Monthly Archives: December 2014

The Problem With Obama

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Garry WillsI think one of the things that may be hindering him is that he’s so aware that he is the change — that it’s such a break with our history to elect a black President — and that’s such an odd thing to some people and that’s why they’re calling him “not an American” or “socialist” or “fascist” or whatever — that he wants to emphasize continuity almost to a fault. So even though he came to national attention by opposing the Iraq War, he appointed his Secretary of State (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Vice-President (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Secretary of Defense (someone who conducted the Iraq War), the two generals in Afghanistan (who conducted the Iraq War). That’s continuity, all right! But is it the continuity that we need?

And then I noticed that the same thing was happening in other things. He wanted to face up to the banking problems. So he put in Geithner and Summers and Bernanke — the same people who got us into the banking problems. He wanted to bring us healthcare. And the first people he invited into the White House were the AMA, big pharma, the insurance companies. And he actually said, foolishly, “This is the first time we’ve had all these people on our side.” They weren’t on his side; they were snookering him. So I think that his rhetoric of a post-racial, post-partisan, post-blue-state-red-state America is just unrealistic. And the Republican Party has played him for a fool.

—Garry Wills
Interview on Conversations With History

Aphra Behn

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Detail of Aphra Behn by Peter LelyBefore getting to the birthday post proper, I just want to say that it is the painter Roger Fry‘s birthday, and I love his work. I just don’t know that much about him. And for some reason, there isn’t all that much of his work online. Nor is a book about or by him in the library. But maybe by next year, I will have something to write about. He’s very deserving. Of course, so is the subject of today’s birthday post.

On this day in 1640, the great English writer Aphra Behn was baptized. Like most people from that time, we don’t know when she was born. The standard thing is to assume that people were baptized when they were three days old. That’s what the birthdays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Cervantes are: their baptismal dates minus three days. So with Behn, we are just going with the baptism. And it hardly matters. Why not that day?

Well, why not any day? The truth is that we don’t even know Behn’s real name. The date of her baptism is apocryphal. We don’t really know anything about her. And that is very probably by intention. The literary theorist Germaine Greer said of her, “She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks.” Even the one place where seemingly every adult is documented finds her missing: tax records.

To give you some idea of just how vexing her life story is, check out this passage from Wikipedia:

Shortly after her supposed return to England from Surinam in 1664, Behn may have married Johan Behn (also written as Johann and John Behn). He may have been a merchant of German or Dutch extraction, possibly from Hamburg.

Shortly after returning from a place she may have never been, she may have married a man who might have been of a particular profession and maybe from a particular place. It is exasperating! But we do seem to know that she worked as a British spy in the Netherlands. She was supposed to get in good (Seduce?!) the son of the exiled son of the recently executed Thomas Scot. For this dangerous service, the King of England (Charles II at that time) repaid her the way they normally did: by abandoning her and not even paying her expenses.

Because she was in debt, she started writing for a couple of theater companies. Her early works were rather bawdy, like, The Amorous Prince. But she found more success later with comedies. She wrote a total of 19 plays and was the first notable female playwright in England (other than Queen Elizabeth who wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays). But she did far more than this. She also did a great deal of translation, and most important, she was key in the development not just of the English novel, but of the novel generally.

Sadly, she spent pretty much all of her adult life in debt. She may have been working at a furious pace (only John Dryden wrote more plays during that period), but it didn’t pay off very well. Perhaps the British were as bad about paying women then as we are today. On the other hand, there are two portraits of her by noted artists (and perhaps a third). So maybe she just lived beyond her means, as seems to have been typical of writers then — and now. She died in poverty at the age of 48.

Happy birthday Aphra Behn!

Nazi Gumball Ring… Or Is It?

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Nazi RingMy friend Will brought my attention to this curious article, Toy Vending Machine Gives Tulsa Boy a Nazi-Themed Ring. A Oklahoma mother was shopping at a dollar store when her son got the ring pictured there on the left from one of those little toy vending machines.

My first reaction was that it must be a prank being perpetrated by the boy or his mother. But when the local news ponied up some serious coin, they found a dozen other rings just like it. This led me to my second reaction: it must be something done by someone who works for the vending machine company. That could be a prank but it could also be a stunt done by some neo-Nazi. That got me searching Google Images.

