Let us return to 2005, the year the American voter realized it had made a terrible mistake in the election the year before. You remember, if 2004, the voters were promised that Bush would “Get the fags!” But once re-elected, the voters found they had voted to “Privatize Social Security!” If ever there was a simple example of What’s the Matter With Kansas? it was Bush and his craven use of a conservative social issue to push a conservative economic wet dream. But 2005 also stands as the ultimate example of conservative overreach: Terri Schiavo.

As you may remember, Schiavo was an unfortunate woman in Florida who had a heart attack in her home. Due to lack of oxygen, she had massive brain damage. After 15 years, doctors had diagnosed that she was in a persistent vegetative state — that is to say, she was more or less what we think of as a zombie; she was no longer Terri Schiavo but rather just a body with a functioning brain stem. It was a tragic situation. Her husband wanted to end her suffering and move on with his life; her parents understandably wanted to hang on.

So the parents put together a video tape of their interactions with her. It was cut together from hours of tape, throwing together all the moments when it seemed as though Schiavo was responding to them. I don’t think they were meaning to be dishonest. When the will to believe is strong, one can be convinced of just about anything. I see no villains in the actions of any of the people directly involved. But the Terri Schiavo case did not stay confined with those directly involved.

First, the Florida Republicans got involved. It passed “Terri’s Law” that allowed Jeb Bush to take control and have Schiavo’s feeding tub reinserted. When the law was found to be unconstitutional, the case ended up at the Federal Level. And that’s when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist got involved. You see, he is a physician — a heart surgeon. And in one of the great acts of hubris, he countered the doctors’ diagnosis, even though they had actually spent time with Schiavo to determined her condition, “I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office.” It was also, of course, an ethical breach. It was clear that he was just saying what was politically expedient and using his medical degree to provide a patina of legitimacy. It amazes me that such actions do not cause doctors to lose their licenses.

But as bad as the 2005 Republican Party was, it really doesn’t hold a candle to the modern Republican Party. And this is especially evident on the RNC propaganda channel known as Fox News. I’ve been reminded a lot of Dr Frist when I’ve heard psychiatrist Keith Ablow who has been on the station for years as part of its “Medical A-Team.” (God help those treated by the “B-Team”!) And in that capacity, he has been psychoanalyzing President Obama, who he has determined has abandonment issues that cause him to hate white people. Here’s a good collection put together by Madia Matters for America:

Remember: this is the kind of stuff coming from the authoritarian conservatives. They have absolute respect for their own leaders and are shocked (“Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”) that anyone would even disagree with them. But they automatically treat opposing leaders as though they were common criminals. And Ablow is about the worst that they come. He is more than willing to prostitute his psychiatric degree for political gain. It is hard not to conclude that Ablow would have been one of those Nazi doctors doing “experiments” at the concentration camps. But I can’t say for sure, because just as with Ablow regarding President Obama and Frist regarding Schiavo, I have never met the man.

On Thursday, David Bauder at the Associate Press reported on a little push back, Fox‘s Ablow Regularly “Diagnoses” Obama. It contains a number of quotes from psychiatrists who are bothered by what Ablow does and how it reflects on the profession — something Ablow certainly doesn’t care about. But I was struck with the fact that even people at the crazy Media Research Center have a problem with him. Tim Graham criticized the whole issue of psychoanalyzing the president.

But he bugged me by noting that people on the left said that Bush the younger had “daddy issues.” This is false equivalence. To begin with, people were making a common observation, not a psychological diagnosis. Regardless, it was not psychiatrists coming on television claiming that they were objective scientists and they knew that Bush was invading Iraq because he was trying to prove to the world that his penis was bigger than his father’s.

It speaks poorly of our society that Ablow is not just considered unacceptable. Certainly he would have been at any time before the creation of Fox News. And I really do think that this is an important event. I doubt that Terri Schiavo would have been such a big deal without Fox News and all the rest of the right wing echo chamber. It creates a place where they can all get together and talk themselves into believing anything. And the nation is far worse off as a result.

