| CARVIEW |
The failure of Democrats to beat a “vulgar talking yam” has occasioned no real re-thinking, realignment, or even reassessment in the party itself. Democrat operatives have so far seemed, rather, to be obsessed with pointing fingers outside themselves. To read their tweets and articles is to encounter a host of outside responsible forces – Sanders, Putin, a clickbait media, ominous “Third Party voters” (the Nader Effect), Bernie bros, Comey, and so on. It’s a long list that even includes a belated awareness that racism and misogyny may be more prevalent in the electorate than previously believed.
What the list does NOT include is either the candidate or the party itself, which is of course where the real blame lies.
Maybe you’d think that would be too much to expect from human beings – honest criticism of their own obvious failure – if it weren’t for one salient factor. This was politics.
Until recently politics in America has traditionally, historically been an exercise in practicality. A “politician” was someone who reacted to the perceived “will of the people” and adjusted her approach to include as much of it as possible, thus the myth of the Great Center. Perhaps the most glaring (because relevant) example was the Socialist/populist uprising at the beginning of the Great Depression when the success of socialist Eugene Debs, among others, caused FDR to absorb populist ideas into the Democratic party platform and his own campaign.
This past summer, the Democrat party faced a similar challenge. But instead of adjusting to the Sanders success and absorbing that success into their approach, they concentrated on destroying his candidacy. Then, having done that, they completely ignored what made it successful – the opposite of the political decision made by Roosevelt’s Democratic Party which led to 50 years of Democratic hegemony.
Politics is, perhaps more than anything else, the art of listening and then materializing what you’ve heard. This year both parties were so focused on their own agendas that neither could be bothered. Trump and Sanders were the only ones who listened.
]]>This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.
Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival
It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950′s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then – and is now – a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.
The truth is somewhat different.
In America, we are reminded, the idea of a Christmas celebration didn’t really take hold until commercial interests recognized its potential and began to sell it like corn flakes.
The growth of Santa as the predominant icon of Christmas in much of the world grew out of the efforts of retail wizards such as John Wanamaker and Rowland Hussey Macy, founders of the modern department store. Much like the early church fathers, Wanamaker and Macy systematically laid claim to a Christmas of their own making in the 19th century.By this point, said Russell W. Belk, a sociologist and anthropologist at York University in Toronto, Christmas had already been through several incarnations — Christians in the United States had initially resisted Christmas because it was seen as tied to the Catholic calendar, but waves of European immigrants brought traditions of Christmas celebrations with them. Still, the idea of giving gifts to relatives was not the norm, especially among English immigrants, where Christmas gifts were primarily seen as acts of benevolence toward servants and slaves.
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Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa’s ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.
“Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas,” said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, “they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa’s outfits came from Coca-Cola’s paintings.”
It doesn’t actually. “Santa Claus” is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas – Sinterklaas – and the color red was always associated with the Greek St Nicholas who is the source of the icon. (More about him later.) Coke’s artists merely appropriated an image already made famous by Thomas Nast in the 1870′s and 80′s, an action that is fairly symbolic of how the holiday actually developed.
Myth #2: That Christmas is primarily a Christian holiday
The trappings of Christmas are almost entirely pagan in origin. Christmas trees, the lights on both trees and homes, wreaths, caroling, Santa Claus, the exchange of gifts – all of it was born in pagan solstice festivals beginning, as far as we can tell, long before Christ’s time. In the context of the solstice, it all makes perfect sense. In a Christian context, they simply don’t belong. What does Christ, a product of the Judean desert, have to do with pine trees, after all? Nothing.
- Christmas trees – Probably born in Germany or the Nordic countries, the ritual symbolism of the solstice evergreen was just that: it was ever green. Unlike the deciduous trees that dominated the forests of northern Europe whose leaves died and fell away as winter began, fir trees remained green all year round. They were the perfect representation in pagan societies for the persistence of life and the fertility of the earth on which those societies depended. Druids (the real ones, not the pale, bogus artifices we know today) worshipped trees, evergreens in particular, because they believed they were the earthly incarnations of spirits and/or gods. Evergreens were believed either to be or to be the homes of spirits who controlled the sun and had the power to bring it back and renew the earth for another year. The custom of bringing a tree inside, almost certainly German, probably began as a form of pagan tree-worship.
- Lights – As the days shortened and the sun threatened to disappear, the long nights became a source of real fear, not just because folk believed it might vanish but because they believed that evil spirits lurked in the dark, and the longer the nights were, the more chance there was that these monsters would wreak havoc on their villages. The solution, of course, was a Festival of Light held, naturally, on the one day of the year that had the least of it. There were torch parades and candles were kept burning all night. When the trees came inside, so did the candles, and by the Victorian era the candles had become attached to the branches of the tree.