I immediately noticed that I couldn’t find any Nazi ring that looked anything like this. And even a search on Nazi symbols with birds in them didn’t turn up anything that looked especially like this. Overwhelmingly, Nazi symbols contained birds with their wings outstretched. I’m sure the Nazis saw themselves as very active: birds that soared, not birds that nested. This is the best match I can come up with:

Nazi Eagle Symbol

Another question I have is how anyone could do this even if they wanted to. It would certainly be easier to create Nazi swastika decals rather than plastic rings. What’s more, let’s not forget that the Nazi swastika was first and is still part of the primary symbol of Jainism — the most peaceful religion or philosophy in the world:

Jainism Symbol Explained
Image used without permission from Jain Belief

I figure it happened as follows. The vending machine company buys these rings for about a penny a piece from some company in China. The company in China makes rings with all sorts of designs on them. They don’t know what they mean, nor do they care. They are providing stupid plastic rings at unbelievably low prices. And the people at the vending machine company don’t even look at the rings because they usually just have Hello Kitty on them anyway. What’s more, they aren’t as hung up on the Nazis as we are. They remember the Japanese! When they see a swastika, they probably think Jainism, not fascism.

All this means that it probably is a Nazi symbol. But I doubt that anyone intended it as Nazi propaganda. It was just another example of how great globalization is. And it just proves that the market is always right. Heil profits!

Attack of the Crybaby: Why Chris Hughes Turned Against New Republic

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Chris HughesI don’t especially care about the death of New Republic. As I discussed in, New Republic: 1914 – 2014, I mostly associate it with The Bell Curve. But I am interested in Chris Hughes. After all, what did Chris Hughes do in life? His singular claim to fame is that he was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. In exchange for that chance encounter, Hughes has a half billion dollars. Now I don’t think much of Zuckerberg either. But at least he did something and was a leader of men. Hughes is just a man-child who ought to be a barista at a suburban Starbucks.

So I’m really interested in how this entitled rich boy went from the savior of New Republic to its destroyer. And luckily, Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker has the whole story, Inside the Collapse of the New Republic. Just to give you a little idea of how thoroughly Hughes has managed to destroy the magazine, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at the hundred year anniversary for the magazine last month. This month, she canceled her subscription. But it may not matter. Because of the mass resignations, New Republic has stopped producing the magazine until February. We’ll see if they manage to grind one out even then. And if they do, I wonder how long it will go on. The two top people are New Republic have no experience doing actual journalism.

But I don’t want to get distracted. My interest is in Chris Hughes and his crybaby act. According to the article, things were great at first. Hughes even went to a conference with the writers and editors and hung out with them late into the night. Sadly, everyone involved, including Lizza, seems to think that this was a good sign. But it wasn’t. It was just a pampered rich boy playing with his new toy. Here were all these urbane sophisticated people willing to hang out with Hughes, who is the kind of guy every one of those writers would have scoffed at had he not been the boss.

Just how pathetic a figure is Chris Hughes? After totally screwing up and causing a mass exodus of his staff, he whined to his remaining staff that he cared “about tradition and about institutions.” And as an example of that, he noted that he studied history and literature at Harvard. Oh my! That does settle it, then. And this is why he hired a guy who said the following on his first day of being placed in charged of the magazine:

They say that there’s two types of CEOs. There’s the peacetime CEO and the wartime CEO. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but this is sort of a war. This is a wartime period. That just means that we need to change a lot of things. We need to just break shit. Sorry to say, we’ve got to break shit and embrace being uncomfortable sometimes. And it’s scary. It’s definitely a scary thing to do. But it’s also fun: you know, lean up against the wall and break it.

This bit of self-consciously belligerent new economy babble was widely mocked by the staff at New Republic. What’s become clear over the past decade or so is that the jargon of the high tech “entrepreneurs” is no more meaningful than the Sun Tzu quotations of the idiot traders of the 1980s. But this is all that Hughes and company bring to the table: business “truisms.” The fact that Hughes considers himself a Democrat is all you really need to know about the state of the Democratic Party.

One of the first things that Hughes did after buying New Republic was an amazing bit of micromanagement. The magazine was already being printed. But Hughes stopped it because he didn’t like the following headline, “Attack of the Crybabies: Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama.” He had the staff remove “Attack of the Crybabies” from the headline. Similarly, when Amazon cut off their participation in their Alpha House campaign because of a critical New Republic article, Hughes did not want that information made public. That one’s a twofer: two different high tech icons showing that they behave exactly the same (if not worse) than their business predecessors.

