The fundamental error of economic libertarians is one of faith, faith in the divine efficiency of the almighty market. And, like chiliastic Christians everywhere, market fundamentalists—no matter how many times events refute their articles of faith—can be relied upon to find some handy explanation, usually involving bureaucratic malfeasance, for avoiding the plain fact that any market more complex than a vegetable cart requires regulation. Market fundamentalists believe that if government would simply get out of the way, the goodness and virtue of our enlightened buisnessmen would lead us to a promised land of milk and honey and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. They would be better off attending to the hard teachings of Machiavelli, who observed that “it is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.” This is a fine maxim for business regulation and one well borne out by the housing bubble, as is its corollary: “Men never do anything good except by necessity.”
—Roger Hodge
The Mendacity of Hope

Two years ago today, Damian Paletta interviewed Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. And in that interview, they said that a destabilizing fiscal crisis was coming in—Wait for it!—two years. Okay, they actually used a weasel word. The exact quote is, “The U.S. could face a destabilizing fiscal crisis in two years or even sooner.” In truth, the US could face an alien attack sometime this afternoon. But in saying that, it is clear that this is an unlikely occurrence. The Bowles-Simpson claim is meant to imply that the crisis is coming and that two years is the longest that it would take.

It is two years later. Want to know what the status of that crisis is? The government can now borrow money for half the interest rate it could when they said it. But the terrible thing is not that they made this prediction and it turned out to be wrong. The terrible thing is that they’ve been making these predictions for years, they are always wrong, and yet the mainstream media and politicians from all sides still treat them as oracles.

What I think is interesting is that it is standard in journalism to note who a lobbyist works for. If someone is lobbying for a gun manufacturer, it is understood that this might affect his thinking on increased background checks. But in the case of people like Bowles-Simpson and the many other deficit fear groups, the media treat them as objective truth tellers. But they aren’t. These groups are best thought of as good old fashioned conservatives. Above all else, they want to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare and reduce tax rates.

Again, I can’t help but quote Matt Yglesias:

These people are always wrong when it comes to what they claim to be doing. But given it is just a smokescreen, that isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that so many people don’t see that. To do my part, I will here after refer to these guys as Republican lobbyists Bowles-Simpson.

Afterword

Note: Yglesias was specifically talking about Fix the Debt, not Bowles-Simpson, but it equally applies.

Peter Hart over at FAIR notes an amazing thing: ten years ago, Newsweek published an article, right before we went to war with Iraq, that proved that the whole WMD claim was false. The story is mostly about Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s brother-in-law, who had defected to the United States. The Bush administration used Kamel to make its case for war. The problem is that they were only quoting part of what he had to say.

It goes like this. Kamel said, “Saddam Hussein had a big WMD stockpile, but it had all been destroyed.” He said this back in 1995! But, of course, the Bush administration only reported the first part of what Kamel had said. Now you would think that the rest of the media would pick this up and run with it. But they didn’t. By 3 March 2003, they were far too vested in a great big patriotic war to let the facts get in the way!

This is what happened when Colin Powell spoke to the United Nations in the lead up to war. Pretty much everywhere outside the United States, journalists thought the speech sucked. They thought he hadn’t even come close to proving the case for war. But inside the United States it was one big love fest. Everyone agreed that Powell had hit a home run. Only the French could question that speech! (Note: I mean those in power. All alone with my little radio, I knew exactly what was going on. And I’m sure there were a lot of people like me. It was only hard to understand what was going on if you were an idiot. And that seems to be the base qualification of being important in modern American political life.)

When none of the big news sources picked up on the story, Newsweek did what McClatchy had done before: assumed they must be wrong. (Note: when it comes to the mainstream press, this is always a mistake.) The very next week, the cover story was “Saddam’s War.” It was all about Iraq’s terrifying weapons of mass destruction.

What I’ve learned over the years is that knowing what’s going on is not that hard. All you have to do is pay attention to the news and be a little skeptical. The problem with CBS and NPR and the New York Times is that they have no interest in understanding what is really going on. In real time, it doesn’t matter to sales whether your reporting is right or not. It’s a lot easier to just accept what the powerful say as though they are oracles. But we don’t have to accept that. And increasingly, I think we don’t.