- Wreaths – Common to many cultures, wreaths were either worn, as in Rome, or displayed as signs of either special favor or protection from evil. Long before trees were brought into the house, wreaths were attached to doorposts, connecting the magic of the evergreen to individual homes.
- Caroling – Noise has long been believed by many peoples to scare away evil spirits. In China they beat drums and gongs, in Europe they sang. The origin of this particular custom (called “wassailing” in Britain) is lost to history but it isn’t unreasonable to assume that it was a natural addition to all the other anti-evil charms employed by our ancestors. So is dancing, of course, so it isn’t surprising that the two were combined. In fact, the original meaning of the word was “circle dance” and was most likely an integral part of the midwinter ritual. We don’t do the dancing part much any more, and it’s too bad.
- Santa Claus – Unlike the rest of our Christmas traditions, Santa Claus does have some slight connection to Christianity.
Born to wealthy and devout Christian parents in Patara, then a province of Greece, St Nicholas is supposed to have taken the words of Christ to heart and given away the whole of his large inheritance to relieve the suffering of the poor and the sick. Though he was never ordained, his reputation for piety was such that he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Persecuted and imprisoned by the Emperor Diocletian, he returned to Myra after his release and died there on December 6, 343. For many years after that, the anniversary of his death was celebrated as “St Nicholas Day”.Co-incidence? Sort of. The fact that he died in December only a few days before Saturnalia (the Roman midwinter festival) connected him quite naturally to what became Christmas when the Catholic Church appropriated midwinter festivals for a celebration of the birth of Christ. After centuries of trying unsuccessfully to stamp out these primarily pagan rituals, the geniuses in the Church came up with a brilliant idea: if they couldn’t be stopped, they could certainly be swallowed up – assimilated by the Church and given a Catholic context. This was to prove a valuable and almost universally successful tactic in the centuries to come.St Nicholas Day melded rather naturally into the solstice festivals and it wasn’t long before St Nick and Christmas were inseparable. In many parts of Europe, Dec 6 is still celebrated as both.It should be noted that the St Nick we know is neither Greek nor terribly Christian. He’s Dutch. Sort of…. - The giving of gifts, stockings over the fireplace, and coming down the chimney– Both of these customs arose not in Europe but – are you ready for this? – here. In America. In New York, in fact.
After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride the colony’s nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, influential patriot and antiquarian, who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that year he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not a saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the origin of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas; that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving’s work was regarded as the “first notable work of imagination in the New World.”The New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810. John Pintard commissioned artist Alexander Anderson to create the first American image of Nicholas for the occasion. Nicholas was shown in a gift-giving role with children’s treats in stockings hanging at a fireplace. The accompanying poem ends, “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.”
So Washington Irving invented the Santa Claus we know more or less out of whole cloth, relying on legends (as he often did) and embellishing until the original story was barely recognizable. Irving entirely ignored the religious connotation of the title “saint” and any overt connection to religion, let alone to Christ. His St Nick was already 95% secular, a cultural symbol closer to solstice celebrations than Christian ones.
The total secularization of St Nicholas, morphing him into the Santa Claus we know, was accomplished by only two men: Clement Moore (probably) and Thomas Nast. Moore is generally credited with writing A Visit from St Nicholas(“‘Twas the night before Christmas/and all through the house….” – you know it) for his children in 1822. It forever identified St Nick with the roly-poly, “jolly old elf” of Irving’s story and pretty much divorced him from any possible religious significance. Fifty years later, what Moore had done with words, Nast did with pictures. His cartoons of Santa Claus formed our visual image of the old guy once and for all. Following Irving and Moore, Nast’s Santa is no more a religious figure than, say,Uncle Sam.
Of all the traditions we associate with Christmas, only three are overtly religious: the Nativity Scene, the angel on top of the tree, and going to church. Many Christian churches have the former and most Christians do the latter on Christmas even if they never go the rest of the year. By my count, that makes Christmas roughly 87% secular whether Bill O’Reilly likes it or not.
]]>The CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith.
Really? How’s that?
CNBC billed the debate as one that would focus on “the key issues that matter to all voters—job growth, taxes, technology, retirement and the health of our national economy.” That was not the case.
Well, Reince, they tried. Give them credit for that. But look what happened when they did. Asked for details as you request, they either answered by asserting generalities without explaining anything or they ignored the question entirely and went off on pre-scripted irrelevant rants.
Questions were inaccurate or downright offensive.
Inaccurate how, Reince? Was Quick’s question asking Carson to explain his economic program because the numbers didn’t add up – which they don’t, not even close – inaccurate? No, it was not. But more importantly, look at Carson’s answer: It will work because I say it will work. Asked how he would build his border wall, Trump answered: I’ll do it. It’ll be easy. Then he compared it to the Great Wall of China. Like, what?!