But I will just quote Lizza for the best example of how small-minded Chris Hughes is. It shows what really attracts him to the Democratic Party: it accepts his sexual orientation and makes no claims on his wealth:

Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” TNR’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality — pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else — yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”

Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”

The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.

“I’m confused,” Hughes wrote back. “Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal? Companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value, including through strategic tax planning.”

When the whole thing was over, Hughes was genuinely surprised. One ex-staffer said, “He was shocked. And I’m kind of shocked that he was shocked.” Hughes had no problem with New Republic being a money loser so long as he was having fun with his new toy. But that could only last so long. Rather than flattering him, people like Alec MacGillis were saying things that indicated that maybe they disagreed with his outlook on life. So New Republic quickly became just another investment. And that meant that it needed to make money! Of course, Chris Hughes doesn’t have a clue how to actually make money other than to hire people who speak the same incoherent language that he does.

If we had a just society, Chris Hughes would die soon, alone, and broke. But no one with a half billion dollars is ever allowed to fail in our society. So Chris Hughes will always be successful in the only way that matters to him: financially. But I do hope that liberals will finally wake up to the fact that Chris Hughes and all the other billionaire “liberals” are anything but actual liberals. They are, in fact, a great impediment to making social progress. We need to elect a president who would never take a call from the likes of the crybaby billionaire class. They only harm society.

Update (14 December 2014 10:14 am)

I haven’t read it yet, but the subtitle to Thomas Frank’s column today is, “Zillionaire new media barons think themselves geniuses, not say, really lucky to’ve been Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” It appears great and middling Franks think alike.

America Is Falling Apart

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Noam ChomskyObama virtually nationalized the auto industry. It was collapsing, so it had to be kind of built up by the taxpayers. So he took over most of the auto industry. There were a few possibilities. One possibility, of course, was the one that was followed. Bail out the owners, bail out the banks, give it back to the same people, or other people with different faces but essentially the same roles in society, and have it continue to produce what it had always been producing — automobiles. There was another possibility.

Give it to the work force. Subsidize them to develop and have it produce what we need. What do we need? I can give you a personal example.

My wife and I came to New York by train from Boston. The train took only an hour and a half longer than when I took it in 1950 for the first time. Either it was standing still or it was going slower than the trucks on the Connecticut Turnpike.

There isn’t a country in the world where this happens. And that’s just a symbol of the country. This is the richest country in the world that has incomparable advantages and it’s just falling apart.

—Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky Talks US Militarism and Capitalism, at Home and Abroad

Zulu and the Politics of Power

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ZuluLast night, I watched the 1964 classic, Zulu. I’ve always really liked the film, but it also seems somehow racist. I add the modifier there, because the film goes out of its way to portray the Zulu with a great deal of dignity. And having watched the film again, I am of the opinion that it isn’t racist, although it is Anglophilic: it tells the story entirely from the standpoint of the British. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that — especially given when the film was made. What I think is most interesting, however, is that an equally great film could be made entirely from the Zulu perspective.

I love the stories of family squabbles, especially when they have consequences far outside the family. Cetshwayo kaMpande, the king of Zululand, was a good ruler. The British were the aggressors in the Anglo-Zulu war. And overall, the Zulu were doing quite well. But Cetshwayo was not out to create a new empire. He was just trying to hold onto to his own kingdom. Even after his success at the Battle of Isandlwana (the subject of the mediocre film Zulu Dawn), he wanted to make peace with the British. And he might have been successful if it weren’t for his half-brother, Dabulamanzi kaMpande.

It was Dabulamanzi who instigated the Battle of Rorke’s Drift — the subject of Zulu. Rorke’s Drift was outside of Zululand and Cetshwayo did not want to attack outside of his own land. That’s not to say that Dabulamanzi was disloyal. In fact, he was very loyal. He was just younger and less wise. It’s not clear what he really thought to accomplish at Rorke’s Drift. A victory would have meant nothing compared to the victory at Isandlawana. As it was, the British didn’t win the battle so much as survive. That brings up the important point about the ending of Zulu.

The most beautiful part of the film is where the Zulu sing a song in preparation for a huge attack. In response, the British sing, “Men of Harlech.” It is a beautiful moment that has no historical basis. But who cares? It is followed by the Zulu attack. The British fall back and form three lines of fire. And after much sound and fury, the British are left standing in front of a sea of death Zulu warriors. It is an amazing bit of filmmaking, switching from the lyricism of the singing scene to the brutality of the attack.