I find this offensive. Last year, JPMorgan Chase made a deal with the Justice Department to pay the largest fine in history, $13 billion, blah, blah, blah. But the big deal is not the fine, because, hell, it’s JPMorgan Chase; the company still made $18 billion that year. I think a major bank robber would be fine with a deal that only required him to pay 40% of the money he made that year. In fact, most regular felons have to pay a lot more than that in restitution. The money means nothing. But here’s the important part: according to the Washington Post, “The Justice Department and JPMorgan are hammering out the final details, including a statement listing what the company did wrong.” Consider our poor bank robber again. Can you imagine what a terrible thing it would be to be forced to admit his guilt?! I mean, the 30 years in jail is nothing compared to that! Of course, JPMorgan might also be open to further legal proceedings — focus on the “might” as in “won’t.” I mean, it’s been a year. Have you read about any indictments?

That was then. On Thursday, Matt Taibbi published a bombshell article, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare. It is about Alayne Fleischmann, a securities lawyer who used to work for JPMorgan Chase. And she tells the inside story of last year’s settlement. In brief: managers at the bank not only knew about the criminal behavior that was going on, they were the ones pushing it.

Fleischmann worked under the manager for diligence who did not want any of his subordinates to send him email. He wanted everything done verbally, we assume because he didn’t want a paper trail that would lead to him after the bad securities the bank was approving blew up. Fleischmann and other subordinates did not approve many of the mortgages that were in the securities. This meant the securities could not be sold. So the subordinates were put under extreme pressure to okay bad loans.

What I find most interesting about this is that the situation is that the low-level employees like Fleischmann are the ones being set up for the fall. When the securities were shown to be the garbage everyone at JPMorgan Chase knew they were, the managers could feel safe with their bonuses knowing they could always claim that they were the victims of their subordinates who approved bad loans. It is despicable.

Fleischmann stands to lose her license and much more for coming forward because of a confidentiality agreement she signed. And it would be entirely typical of American “justice” that she gets punished while the actual criminals do not. And the criminals are everywhere, even at the very top of JPMorgan Chase:

Why isn’t Dimon doing years in jail? Because that sort of thing just isn’t done to the likes of him. If he were ripping people off for five bucks by doing three-card monte in the subway, he’d be in jail. But defrauding people out of hundreds of millions of dollars somehow makes a man respectable.

So five years pass and the Justice Department contacts Fleischmann and gets all the goods on JPMorgan Chase. They are going to announce a widespread fraud case against the bank. But then Dimon calls the number three man at Justice and tells him the bank wants to negotiate. So the fraud case is dropped and JPMorgan pays a few billion and admits, “Yeah, some unnamed people misbehaved.” As Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets said, “It would be like charging a serial murderer with a single assault and giving them probation.”

And in the end, that $13 billion figure was a joke anyway:

As for the criminal investigation, well, the Justice Department apparently just dropped it. Fleischmann was not contacted for almost a year. She is understandably skeptical now. Consider what Eric Holder said about holding bank managers accountable, “Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual.” As Taibbi commented, “In other words, people don’t commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes!” In a regular criminal case you would never see this. After a criminal was looking at decades in jail, then the defense could make social pleas. But when it comes to corporate crime and billions of dollars the Justice Department starts there, “They aren’t bad guys!”

As for Fleischmann, it will probably go very badly. If she doesn’t lose her license altogether, she will be blackballed. I’m sure the financial press will pick her life to death. But that’s what happens to ethical people in our society. Other than that, expect JPMorgan Chase to make even more money and for Jamie Dimon to get another raise.

Afterword

Check out the great Democracy Now! interview with both Taibbi and Fleischmann.

I really am a terrible partisan. I suppose it was clear enough after the election in 2012. It seems that every couple of days I was writing the same article about how stupid it was that people were saying that the Republicans would have to yield to the Democrats because of their poor showing in the election. What nonsense that was! The Republicans still had control of the House and just because the Democrats had done well nationally, didn’t mean that any given Republican should change; they still had the same conservative constituency. Of course, it wasn’t even Democratic partisans who were saying these kinds of things. That was just the conventional wisdom of our hopelessly centrist media establishment.

It is two years later and these same nitwits are saying the same thing, but with the parts reversed. What exactly are the Republicans going to do if Obama doesn’t pander to them? Impeach him? I’m sure Joe Biden wouldn’t mind running the country on autopilot for the next two years, as Obama is expected to. How the Senate would ever get 67 votes, I cannot say. So it is all nonsense and I wish as much now as I did then that people would just shut up. There is only so much brain dead analysis I can take.