The fault, dear Reince, lies not in the moderators but in the candidates, and it’s simply stated:
YOU CAN’T HAVE A SUBSTANTIVE DEBATE WITHOUT SUBSTANTIVE CANDIDATES.
And you don’t have any, Reince. What you’ve got are faith-based imagineers who are comfortable with loopy theories and wide swaths of non-specific generalizations and unproven assertions. None of them DO detail. Asked for it, they think they’re being attacked. All of your candidates are lightweight and ignorant. None of them has the remotest idea what govt does or how it does it, and none of them give a shit about learning.
While debates are meant to include tough questions and contrast candidates’ visions and policies for the future of America, CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of “gotcha” questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates. What took place Wednesday night was not an attempt to give the American people a greater understanding of our candidates’ policies and ideas.
The moderators – any moderators – can’t do it in a vacuum. Those questions were NOT “petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates.” They were attempting to elicit “policies and ideas” except your candidates don’t have any. Their collected economic policies could be written on a napkin, and not one of them has at any point in their careers come up with an idea that wasn’t old when Reagan was a baby.
Give it up, Reince. It’s hopeless. PR and marketing spin notwithstanding, you can’t make them something they’re not. Maybe you ought to consider Cruz’s suggestion and hire Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck as your next moderators. It’ll still be a trainwreck but more fun to watch.
]]>What’s wrong with pandering? Our system of government, as it has evolved, offers precious few opportunities for ordinary people to get into the national conversation. Big Money has a tight grip on governance through insistent lobbying, and for the most part they fund national elections.
For once, the Democratic nominating fight, and the emergence of Bernie Sanders, has given public interest groups a voice, a rare channel to impact the political system. We shouldn’t roll our eyes at that; we should respect it. National leaders should have to listen to their constituents and earn their support. Primaries are one of the only moments that allow such an opportunity.
Had Mr Dayen written this piece 10 years ago – even 5 – I would be cheering. After all, I’ve been saying for at least a decade, ever since liberal Dems started blaming Nader for Gore’s 2000 defeat, that a push from a third party looked to be the only way to force an increasingly conservative Democratic party back to its root liberalism. The party had been captured by Third Way cons – the so-called neoliberals – and needed a challenge from the left to move them back toward the center.
So Clinton’s reaction to Bernie Sanders’ FDR-style pitch was predictable and would have been welcome but for one thing, and I can encapsulate the problem in two words: Citizen’s United.
Mr Dayen seems a shade behind the times. “Big money” not only “has a tight grip on governance”, CU has given it a pretty tight grip on campaign finances. Mr Dayen argues:
But here’s what we know from political science…: Politicians typically keep their campaign promises. Presidents may not fulfill them, but that has more to do with Congressional obstruction than a flip-flop.
In other words, locking in a particular endorsement in a primary has real lingering effects. That makes the process some call pandering, which I would call paying attention to your political base, all the more important. If you can move a candidate on an issue you care about, you can keep them in that position for a long time.
Yes, that’s the way primaries ought to work and I’ve made the same point myself in the past. But CU has changed the game. The injection of the “money is free speech” doctrine into election fundraising means that the richest campaign will be the winning campaign, which in turn means that candidates can say virtually anything to get elected and the only promises they have to keep are the ones they make to their funders.
The GOP has been running on this model for 30 years, and winning. They made lots of promises they had no intention of keeping – and didn’t – yet because their massive war chests allowed them to buy election after election, they kept on winning. It has taken three decades – DECADES – for this policy to catch up with them. Their base is in full revolt, fueled by 30 years of lies, but in the meantime they have controlled Congress and the presidency for more than half that period.
This lesson cannot have escaped the Democrats, especially the conservative/neoliberal wing. As long as candidates keep their promises to Big Money, they can lie their asses off to the electorate with few if any consequences. The electorate is now just part of the kabuki, and they will have even less influence as time goes by. Elections are becoming propaganda battles as Big Money hustles both parties into puppeteering. What all of this adds up to makes whether nor not a candidate is “pandering” a lot more important, even critical in terms of understanding what a candidate will actually do if elected.
IOW, which set of promises is a candidate going to keep? The ones she makes her BIG Money donors, or the ones she makes the electorate? Because she sure as hell isn’t going to be able to keep both.
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I actually wasn’t referring to the voters themselves (in fact, that makes no sense); I was talking about the solutions they seem to embrace for the country’s woes.
– but either way she meant it, it’s true. Their attitudes do reflect LCD thinking, are childish, are free from every response but visceral wishful thinking. I know this because I grew up here surrounded by these people and left here in large part because of them. I’ve come back after 40 yrs to find that very little has changed.