Afterword

It always bothered me that Dick Cheney would leak some information (speculation) to Judith Miller. She would publish it in the New York Times. Cheney would go on PBS and say, “See: it’s not just me who’s saying it; the New York Times published it this morning!” Didn’t Miller see that and think, “I’m being gamed! The whole country is being games!” I think she just didn’t care. She’d gotten her scoop and that was all that matter. The truth be damned! And now that she works at Fox News we know just how much the truth matters to her.

A couple of actresses I like are having birthdays today: Wanda Sykes is 49 and Rachel Weisz is 43. The great Arthur Lee of the band Love was born today but sadly died back in 2006. I saw him that the Filmore not long before that. The great hero of my home town, Santa Rosa, was born on this day back in 1849: Luther Burbank. And in 1671 Robert “Rob” Roy MacGregor was born on this day.

But most of all, we should celebrate this day because Maurice Ravel was born on it way back in 1875. I’m rather fond of him. But for most of my life, I have avoided Bolero because it was so unlike all his other very ethereal work that I preferred. But in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate Bolero. (You might check out the excellent Georgian Festival Orchestra version.) It is a fine and very subtle piece of music.

For this day, then, I offer you Bruno Bozzetto‘s excellent visualization of the piece for his Fantasia parody, Allegro Non Troppo. We can use it to also celebrate Bozzetto’s birthday, since I missed it back on 3 March. Enjoy:

Does this drive you crazy too? You are watching C-SPAN or the news or something else and you see John Boehner’s rusty mug saying, “The American people do not want higher taxes!” If you’re like me, you scream at the TV machine, “What the fuck would you know about what the American people want?” Okay; you’re not like me; you don’t yell at the TV. But surly you think this (perhaps without the expletive). For one thing, the “American people” is not a monolithic thing. For another, we know what most American people think on this issue because we’ve asked them. They don’t want their taxes increased, but overwhelmingly they think the rich do not pay enough in taxes and would like to see them pay more.

There are two ways to look at these kinds of statements from conservative politicians. It could be that they are just lying. They do combine politician (mendacity) and conservative (willfully ignorant) into one big deception singularity. Or it could be that they actually believe what they are saying. As it turns out, there are data that indicates that this is the case.

Dylan Matthews presented research by two economics graduate students that compares the opinions of legislator’s constituencies to what the legislator thinks they are. You will be shocked by the results, I’m sure! It turns out that Democrats and Republicans alike think that their constituencies are a whole lot more conservative than they actually are. On average, Republicans overestimate how conservative their constituencies are by 20%. What does that mean specifically? It means that the average Republican state legislator thinks his constituency is more conservative than the most conservative district in the United States. Got that? Republicans think the people they represent are more conservative than the most conservative constituency in the country!

What is even worse: Democrats also systematically overestimate how conservative their constituencies are. Depending on the issue, Democrats overstate this by 5% to 10%. In other words: they still overstate this by a lot. And this explains why it is that a popular idea like single payer healthcare is considered a nonstarter by political elites. It is also why Democrats have long thought that gun control was a losing issue for them. It doesn’t make any sense. Everyone could see that regardless of how pro-gun democrats got, they never got credit for it. For various reasons, almost none of which have to do with gun control, gun lovers will always tilt toward the Republican Party. So now Democrats have learned that while the NRA isn’t going to help them get elected, they also aren’t going to hurt them.

I don’t know what we can do about this disconnect between what politicians think and what the people think. But I have some ideas. Obviously, part of the solution is to get money out of politics. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, most politicians have their ideas about what “the people” want altered by the very clear signals of what corporations want. Another part of the solution is just getting the information out: politicians need to be told that their views are skewed. And as always, the biggest part of the solution is voter turnout. If we just get out and vote, we will get more and more politicians who are more and more liberal.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth!

A lot of interesting people were born on this day. The most important to me is probably Elizabeth Barrett Browning who was born in 1806. I tend to prefer her and other Americans (like Poe) to the British Romantic Period poets. I wish that I had one great poem I could offer you here. The problem is that she didn’t tend to write nice little poems. She wrote a lot of rather long (1000+ line) poems. And she wrote collections of poems—mostly sonnets.

