. The great film director Hal Ashby was born in 1929. The great musician Billy Preston was born in 1946. Here he is doing “Nothing from Nothing”:

Actor Mark Harmon is 62. Keanu Reeves is 49. And Salma Hayek is 47.

The day, however, belongs to the great jazz pianist and composer Horace Silver who is 85 today. He is technically a hard bop artist, but his influences are very broad. You can hear this in “Song for My Father,” which is kind of a bossa nova. You will probably recognize the opening (played much slower on his album cut) which Steely Dan used to open their hit “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Even though Silver stopped playing publicly about 15 years back, he left a great recorded legacy.

Happy birthday Horace Silver!

I came upon an amazing article this weekend. It was from McClatchy back on 3 June 2013, Assad Backers Reportedly Make Up 43 Percent of Dead in Syria. It is based upon work by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) which is based in London. The article claims that, “The observatory… is considered the most authoritative source for reports on the daily violence in Syria, and it’s the only group that routinely attempts to categorize deaths according to whether the victims were civilians, rebels or government fighters.”

The results are exactly what you would expect if you don’t have an ax to grind. War is hell, and civil war is especially so. According to SOHR, 43.2% (41,648 total) of the deaths are Asaad forces and aligned militias; 36.8% (35,479 total) are civilians; and 17.3% (16,699) are anti-Asaad forces. We can’t say who is responsible for the civilian deaths, but even if we assume that Asaad is responsible for all the civilian casualties, the deaths are pretty equally shared.

Of course, these numbers are not without doubt. The Syrian Network for Human Rights counts only rebel and civilian deaths, but their numbers are quite different: 75,992 civilians and 7,606 rebel deaths. I don’t think that this changes the picture much, even if these numbers are correct. It is clear that there are massive casualties on both sides and among the civilians.

Yesterday, Straits Times reported that SOHR now estimates that 110,371 people have been killed in Syria since the March 2011 uprising. For these, at least 40,146 are civilians. A common liberal complaint about all this talk of war with Syria is in the context of all the people who have died while we’ve stood by. The argument for war is something about national credibility.

So the question to me is why our focus is not on ending the conflict. What we are doing is further indicating that we really don’t care about Syria at all. We don’t even care about the chemical weapons attack. We just want an excuse to attack Assad. The situation is terrible for everyone. We have a great opportunity to work with Russia to put an end to the Syrian civil war. So why aren’t we doing that?

On Saturday, Dean Baker wrote an interesting article, Labor Economics 101: Few Jobs Means Bad Jobs. In it, he shows that bad labor markets lead to bad jobs. This isn’t hard to understand. If there is a big surplus of workers, employers have no incentive to pay well, it is easy to find qualified people who will be glad to have any job at all.

I remember when the opposite was the case. In the late 1990s, during the dot-com bubble, companies were so desperate for employees that you could get a job in a single day. Now, you go through numerous interviews, background checks, employment checks, credit checks. And if all goes well (that is, you’ve never lived an actual, you know, life) they will hire you at half the rate they would have 15 years ago.

None of this should surprise us and I don’t actually think it is a bad thing. What I do think is a bad thing is how the power elite try to keep unemployment high. Since the bursting of the housing bubble, unemployment has been very high while inflation has been low—too low if what you want is to stimulate the economy. And for a good two years of the last five of this employment crisis, even the supposedly liberal Democrats were obsessed with—Wait for it!—the budget deficit.

Also on Saturday, another of my favorite economists, Paul Krugman wrote, The Arithmetic of Fantasy Fiscal Policy. In that article he looked at how big the 2009 stimulus should have been in order to get the economy back on track. This is done by looking at the difference between what the economy was actually producing and what it would have been producing at full employment. He calculates that it would have taken another trillion dollars in spending. And that is making assumptions that are unreasonably conservative, so the amount would likely be substantially less—0.75 trillion by my calculations. Regardless, that would change our current federal debt from 72% of GDP to 76% of GDP. Not exactly a crisis, right?

But we didn’t do that and I really don’t think it is about a general fear of government debt. Sure, the power elite get the media to scream about it and the prols gets scared. But the reason that the power elite feed the fear machine about the debt is that they don’t want the government to improve the economy. Doing that will put more people to work. The more people who have jobs, the more workers have power to demand better pay and working conditions from employers.

So on this Labor Day, let us make a commitment to improve the job situation in this economy. Politicians who talk about the national debt are just the minions of the power elite. All of their rhetoric about fiscal rectitude is just falderal to distract from their real objective of prohibiting workers from sharing in the American Dream.

On this day in 1566, the great English actor Edward Alleyn was born. He was considered the greatest actor of his time, but unlike Richard Burbage, he had little association with Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe wrote plays specifically for him: Faustus, Tamburlaine, and The Jew of Malta—all of them big characters for a very big actor. Just like Shakespeare, as soon as he had the money, he retired. For these people, the theater apparently had little romance. In fact, from what we know of Marlowe, even in his 20s, he was only writing plays for the money. I suspect that for any of the writers, if they’d had their druthers, they’d have been publishing books of poems. Alleyn went on to be a successful businessman and then a philanthropist, founding Dulwich College and Alleyn’s School.

The Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel was born in 1653. He wrote a whole lot of stuff. And he was quite good. But now, he is best known for one thing: Canon in D Major or as it is now know, “Pachelbel’s Canon.” It is not that it is that great a piece, although it is great. It is just that in 1970, the Jean-Francois Paillard Chamber Orchestra performed their own version with a very compelling pizzicato cello bass that people just went mad for. But here is an equally beautiful, but very different, version done with the original music with period instruments by Voices of Music:

German composer Engelbert Humperdinck was born in 1854. Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in 1875. The scientist (he crosses boundries) Francis William Aston was born in 1877. He proved the whole number rule—that all the elements are a whole number multiple of the mass of the hydrogen atom. Othmar Schoeck was born in 1886. He was known as a composer of art songs, but here is his very compelling Cello Concerto:

The great actor Richard Farnsworth was born in 1920. Speaking of airplane crashes, boxer Rocky Marciano was born in 1923. The great jazz musician Art Pepper was born in 1925. The United States government in its infinite wisdom kept Pepper in prison for many years of his life because of the drugs that he was addicted to. Here he is doing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” from his great album Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section:

Comedian Lily Tomlin is 74 today. And singer Gloria Estefan is 56.

The day, however, belongs to the labor leader Walter Reuther who was born on this day in 1907. He had what I think was a very common political arc for people of his time. He started as a socialist (even a communist) but after the New Deal came in, he became a liberal. Conservatives tend to vilify FDR for bringing socialism to America. That isn’t true, of course, and that thought is typical of the conservative “all or nothing” mentality. If they thought about it for a moment, they would realize that what FDR did was save capitalism from revolution. People like Reuther thought they wanted socialism, but all they really wanted was a more fair and equitable political and economic system. Is a safety net to avoid the worst excesses of capitalism so much to ask?!

Reuther turned the United Automobile Workers (UAW) into a major force in the United States. He also integrated it with the Democratic Party—where he was a major figure until his death. He was also a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement. He was on stage with Martin Luther King Jr during his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs. He also took part in the Selma to Montgomery March. Unfortunately, he died in a plane crash with his wife and other at the age of 62.

Happy birthday Walter Reuther!