Yes, there are more progressive areas, and yes, NH did elect a Jeanne Shaheen or two while I was gone, and yes, the recent influx of employers has resulted in attracting a new set of employees from out of state (“outlanders” we call them, not with affection) that has changed the demographics of the region somewhat. But none of this regeneration has touched the hard-core NH RW. They are what they have always been: an angry, superficial tribe in search of revenge for imagined slights and in denial of any reality more complex or nuanced than you could find encased in an episode of Father Knows Best or Mayberry RFD.
They are also the kind of conservatives who would love Trump because he sounds like a bully. They like bullies. These are the same people (or their sons and daughters) who loved Joe McCarthy in the 50’s and Ross Perot in the 90’s mostly because they promised to kick the asses of people the tribe hated, chiefly Commies and FDR Democrats. Most belonged to the John Birch Society and made it a powerhouse of NH politics for 30+ years. Of course they love Trump. Of course they think he’s “classy”. He’s rich, isn’t he? These are the people who would have loved to vote for Lyndon LaRouche only he wasn’t rich enough and they couldn’t take his candidacy seriously as a result.
In today’s WaPo, David Farenthold tries to figure out Demagogue The Donald’s appeal by asking people who know him. This comment struck me as particularly spot on.
“Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which calls for reduced immigration.
That’s the best description of NH’s Trump adherents I’ve run into. The NH GOP is loaded with Uncle Georges for whom every problem is simple, every solution even simpler: force. Just do it. The Uncle Georges would agree: “Just build a damn fence. An electric fence. That’d keep the buggers out. Works on my cows.” The Uncle Georges would agree: “Just bomb the shit outa them ISIS and steal their oil so they can’t buy no more guns. That’ll fix the bastuds.”
It isn’t even that they agree with Trump. What it really is, is that he agrees with them. See, the Uncle Georges (and Aunt Millies, there are just as many women in the tribe as men, maybe more now) have been saying these same things, demanding these same solutions since WWII. When I lived here as a teenager in the 60’s, they wanted a border fence built and Vietnam (or Veet Naam as they called it) bombed out of existence. Both those “solutions” were, they believed “just common sense”. And here comes Trump, the first presidential candidate ever to put on a national stage exactly what they’ve been saying for decades, practically in their own words.
Is it any wonder, then? Trump is validation for every simplistic, childish solution to world problems that they have championed all their lives. Goldwater had some of it, Perot had some, Reagan had more than anyone, perhaps, but they all talked like politicians, to some degree weaseling out even as they put forward the UG’s and AM’s views. But Trump lays it out by saying exactly what they’d say if they had a national microphone, exactly what they’ve been saying. For decades. Mostly to long-suffering relatives.
It’s sad, alright, sadder than you think. The NH GOP has always been like this. For 50 yrs the (relatively) few rational GOP leaders, with help from the national party, kept the core NH GOP from descending into Lalaland. Their main argument – and it was a very effective one – was that NH’s First In The Nation Primary
was singularly important to both NH’s economy and its status. If Lyndon Larouche, say, were to win the GOP primary, there was a very real risk that viable candidates – candidates with real money to spend – would decide to bypass NH the same way they did Louisiana because the NH primary would have become a national joke, irrelevant, even meaningless, to the national party.
And so the UG’s and AM’s would mutter under their collective breaths, only allowed to work up a head of oratorical steam at occasional family gatherings, and only after the beer came out. The national party was content to shush them and never tried very hard to educate them to actual realities because that would have made them useless. They were party activists because they were angry, and they were angry because those damn FDR commie Democrats were messing everything up by complicating every little problem and talking it to death. Negotiations were for pussies, real men bombed the living shit out of their enemies.
They never learned because they never had to. GOP leaders encouraged them, and Bill Loeb’s Manchester Union-Leader bucked them up by feeding them all the RW propaganda they could use and then some. They held onto their fantasies and their simple solutions, then handed them down to their kids. They’ve been waiting a long time for their candidate, and now he’s here and the country thinks he’s a clown, which means that once again, they’re clowns.
It’s a tough position to be in, in some ways. That’s why the folks in the focus group look so defensive and sound so tentative. They’re expecting that what they say will be ridiculed, as it always is, even by their own families. And of course it will be and should be, because these are people who for two generations have militantly refused to acknowledge reality or, in many cases, to learn one new thing, any new thing, since they passed into high school.
I say all this because I suspect that Trump’s appeal is to the same kind of people and for the same reasons that he hits NH’s core GOP voter. All over the country, the Uncle Georges and Aunt Millies and Cousin Tonys are hearing the same things they’ve been saying coming back to them from the guy on the tv.
And he’s rich so he must be right, ay?
]]>Mistake: “The Tea Party started just as much as a movement of self-styled outsiders, but unlike activists on the left, they pursued an inside strategy from the outset, one focused clearly on elections.”