After this, the film cuts to three hours later where we learn that the Zulu have not attacked again. Then the Zulu appear on the hillside — thousands of them. The British don’t even try. It is over. But instead of attacking, the Zulu sing a song honoring them as fellow warriors. And then the Zulu go on their merry. It works rather well as an ending to the film, but it isn’t what happened. In fact, the Zulu just disappeared because they were short on supplies, with many wounded, and far from home.

But Rorke’s Drift had great public relations benefit for the British. I question whether the British would have continued on with the Anglo-Zulu War without this “victory” — especially with Cetshwayo’s attempts to broker a peace. But it’s hard to say. In terms of imperialism, the British were not nearly as bad as many. But that’s just a function of how bad others — notably my own Portuguese ancestors — were, and not of the British being great.

Another interesting thing about the battle is what happened to the British soldiers who fought in it. Most of them died quite young. Lieutenant Bromhead, for example, died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 while serving in India. But the situation was much worse for lower ranks. One of the men, William Jones, ended up pawning his Victoria Cross. He died in a workhouse. But in some ways, he was lucky — living into his 70s. The most extreme case was that of Ferdinand Schiess. He couldn’t find work — a common situation for the men who fought at Rorke’s Drift. A few years after the battle, he was discovered by the Royal Navy on the streets of Cape Town — starving. They saved him, but he died on the journey back to England. He was 28 years old. (That is the age that the hero dies in Jude the Obscure — written around the same time.)

I bring this up because it shows the way that the powerful treat the people. It doesn’t matter if they are enemies (reluctant though they may be) or friends — even heroes. They are all expendable.

Image licensed under Fair Use.

Tom Verlaine

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Tom VerlaineThe great musician Tom Verlaine is 65 today. He was the founder of the early punk band Television. If that is the right word. Those early bands like Television and Ramones are hard to classify. But Television was an amazing band. Verlaine originally started the band with Richard Hell. But eventually Verlaine kicked Hell out of the band, supposedly for his poor musicianship and his odd behavior. I think it was actually just a personality conflict. For one thing, Hell was actually a rather good bass player. But more important, Verlaine is very laid-back on stage and Hell was spastic. It was probably for the best. Hell really needed to be a solo act, and his material didn’t fit in that well with Television.

Television didn’t stay together that long. I’m not counting how they later got back together like just about every other punk and post-punk band. They only released two albums during that period. But they are both classics: Marquee Moon and Adventure. And then, Verlaine went on to have arguably an even more successful solo career. In addition to his excellent songwriting, he is one of the great guitarists that rock has produced.

There isn’t a lot of great video of Verlaine online. There is currently the whole Marquee Moon on YouTube. But the best thing I can find is the same thing I posted last year of him solo performing in Madrid. But this is a playlist of the entire performance:

Happy birthday Tom Verlaine!

Two More Things About Torture Report

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Stop Torture - Funny enough, cropped from image at US Embassy WebsiteI’ve seen two more things about the torture report that really should be read. The first is from Jonathan Chait, The Torture Party: Why Republicans Defend the Most Sadistic Government Program in Recent History. It’s a longish article, that will be in the upcoming issue of New York Magazine. It makes a number of good points. For example, all the torture apologias up until now have used the same now discredited claim, “We waterboarded in the CIA — the CIA waterboarded three terrorists. Just three.” Of course, we pretty much knew that wasn’t true two years ago. But now we know that wasn’t true and that the CIA did much worse.

This leads us to the horrifyingly amusing spectacle of Ted Cruz claiming that torture is terrible but “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W Bush’s fault.'” Because the torture report is really just the administration’s effort to blame everything on Bush. And we know this because (1) the White House did not want to release the report; and (2) the report is really a whitewash as far as Bush and company are concerned — it puts all the blame on the CIA, where it most definitely does not all belong. Chait noted, “To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion.”

Chait also pointed to Dick Cheney on Fox News, who finally said what he really thinks, “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’? Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and prevent a further attack, and we were successful on both parts.” In addition to being morally bankrupt, people like Cheney will never accept that (1) torture is not effective; (2) we tortured a whole lot of innocent people; and (3) there are huge opportunity costs associated with what we did. Chait ended with a summation that I’m afraid applies to a whole lot more people than just Dick Cheney:

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

Ron Wyden

After the report was released, a group of ex-CIA heads wrote an OpEd in The Wall Street Journal, Interrogations Saved Lives. I think there is a special kind of logic here that they would never admit to, “Our interrogations must have saved lives! If they didn’t, then we would have to admit to being monsters!” But you know what I say, “If the rectal tubing fits, it doesn’t matter how nice a suit you wear, you are a monster.” But I digress.