But you won’t be seeing me write multiple articles on this subject. It is different being on this side of it. I don’t even want to think about the election. The only thing I can do is look to the future and hopefully build a better — more liberal — Democratic Party. But more than that, I feel that my repeated expression of annoyance would be seen as sour grapes. God knows, I got no praise from Republicans about my defense of them in 2012; but I feel certain that I would get complaints from them now if I actively defended the Democrats — even though I would do it in an entirely nonpartisan way. All I really care about is that people see political reality and stop living in some mythical land where parties have “mandates.”

As bad as the mainstream press is, the conservative press is just loony. Ed Kilgore brought my attention to the following bit of hilarity from Charles “If you speak softly, you can get away with the craziest things!” Krauthammer, Seize the Day, Control the Agenda:

Ah, yes! America spoke! Kilgore noted, “No, Charles, 38% of eligible voters ‘spoke,’ in a tilted battleground, and 52% of them voted Republican while 48% did not. It was a big defeat for Democrats, of course, but not the end of the Thirty Years War. Get a grip.” It is kind of like saying that the English people spoke when Henry Tudor became king. After all, the only people who mattered had spoken — namely Henry Tudor.

What’s annoying about this kind of triumphalism — and it is everywhere on the right now — is that any reasonable person knows that it isn’t true. The Democrats didn’t do better in 2012 than in 2010 because the people had changed their minds; they did better because more people voted. If the people who voted in 2012 had voted in 2010, the Democrats would have done well. And that’s true of 2014 too. The people didn’t turn against the Democrats; the Democratic voters just didn’t turn up.

I’m not suggesting that this isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It is a minor catastrophe. It says some very troubling things about the Democratic coalition. But it doesn’t say a damned thing about changes in America because there haven’t been any changes in America. The same people who hated Obama in 2008 also hated him in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Now things will probably change. In 2024, these people will probably look back fondly on Obama and think he was pretty good — at least compared to whatever socialist is in the White House at that point.

I have done my best to avoid coverage of the election. Part of it is just to avoid the nonsense. But another part of it is that conservatives are as bad at winning as they are at losing. I really do not remember this kind of exultation by the Democrats in 2012 or even in 2008. I think it is the authoritarian nature of conservatism. What’s the point of winning if you don’t get to rape and pillage, am I right?! Well, no: I’m not right. They really are awful people.

Not depressed enough, liberals? Well, I can help. The Supreme Court has decided to hear King v Burwell. This is just the latest in literally hundreds of lawsuits designed to cripple Obamacare by any means necessary. This one is based on a typo in the law that the plaintiffs claim means that people in states that did not set up their own healthcare exchanges do not get federal subsidies to help people pay for their insurance. If this case was reversed by the right wing extremists on the Court, it would be a catastrophe.

Of course, even now, in states that didn’t accept the Medicaid expansion, the working poor fall into a kind of “doughnut hole” where they don’t get free healthcare but also don’t qualify for any subsidies. This alone should have caused the voters to reject every Republican legislature in the nation. But of course, that didn’t happen. Even Sam “Screw the kids, rich people need more cash!” Brownback managed to win re-election by four percentage points. What’s the matter with Kansas? It is filled with the apathetic and the evil. Good job guys! At least those awful working poor won’t get healthcare so they can continue to function at their back-breaking jobs!

King v Burwell would do the same thing that is currently happening to the working poor to the entire middle class. And you, my dear liberal reader, are probably now thinking, “Well, then the Republicans would have to get on board; they can’t slight the middle class!” Oh, grasshopper, how much you must learn! It won’t matter. Sam Brownback and Scott Walker and all the rest won’t be up for election for four years anyway. And by 2017, Walker may be in the White House — propelled to the high office by his bold stand destroying public sector unions. If your life can’t get better, at least you can feel good about other lives getting worse, am I right?!

Sadly, if the Supreme Court manages to do this to the country, it will not only harm red states. Oregon, for example, will be harmed, because its state exchange turned out to be a complete fiasco and they were forced to use the federal exchange. Of course, the idea of King v Burwell is not to hurt individual states. The idea is to destroy the law in total. If 21 states in the union are not given the benefits of the law, there will be a huge call for its repeal.