Because they were NOT outsiders. The Tea Party was started by Dick Armey with Koch Bros money and aimed at the political disruption of establishment Dems from the very beginning. Neither Armey nor the GOP establishment expected that they would use what they were taught by them on their GOP Masters. BlackLivesMatter are NOT a trained arm of Dem operatives. They have arisen from a need and are clearly not politically sophisticated yet. No comparison.
The Dem elite: The simplest way to explain why the Third Way/BD/NewDem party leaders don’t give a shit about the base is to repeat Axelrod’s comment from 2012.
“We don’t have to care. Where else are they going to go?”
]]>AS Republicans take control of Congress this month, at the top of their to-do list is changing how the government measures the impact of tax cuts on federal revenue: namely, to switch from so-called static scoring to “dynamic” scoring. While seemingly arcane, the change could have significant, negative consequences for enacting sustainable, long-term fiscal policies.
Whenever new tax legislation is proposed, the nonpartisanCongressional Budget Office “scores” it, to estimate whether the bill would raise more or less revenue than existing law would.
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[The] conventional estimates do not, however, include any indirect feedback effects that tax law changes might have on overall national income. In other words, they do not incorporate macroeconomic behavioral changes.
Dynamic scoring does. Proponents point out, correctly, that if a tax proposal is large enough, then those sorts of feedback effects can aim the entire economy on a slightly different path.
“Dynamic scoring” basically allows the injection of unjustified assumptions about the future performance of the economy. IOW, adding a baseline article of faith from Reaganomics that all tax cuts on the wealthy raise revenues and if they don’t, it’s because they weren’t deep enough.
Federal deficits are on an unsustainable path (as it happens, because of undertaxation, not excessive spending). Simply cutting taxes against the headwind of structural deficits leads to lower growth, as government borrowing soaks up an ever-increasing share of savings.
The most optimistic dynamic models get around this by assuming that the world today is in fiscal equilibrium, where the deficit does not grow continuously as a percentage of gross domestic product. But that’s not true. If you add the reality of spiraling deficits into those models, they don’t work.
To make these models work, scorekeepers must arbitrarily assume either that we tax more and spend less today than is really the case — which is what they did for the Camp bill — or assume that a tax cut today will be followed by a spending cut or tax increase tomorrow. Economists describe such a move as “making counterfactual assumptions”; the rest of us call it “making stuff up.”
Again IOW, they’re going to enshrine in law a faith-based assessment mechanism guaranteed in advance to justify both their rosy predictions and their brutal get-tough-on-the-poor cuts to human services along with their go-easy-on-corporations cuts to everything from the SEC to the FDA. They will now be able to point to government-authorized conclusions that everything is fine even as it collapses around ordinary folk not rich enough to protect themselves from it.
The Republicans’ interest in dynamic scoring is not the result of a million-economist march on Washington; it comes from political factions convinced that tax cuts are the panacea for all economic ills. They will use dynamic scoring to justify a tax cut that, under conventional scorekeeping, loses revenue.
When revenues do in fact decline and deficits rise, those same proponents will push for steep cuts in government insurance or investment programs, because they will claim that the models demand it. That is what lies inside the Trojan horse of dynamic scoring.
A win-win. When their tax cuts make the economy worse, their scoring model will demand more tax cuts as a fix.
Priority #2 is likewise financially related: further weakening if not killing outright Dodd-Frank, once again allowing banks to rig their own scams.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform law was supposed to curb speculation in swaps. But as The Journal has reported, hedge funds are increasingly using swaps to wager on whether weak firms will live or die. RadioShack, the troubled consumer electronics retailer, is one of several prominent examples. In December, RadioShack’s total debt came to about $1.4 billion, but swaps outstanding on the performance of the debt totaled $23.5 billion. Similarly, J.C. Penney, the ailing department store chain, had total debt of some $8.7 billion, but swaps outstanding on the debt totaled $19.3 billion.
Those gaps suggest excessive speculation, though it is hard, if not impossible, to gauge the precise exposure of funds to big losses. What is known is that a hedge fund that is betting on a company’s default has an incentive to push it over the edge. Conversely, a fund that is betting a troubled company will not default has an incentive to keep it afloat, at least long enough to avoid a big payout. Either way, the company becomes a pawn in a financial game.
Speculative activity is likely to increase. Last month, Congress repealed an anti-speculation provision of Dodd-Frank that would have prevented federally insured banks from conducting several types of swap transactions. In addition, the Federal Reserve recently gave the banks two extra years to meet a Dodd-Frank provision requiring them to sell their investments in private equity funds and hedge funds.
And when the 2 yrs are up, the Fed will extend the deadline for 2 more yrs and then 2 more after that and so on and so on.
The Democrat minority will, of course, “compromise” by unconditionally surrendering when their corporate sponsors tell them to.