Senator Ron Wyden saw the OpEd and he wasn’t pleased. So he put together the following annotated version of it. You will have to click on the full-screen button to read it. But it is very much worth the effort!

Wyden Torture Rebuttal

What bugs me about all of this is the sense I have that the American media is so done with this torture report. To me, this is extremely deep. Even at the time, I was greatly disturbed. When I was young, I was a true believer in America. I believed everything I was taught. And one of the things that I was taught was that we don’t torture. That was a big difference between “us” and “them.” But the moment it became convenient, we tortured. It seems as though many people had just been waiting for the chance. When Walter Johnson’s fast ball started to slow, he retired. He didn’t turn into Ty Cobb. I guess it is different for nations. The error was mine: to ever think that we were better than others. So maybe Dick Cheney and company did me a great favor. The sad thing is, they can torture and still think that we are better.

H/T: Zack Beauchamp

CRomnibus Is Not That Bad

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Obama CopeAs I explain quite a lot around here, I’m really not very ideological. If I lived in a better time and place, perhaps I would be. But I’ve seen too much of the dangers of ideology — on the left and, most especially and recently, on the right. So as a pragmatist, I’m not especially upset about this new budget — the so called CRomnibus. (It’s called that because it is a combination of a normal budget — an ombibus — and a continuing resolution, or CR.) I’ll get to the details of the deal in a moment.

One thing that we liberals have to understand is that it really doesn’t matter that roughly half the population consistently votes against its own best interests — usually in the name of concepts that have no meaningful policy substance — things like “life” and “freedom.” And it doesn’t matter that if everyone voted we would have a far better government. The fact remains that a large enough block of the electorate votes for oligarchs and we have to make the best of this situation. (I might note that when things go ridiculously wrong because of the oligarchs, we would be better off voting in a bunch of actual liberals and not New Democrats like Obama, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

There are a number of things that are wrong with the new budget. It isn’t just the change to Dodd-Frank and the increase in political party giving. There is also a change to the funding of the risk corridor program in Obamacare. There are some cuts to the EPA. There are cuts to the IRS that are totally self-defeating unless you are a Republican and want to “destroy the IRS.” And perhaps the worst thing is that Congress is blocking the District of Columbia’s cannabis legalization law. Republicans always talk about what an authoritarian Obama is. That’s a joke, of course; but their treatment of DC is quite authoritarian.

But even if this was all there was to the budget deal, it wouldn’t be that bad. A government shutdown is a very bad thing. It hurts people. Nothing here is totally unreasonable like defunding the Medicaid expansion or enacting chained-CPI. So I don’t see any reason to freak out regardless. But the truth is that it isn’t that bad because the Democrats did get a lot of what they wanted. And that’s what we’ve all been saying over the last four years: compromise involves getting something and giving something. So what did the Democrats get?

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones provided a good overview, Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the CRomnibus. In the article, Jim Morgan explained that perhaps the biggest thing they got was not having the EPA gutting — which is what the Republicans wanted to do with a thousand cuts (okay: 26). And according to Obama it included “investments for the President’s early education agenda, Pell Grants, the bipartisan Manufacturing Institutes initiative, and extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.” These are not the greatest things in the world, but the same can be said for what the Republicans got. Which is why the right-wing authoritarians are screaming about the bill.

Some, like Ezra Klein, are arguing that the Democrats really had to take this opportunity, because otherwise, they would have just passed a three month continuing resolution. That would have meant the even more crazy fully Republican controlled Congress would have to be dealt with. I don’t really buy that, either. The Republican leadership wanted the CRomnibus too. They are as afraid of the new Congress as the Democrats are. But they weren’t going to roll-over on this. And that’s why this compromise bill actually made sense.

I’m not exactly happy with the CRomnibus. But it isn’t the sort of thing that I’m going to get worked up about. It isn’t the end of the world. I’m much more concerned that the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates just in time to assure us a Republican president. I’m far more outraged that the torture report was met by conservatives (and many “liberals” as well) with a shrug and a, “That was so long ago!” Above all, I’m angry that the Democratic Party can’t manage to be an actual liberal party when it comes to the economy or the national security state or foreign affairs. But this budget deal? No big deal.