That’s why the red states will not accept the fact that they are not representing the best interests of their people. This will be a great opportunity to demagogue the issue, “It is outrageous that the people are forced to pay higher taxes and yet they get nothing for it!” It will not matter that (1) they won’t in general be paying higher taxes and (2) the only reason they get nothing for it is because their leaders refuse to accept it. American politics doesn’t do fact or nuance. And the Republican Party is the perfect organization for this kind of environment.

Nicholas Bagley is very pessimistic about this, The Supreme Court will hear King. That’s bad news for the ACA. His argument is that it takes four justices to hear a case. And in general, they will only decide to take a case if they think it will go in their favor. Those who are inclined to agree with the lower courts’ decisions have no real reason to hear the case. So there is a very good chance the usual five suspects will hear the case and throw a major wrench into the workings of the rest of government.

My gut reaction is to think that they won’t do this. After all, John Roberts seems to be concerned about his legacy, even if the others aren’t. What’s more, he already took a hit when he found in favor of Obamacare before. But my gut reaction could well be wrong. I don’t think that Roberts — or for that matter any of the justices — is that rational. In fact, he may use his previous vote to self-justify that he is the truly objective justice and now he is just “calling balls and strikes.”

I weep for the once great country of my birth. This is how empires crumble.

Update (7 November 2014 6:10 pm)

If you aren’t as familiar with King v Burwell, Jonathan Chait has a pretty good overview of it, Supreme Court to Hear Newest, Craziest Legal Challenge to Obamacare. He’s far more positive about sanity prevailing. He may be right. I just wouldn’t count on it.

As you probably know, I am an amateur political scientist. I don’t mean this in terms of all the ranting I do here — fine though the ranting may be. I mean that I have created my own little election models and I have developed a couple of theories that professional political scientists would scoff at. And one of the most vexing things that I’ve noticed is that what’s going on in the economy is of fundamental importance to which party wins in presidential elections, but it seems to have absolutely no effect at all in mid-term years. I understand why it is important in presidential elections: the economy is of primary importance to people. It makes no sense that it wouldn’t matter in off-year elections.

Look at this year. the unemployment rate started at 6.6% in January and it was down to 5.8% last month. You don’t believe this number because of the discouraged worker effect? Fine! The Civilian Employment-Population Ratio was 58.2% in January and it is 59.2% now — a remarkable increase in just one year. Or let’s look at the number of jobs added to the economy this year: we’ve added an average (pdf) of over 220,000 jobs per month this year. That’s better than last year when we didn’t even manage 200,000 jobs per month.

The the economy is really doing better. If this had been a presidential election year, the party in the White House (nominally the Democrats) would have won by a landslide. Yet they did not. The Democrats lost in a landslide. How can this be?! Is it as simple as Matt Yglesias says, “Life isn’t fair.” Well, no; it isn’t as simple as that, because what happened this year is exactly what happened in 2010 when the economy had flatlined. Yet the people still punished the party that was in the White House.

It’s important — even critical — to remember that the president shouldn’t get credit for the economy. Most of what Obama has done has been bad for the economy. The Fiscal Cliff deal was probably worth doing, but the timing was bad and it harmed the economy in the short term. A better thing to have done would have been to trade two more years of the low top tax rates for a continuation of the payroll tax holiday. But more important, Obama allowed himself to be blindsided with the Debt Ceiling, which led to the Sequester. That’s been an enormous drag on the economy. Yet, as always, economies do heal and that is what we are seeing.

But given that the voters punish presidents for bad economic trends and reward them for good economic trends, why don’t they do this during off-year elections? Why do they ignore the economy when he isn’t running? And note: Obama’s approval rating is eleven points under water, even though times are fairly good and they are getting better.

I think this is all about perceptions of un-engaged voters. People think that who is president really does matter. But almost half don’t think it matters who controls Congress. Other polls have shown that a large percentage of the nation don’t even know which party controls Congress. These are the people who reward the party in the White House for good economic trends. And these people simply don’t show up for mid-term elections because they don’t think the elections matter.

So we come back, once again, to turnout. And this speaks incredibly poorly of our democracy. This isn’t even a partisan issue. Whether politicians deserve it or not, the voters don’t reward or punish them on the state of the nation when it isn’t a presidential election. Many pundits wonder why the Republicans are so extreme and unwilling to change to appeal to the people. But why should they?! They know that their political destinies are rarely linked to what the people what.