And so it goes.
]]>This will not be easy.
We seem to have at least one thing going for us: the elite are scared.
Even as Democratic insiders laud Hillary Clinton as a solid choice should she become the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, many also worry that skepticism from some party activists could weaken her by the time the campaign is underway.
They’re concerned about relentless pressure from the party’s liberal wing, which wants Clinton to be more outspoken against corporate greed and more passionate about tackling income inequality.
No kidding. Given that the party’s liberal wing is twice the size of its conservative wing – and potentially a great deal larger than that – this is a serious problem for them. Obama’s betrayal of his liberal roots and his two stealth campaigns running as a liberal and then governing as a moderate-to-Bushie conservative have made the Dem base skittish and skeptical. We’re not going to be so easy to fool this time around, and whatever DLC-approved candidate they pick runs the risk of disaffecting the very voters they need to win. If we stay home, refusing to work for their puppet or even vote for him/her, they lose no matter how much money they’ve collected. It’s that simple and they know it.
They want to believe that David Axelrod’s famous dictum that the party can ignore its base because “where else are they gonna go?” is still true despite the fact that it very clearly got shot to hell by the off-year elections when we answered that question resoundingly: “We don’t go anywhere. We stay home.” The 8-yr Dem strategy of running on a platform of not being Republicans has finally been proved to be the chimera it always was. Ignore your base and it will ignore you.
The problem with the Dem leadership is that they’re so infected with conservative thinking that their immediate response to the drubbing they took was that “our message isn’t getting out there.” The Chair of the Democrat National Committee, Debby Wasserman Schultz, described it in an interview as a “disconnect between voters who support our agenda…and then aren’t going to the polls….” There is no “disconnect”, Debbie. “Disaffection” is very different from “disconnection”. The latter is a lack of understanding or misunderstanding. The former is understanding all too well.
But don’t worry. Debbie’s going to appoint a committee to take “a deep dive” into what went wrong. Why aren’t the people who support the Dem agenda actually coming out to vote for it? It’s a puzzlement.
Only it’s not. It’s real simple. For 20 yrs the Democrats have been lying about their “agenda”. They’ve been telling us they support the liberal agenda during campaigns and then abandoning it to support a corporate agenda when they win. Republicans love to be lied to; they practically demand it. But Democrats, you poor, clueless twit, don’t. We don’t see the value to voting for a party that claims to be on our side and then can’t bend over far enough or fast enough kowtowing to their opposition. Liberals don’t like that, and they don’t trust politicians – or political parties – that do that. We don’t care to work our asses off getting some pissant Dem elected who’s going to immediately turn around and vote with the Pubs against our interests. Go figure.
The DNC doesn’t get that yet. though they’re starting to be afraid of the backlash that’s building in their cloistered halls. Thus the fear of Hillary becoming a poster child for the Dem base’s hatred of the corporate ass-kissers who are the Dem elite and a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the party. After all, Hill’s been a Third Way booster since the 80’s and a main mover in pushing the whole party in that direction. Her candidacy could be very risky. It could make the split in the party – between the liberal base and the ruling cadre of corporate conservatives – obvious and perhaps permanent.
So the first thing we clearly need to do is become the force that scuttles Hillary not because she can’t win but because she’s a corporate toady and we refuse to have yet another one running our party.
UPDATE (4.30PM): From Roy Edroso, writing about Mario Cuomo’s legacy:
Cuomo…continued to stand up for the old-fashioned lunch-bucket Democratic values that pretty much everyone else in his Party was abandoning for third-way, neoliberal bullshit. He wasn’t perfect, but he was one of a very few prominent, powerful liberals in the 80s and 90s who hung tough and held the line against the rapid sell-out of the poor and middle-class to the rich. Look at Jacob Weisberg marveling in 1994, “Nor has Cuomo gotten into the spirit of deregulation… Nor has he tried to get rid of rent control…” Weisberg meant these as criticisms, but after decades of asset-stripping by armies of Lehrmans, I see them as badges of honor. Oh, here’s more Weisberg ’94:
Cuomo has also often indulged, as in a speech he gave at Harvard in 1992, in old-fashioned liberal cant. Talking about the culture of dependency, he said, was blaming the victim. Welfare, he insisted, was a small part of the federal budget. Reform, he said, was “not the solution.” He has excused the rise in single-parent families by calling it “nothing new.” This is truly inexcusable.
Cuomo’s POV was certainly passing out of favor, and Weisberg’s into it; very shortly thereafter, Clinton and Gingrich would make pauper-punching a bi-partisan sport, and their heirs are still trying to make poor people’s lives more miserable and peddling marriage-makes-you-rich hokum. I’d say Cuomo will be missed, but I think we’ve been missing him a long time already.