Best Thing for Greece to Exit Euro

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GreeceSeveral years ago, an economist put together a little tool to decide what Greece should do about its economic troubles. It was very detailed, with well over a hundred “blocks” that various responses to many questions led to. My approach to the problem was simple: Greece should leave the euro and deal with the suffering that would cause. My thinking wasn’t really that sophisticated. It was just that I felt an exit of Greece was a given and it was better to suffer the exit then rather than suffer for months or years and then suffer the exit.

Paul Krugman’s column this morning is, Mad as Hellas. And from it, I learned that after years of intense suffering, the Greek economy is still very bad and the people seem to have finally had enough. The current Greek government that is committed to austerity is trying to put off an election. According to Krugman, “And, if it fails, the likely winner in that election is Syriza, a party of the left that has demanded a renegotiation of the austerity program, which could lead to a confrontation with Germany and exit from the euro.”

Why would that mean that the Greece would exit the euro? Simply: Germany is filled with a bunch of jerks. I don’t see Germany yielding in this matter. Germany’s economy is doing fine. Germany is certain that if everyone just acted like them, they too would be doing fine. Germany has a century-long record of abusing its power on the rest of Europe. I suppose we should be happy that they no longer have to start a war. But it hardly matters when you can get everyone to do as you want without firing a shot.

The United States’ federal budget is $3.5 trillion. According to Krugman, Greece has been forced to cut its budget and raise taxes at a level that would be equivalent to us doing so to a tune of one trillion dollars per year. We are talking massive austerity. And the results? “Meanwhile, wages in the private sector have plunged. Yet a quarter of the Greek labor force, and half its young, remain unemployed… Meanwhile, the debt situation has if anything gotten worse, with the ratio of public debt to GDP at a record high — mainly because of falling GDP, not rising debt — and with the emergence of a big private debt problem, thanks to deflation and depression.”

So it is just as I thought four years ago: the Greek economy is not doing any better, but the Greek people are doing much worse. And there is no indication that Germany will think anything ought to change. After all, things are going quite well for them. And as with all ideologues, the reasoning will be very clear, “If austerity hasn’t worked so far, you need more austerity!” In other words: the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Krugman also noted that extremist political parties are on the rise in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. You can only kick people when they are down for so long. And it is just that. It isn’t, as is generally claimed, that these countries need to “take their medicine.” In this case, the “medicine” is like blood letting an anemic patient. Krugman has it exactly right:

This is what happens when an elite claims the right to rule based on its supposed expertise, its understanding of what must be done — then demonstrates both that it does not, in fact, know what it is doing, and that it is too ideologically rigid to learn from its mistakes.

Being “very serious” in the world of economics is all about people being “hard” and “tough.” But the pain that must be accepted is never their own pain. We see it here in the United States where our budget deficit supposedly means we must lower taxes on the rich and cut benefits of the retired. But the best example of it is found with the way that Germany treats the rest of Europe. One of the reasons for forming the Eurozone was so that they wouldn’t have anymore wars. But this is just another kind of war and someone has to fight back against Germany.

Edvard Munch Without The Scream

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Edvard MunchOn this day in 1863, the German Expressionist Edvard Munch was born. Don’t misunderstand, however; he was a a Norwegian painter, and quite a bit more idiosyncratic than most German Expressionists. He is one of those artists who is cursed to be associated with a single painting. In his case, The Scream, which he painted when he was just 30 years old. But he is so much greater than that.

He was also influenced by the impressionists. And during his time in France, he was doubtless influenced by the post-impressionists. Some of my favorite of his paintings remind me of Gauguin. A quick check of Wikipedia discloses that he was influenced by Gauguin as well as van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. I think I can see the van Gogh to some extent, but my powers of art appreciation are not keen enough to see the influence of the great illustrator.

Here is an example of what I mean. It is The Girls on the Jetty — or rather, one of 18 he painted around 1900:

The Girls on the Jetty - Edvard Munch

It is still Munch and Symbolist, but the use of colors strikes me very much like Gauguin. You can see this even more in an earlier painting, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo:

At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo - Edvard Munch

I’ve had some difficulty finding much of his later work that really blows me away. That’s not to say that his later work is bad. It is just that there isn’t all that much of it on line — or at least it is hidden beneath a million copies of The Scream and parodies of it. But here is a painting from 1914, Weeping Nude:

Weeping Nude - Edvard Much

Happy birthday Edvard Munch!