The real question is what the Democratic Party is going to do. How can the electorate be made to vote based upon the state of things? But maybe the Democratic power elite don’t want that. After all, their economic policies are pretty much the same as the Republicans’. Maybe the last thing they want is for the people to start rewarding actual liberal economic policy. That would hurt all their billionaire friends. But that just brings me back to the point I made yesterday, We Must Make the Democratic Party Better. We the people need to control the party, and that means getting money out of politics. Until we do, we are destined to oscillate from Democrat to Republican as the country slowly loses even the pretense of democracy.

I’m afraid that we liberals are upset about Tuesday’s election because we have had our expectations lowered far too much. The sad truth of modern America is that on economic issues, there is a razor thin difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. Are we really upset that Mark Pryor did not get elected? It’s not like he really worked for the people of Arkansas, even if he was far better than Tom Cotton. The Democrats and the Republicans are both the parties of big business. And they have been since the mid-1970s. As a result, many young people probably don’t even know what real liberalism looks like. If the Reagan of 1980 ran today, he would make many Democrats look like conservatives. And don’t get me started on Richard “I created the EPA” Nixon.

Jeffrey Sachs wrote an excellent article about this over at Huffington Post this morning, Understanding and Overcoming America’s Plutocracy. He noted, “History shows the wreckage of democracies killed from within.” And I’m not sure if we are seeing democracy killed in the United States, or if we are simply viewing its rotting corpse. The beauty of the modern plutocracy is that it doesn’t look like a plutocracy. Sachs put it well:

I am very pragmatic about politics. That’s why I’m a Democrat. It is still the only party that considers evidence. The Republican Party has turned into a revolutionary group where ideological purity is all that matters. What’s interesting is that most Americans share my pragmatism. But most Americans don’t vote. And Democrats normally only offer one reason to vote for them, “We’re not (quite) as bad as the Republicans!”

But even among those who do vote, we saw the minimum wage win in a big way on Tuesday. In four red states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — where the people voted for very conservative candidates, they voted to increase the minimum wage. Think about that for a moment. These people are voting for candidates who are generally against having any minimum wage at all, yet they voted to increase theirs. How does that happen?

I don’t think it is cognitive dissonance. I think it is quite rational. Democrats have started to talk about raising the minimum wage. But they are only recently to the issue. Certainly when Congress was owned by the Democrats, they did not think it was important enough an issue. In fact, I think it is fair to say that the Democratic Party has approached the minimum wage the same way it approached same sex marriage: as a follower. As always, the usual caveat: much better the Democratic Party that follows public opinion than the Republican Party that fights against it. But I suspect that the voters of Arkansas figured that it didn’t matter that Tom Cotton voted against raising the minimum wage in the past; neither Cotton nor Pryor were actually going to do anything about it in Congress.

Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote a disheartening article, Win the White House, Lose the Midterms. It is about how people blame the president for everything. So when the Democrats have a situation like they had in 2009, they need to use it. The problem is that we elect terrible Democrats whose first loyalty is to big business. That’s why single payer healthcare was never seriously considered. Bank nationalization was never seriously considered. No truly liberal policy was considered when the Democrats had the White House, House of Representatives, and a super-majority in the Senate. We were offered the same old neoliberal policies — the usual “not as bad as what the Republicans want” policies. Although sadly, what Obama got behind in policy terms was actually more conservative than what John McCain had run on. Think about that.

Sachs made a really upsetting observation:

The solution? I think we have to start with a grander vision. The neoliberalism of the the Clinton and Obama administrations have been a catastrophe for liberalism. After that, it is just a lot of work at the local level. The most important thing is to get money out of politics. But that is a very heavy lift since the Supreme Court decided that money doesn’t distort the political process — a decision that started with the conclusion. But we can succeed. It is just that it is all on us. Sachs noted that we have pushed back against plutocracy before: “notably in the Progressive Era from 1890-1914, the New Deal from 1933-1940, and the Great Society from 1961-1969.” But that it wasn’t done by Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Kennedy/Johnson, “[I]n all of those cases, the mass public led and the great leaders followed the cause.” We have to start leading.

Afterword

This video is self-congratulatory — not that I mind. But I do think that Wolf-PAC is a good group and they are worth supporting.