Him and Teddy and all the other FDR Dems who refused to bend a knee to the prevailing wind of “neoliberal bullshit”. I’ve often wondered if Mario didn’t run because he knew the upstart leadership of his own party would never support him or what he wanted to do.
]]>The tone is one of finger-wagging accusation and “you oughta be ashamed of ourself” sadness that “we” let down “our” vets by cutting the medical benefits they were supposed to get. Sounds like AL is doing its patriotic duty toward our fighting men, doesn’t it? But here’s the rub: “we” didn’t cut those services. The people who did – Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress – were universally supported, financially and otherwise, by the same American Legion that is now tut-tutting at us for allowing it to happen.
As every poll showed whenever the subject came up, “we” were against the cuts Republicans kept making and “for” taking care of our soldiers, but the pols the Legion supported were more concerned about cutting the budget so they could cut taxes for their wealthy donors. Yet there’s not an inkling of the Legion’s own responsibility for the situation in their ad. Of course.
And it’s not just them. Charles Koch, who has spent decades bankrolling virulently anti-crime conservatives, now says the justice system has gone too far.
[T]he Corpus Christi case…prompted Charles Koch to study the justice system – both federal and state – wondering whether it has been over-criminalized with too many laws and too many prosecutions of nonviolent offenders….
His conclusion: Yes, it has.
Ten years ago, he began giving money to support efforts by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to help train defense lawyers and reverse what some see as a national trend to get tough on crime, which has resulted in the tripling of the incarceration rate since the 1980s and has stripped the poor of their rights to a legal defense.
He’s going to give more to that effort, he said.
Well whoopee for him. Without so much as a hint of acknowledgement that he has been a prime force and main funder for the last 40 yrs of the very people who have created this sad situation, now he wants the credit for trying to roll it back by throwing a few pennies at it. And bear in mind, he is still funding the same anti-crime conservatives who are trying to make it a crime to be poor, black, an immigrant or a dissenter from the Koch Philosophy, thus ensuring the current travesty of justice will continue rolling over his enemies.
What does he expect? Am I supposed to tug my forelock and shout “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”
I’d rather not.
This attitude seems to be growing in conservative/corporate circles. BP, for instance, destroyed the ecosystem of the entire Gulf, doing billions of $ in damages, and then bragged about throwing a few $million at the cleanup (primarily so they could score more govt leases, which they did), all the while insisting that the spill wasn’t their fault.
What is one to say about people who think supporting the illusion of rational behavior is the same as behaving rationally?
]]>This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.
Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival
It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950′s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then – and is now – a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.
The truth is somewhat different.
In America, we are reminded, the idea of a Christmas celebration didn’t really take hold until commercial interests recognized its potential and began to sell it like corn flakes.
The growth of Santa as the predominant icon of Christmas in much of the world grew out of the efforts of retail wizards such as John Wanamaker and Rowland Hussey Macy, founders of the modern department store. Much like the early church fathers, Wanamaker and Macy systematically laid claim to a Christmas of their own making in the 19th century.By this point, said Russell W. Belk, a sociologist and anthropologist at York University in Toronto, Christmas had already been through several incarnations — Christians in the United States had initially resisted Christmas because it was seen as tied to the Catholic calendar, but waves of European immigrants brought traditions of Christmas celebrations with them. Still, the idea of giving gifts to relatives was not the norm, especially among English immigrants, where Christmas gifts were primarily seen as acts of benevolence toward servants and slaves.
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Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa’s ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.
“Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas,” said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, “they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa’s outfits came from Coca-Cola’s paintings.”
It doesn’t actually. “Santa Claus” is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas – Sinterklaas – and the color red was always associated with the Greek St Nicholas who is the source of the icon. (More about him later.) Coke’s artists merely appropriated an image already made famous by Thomas Nast in the 1870′s and 80′s, an action that is fairly symbolic of how the holiday actually developed.
Myth #2: That Christmas is primarily a Christian holiday
The trappings of Christmas are almost entirely pagan in origin. Christmas trees, the lights on both trees and homes, wreaths, caroling, Santa Claus, the exchange of gifts – all of it was born in pagan solstice festivals beginning, as far as we can tell, long before Christ’s time. In the context of the solstice, it all makes perfect sense. In a Christian context, they simply don’t belong. What does Christ, a product of the Judean desert, have to do with pine trees, after all? Nothing.
- Christmas trees – Probably born in Germany or the Nordic countries, the ritual symbolism of the solstice evergreen was just that: it was ever green. Unlike the deciduous trees that dominated the forests of northern Europe whose leaves died and fell away as winter began, fir trees remained green all year round. They were the perfect representation in pagan societies for the persistence of life and the fertility of the earth on which those societies depended. Druids (the real ones, not the pale, bogus artifices we know today) worshipped trees, evergreens in particular, because they believed they were the earthly incarnations of spirits and/or gods. Evergreens were believed either to be or to be the homes of spirits who controlled the sun and had the power to bring it back and renew the earth for another year. The custom of bringing a tree inside, almost certainly German, probably began as a form of pagan tree-worship.