The poem she is best know for, of course, is Sonnet XLIII of Sonnets From the Portuguese. Even if you think you don’t know it, you do. It starts, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” What is remarkable about it is that although that line is tired, the poem is not. Despite that beginning, it is not sentimental—at least not for a Romantic poet.

Here it is; you can skip it if you like, but I urge you to not only read it, but to read it aloud. It is quite beautiful:

I rather like the idea of purity being deaf to praise. It is the one thing that artists most want and yet must ignore. I suspect that this idea was not foreign to her.

Michelangelo was also born on this day in 1475. I find it shocking that he lived to be 88 years old. I still remember when I saw David for the first time in Florence. Up to that time, I had no idea that art could be that powerful. It was only a week or two later that I fell in love with Rodin while in Paris. He was not born on this day.

It is Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s 86th birthday today. I have never read him (that I know of). I’ve wanted to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I associate it too much with my first wife.

David Gilmour is 57 today. I am big fan of his. He is probably my favorite rock guitarist. He has a great sense of melody.

Stephen Schwartz is 65 today. I’m a great fan of musical theater and Schwartz wrote some great ones when I was a kid: Godspell and Pippin. He also wrote Wicked, which I’ve long wanted to see (especially after I learned he had written it).

Ivan Boesky is 66 and Alan Greenspan is 87. I hope that I do not have to note the birthdays next year for these evil men. One is always torn by a great artist who is a horrible human being. I mean: at least they leave us their art. But men like Boesky and Greenspan do nothing but to enrich themselves and their horrible friends. They produce nothing good for society. What is the point of their lives? They could have done something useful like plumbing. If they had, the world would certainly be a far better place.

Afterword

Here is the opening of Pippin. I believe this is from a 1981 filmed version of the Broadway play. That’s 4 years after the play opened and near the end of its run. Ben Vereen came back to play the Lead Player, for which he won the Tony Award for best lead actor in a musical.

I just learned that a new ending was added to the play. The play is about Pippin who is trying to make his life meaningful. At one point he sings, “Don’t you know I want my life to be something more than long.” The Lead Player guides him through various kinds of life experiences: war, power, sex, domesticity. At the end, Pippin has found nothing that is truly fulfilling. The Lead Player then offers up a great use for his life: burn himself alive on stage and provide a great ending to the play. (It is very postmodern in that way.) Pippin is about to go through with it when Catherine and her son show up on the stage and convince him to go back to them. The Lead Player is furious. He removes the sets, the music, the costumes, everything. But Pippin decides that life with Catherine is about the best that life can be, disappointing as that may be. In the end, love conquers all.

The new addition is that the son picks up one of the gloves thrown at Pippin by the players as they went off stage. This calls the players back; they have their new Pippin and so the cycle starts again. I think it is lovely.

And here is David Gilmour doing his thing:

I just caught the tail end of The Ed Show. He had on body language expert Tonya Reiman to discuss Bill O’Reilly’s freak out last night. Let me be clear: I think that “body language” is mostly just a pseudoscience. Sure, there is something to it. But human behavior is fairly individuated. I think there are great limits to it. What’s more, I don’t see how it is ever disproved. Just like in cold reading, some people are good at it and others aren’t. As with other pseudosciences like astrology, it provides some basic notions along with endless caveats.

Ed Schultz made a big deal of the fact that Reiman was “Bill O’Reilly’s body language expert.” He started the segment by showing various instances of her pontificating on O’Reilly’s show. I was very struck by one in which she was looking at a meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By looking at their eyes, she determined that they didn’t like each other.

Once on the show, Ed had her look at Bill O’Reilly’s behavior the night before. She had the shocking insight that O’Reilly was angry. Who could imagine? She repeated several times that Bill was just being Bill—it’s just the way he is. But when Ed asked her if he had an anger problem, she replied, “I’m not a psychologist!”

So let me get this straight. She can tell us the motivations of Obama and Netanyahu based on their eyes. But she cannot tell us the motivations of O’Reilly who commonly loses control of his temper on The Factor. What is it? Is body language a part of psychology when it makes Democrats look bad but not when with it makes unstable conservative loons like O’Reilly look bad? Or is it just that Reiman’s real job is her own self-promotion and she would never do anything to harm O’Reilly, who has been so very helpful in selling her silly self-help books?

Regardless: let’s add Tonya Reiman to the ever growing list of conservative blond automatons.

Afterword