- Lights – As the days shortened and the sun threatened to disappear, the long nights became a source of real fear, not just because folk believed it might vanish but because they believed that evil spirits lurked in the dark, and the longer the nights were, the more chance there was that these monsters would wreak havoc on their villages. The solution, of course, was a Festival of Light held, naturally, on the one day of the year that had the least of it. There were torch parades and candles were kept burning all night. When the trees came inside, so did the candles, and by the Victorian era the candles had become attached to the branches of the tree.
- Wreaths – Common to many cultures, wreaths were either worn, as in Rome, or displayed as signs of either special favor or protection from evil. Long before trees were brought into the house, wreaths were attached to doorposts, connecting the magic of the evergreen to individual homes.
- Caroling – Noise has long been believed by many peoples to scare away evil spirits. In China they beat drums and gongs, in Europe they sang. The origin of this particular custom (called “wassailing” in Britain) is lost to history but it isn’t unreasonable to assume that it was a natural addition to all the other anti-evil charms employed by our ancestors. So is dancing, of course, so it isn’t surprising that the two were combined. In fact, the original meaning of the word was “circle dance” and was most likely an integral part of the midwinter ritual. We don’t do the dancing part much any more, and it’s too bad.
- Santa Claus – Unlike the rest of our Christmas traditions, Santa Claus does have some slight connection to Christianity. Born to wealthy and devout Christian parents in Patara, then a province of Greece, St Nicholas is supposed to have taken the words of Christ to heart and given away the whole of his large inheritance to relieve the suffering of the poor and the sick. Though he was never ordained, his reputation for piety was such that he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Persecuted and imprisoned by the Emperor Diocletian, he returned to Myra after his release and died there on December 6, 343. For many years after that, the anniversary of his death was celebrated as “St Nicholas Day”.Co-incidence? Sort of. The fact that he died in December only a few days before Saturnalia (the Roman midwinter festival) connected him quite naturally to what became Christmas when the Catholic Church appropriated midwinter festivals for a celebration of the birth of Christ. After centuries of trying unsuccessfully to stamp out these primarily pagan rituals, the geniuses in the Church came up with a brilliant idea: if they couldn’t be stopped, they could certainly be swallowed up – assimilated by the Church and given a Catholic context. This was to prove a valuable and almost universally successful tactic in the centuries to come.St Nicholas Day melded rather naturally into the solstice festivals and it wasn’t long before St Nick and Christmas were inseparable. In many parts of Europe, Dec 6 is still celebrated as both.It should be noted that the St Nick we know is neither Greek nor terribly Christian. He’s Dutch. Sort of….
- The giving of gifts, stockings over the fireplace, and coming down the chimney– Both of these customs arose not in Europe but – are you ready for this? – here. In America. In New York, in fact.
After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride the colony’s nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, influential patriot and antiquarian, who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that year he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not a saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the origin of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas; that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving’s work was regarded as the “first notable work of imagination in the New World.”The New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810. John Pintard commissioned artist Alexander Anderson to create the first American image of Nicholas for the occasion. Nicholas was shown in a gift-giving role with children’s treats in stockings hanging at a fireplace. The accompanying poem ends, “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.”
So Washington Irving invented the Santa Claus we know more or less out of whole cloth, relying on legends (as he often did) and embellishing until the original story was barely recognizable. Irving entirely ignored the religious connotation of the title “saint” and any overt connection to religion, let alone to Christ. His St Nick was already 95% secular, a cultural symbol closer to solstice celebrations than Christian ones.
The total secularization of St Nicholas, morphing him into the Santa Claus we know, was accomplished by only two men: Clement Moore (probably) and Thomas Nast. Moore is generally credited with writing A Visit from St Nicholas(“‘Twas the night before Christmas/and all through the house….” – you know it) for his children in 1822. It forever identified St Nick with the roly-poly, “jolly old elf” of Irving’s story and pretty much divorced him from any possible religious significance. Fifty years later, what Moore had done with words, Nast did with pictures. His cartoons of Santa Claus formed our visual image of the old guy once and for all. Following Irving and Moore, Nast’s Santa is no more a religious figure than, say, Uncle Sam.
Of all the traditions we associate with Christmas, only three are overtly religious: the Nativity Scene, the angel on top of the tree, and going to church. Many Christian churches have the former and most Christians do the latter on Christmas even if they never go the rest of the year. By my count, that makes Christmas roughly 87% secular whether Bill O’Reilly likes it or not.
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