The Mindless Minority

Tonight after the Farewell Address of the occupied White House, several of us commenting at Eschaton were trying to figure out how to perform a little cleansing ceremony, and we came up with the suggestion that using a few herbs that cleansed the air and maybe a little beating of drums to get out the bad spirits might work well. I am no authority. But next needs to come real cleansing, of the offices that should serve the public in the executive branch.

Sadly, watching the right wing scrambling about trying to keep the bad spirits in our government, I fear they will be convincing the weak minded as usual, that the ideology of Eat the Poor is the way to prosperity, even though that has been disproved with hideous effect over the past eight to ten years of its sway. Ideologically, wingers insist that their wishes are promoting a climate friendly to business. While businesses fail right and left, they promote themselves as pro-business. The ideology of making hash of programs that serve the general populace is supposed to give us prosperity. It hasn't.

Claiming to be working toward the public interest, the right wing works against it.

Last night I spent some of my time watching the proceedings of the Congressional oversight panel for the bailout supervision. Yes, there is one, appointed two weeks before Treasury Secretary Paulson barreled through the commitments he'd made Congress and threw money at bankers without regard for consumer interests the administration has decided are just a nuisance. Headed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, the panel is now trying to make sure that regulations are in place to prevent further violations of representatives' intent, and of the public interest.

Imagine my horror to hear Rep. Hensarling, a member of the panel, declaring that it is generally accepted that government measures (FDR's New Deal) were the cause of the depression. Of course, this is the present posture of wingers who are desperately trying to keep President Obama from succeeding, and the public interest from getting a toehold. Dr. Paul Krugman has made this point well.

Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.

That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn’t all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

Obviously this is a larger subject than I am going to be able to explicate today, even with Nobel Prize winner help. What I really am pointing to is the attempted undermining of the public good that is being pushed so hard by the right.

For the past eight years the right wing has had an occupied White House threatening a veto to any least measure to effect the public good. That 'enforcer' effect will be gone after the 20th. After tonight, there's no more executive commanding daily attention to the lies of the right. They're on their own, and they've spent twelve years dominating proceedings but now can do that only with obstructions. That they have set to - as if nothing had ever touched their consciousness, that the public, even their revered business community, has seen through their lies - is amazing. Sadly, it is true.

There is no end to the stupidity of the right wing and they haven't taken over just the remnants of the Republic Party. They dominate in business writing/producing communities. This morning's report on Yahoo about worldwide stock market falls had the following lines:

Following one of the biggest consumption binges by any one country in modern history, fueled by rising homes values and easy credit, the U.S. was now reeling from its worst-ever consumer recession, said Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd.

"The American consumer is — as we say in the U.S. — toast, finished, done," Roach said Thursday in Hong Kong. "The consumer is going down for the count here, and there's more to come."

It's you consumers who did it. Just like the mantra that the 'government forced banks to lend to pore fokes', by blaming us consumers, the wingers have impressed their remaining loyalists with yet another piece of nonsense: the indebted are now at fault for the recession foisted on the world. The need for regulations, a need that was desperately felt during the Depression and again in the previous buildup to disaster, is ignored. Jobs and salaries diminishing while the mindless dominated, that just disappeared. Soaring business executive salaries and perks that gave them incentive to seek their own interests at the expense of their own businesses, oh, piddle. Financial institutions that passed off 'toxic' bundles as great investments to the world at large, just a fraternity hazing ritual. It's you and your consuming that made the mess.

The damage this element will do is beyond reason. It's that bullheaded determination just leaving the occupied White House, a determination that sees nothing, has learned nothing, and is content with immeasurable disaster, as long as it keeps to its power and sway.

Cleansing ceremonies are called for. Cleansing our high offices should begin at once.

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Kudos to Rep. Barney Frank, who stood up and replied to Rep. David Dreier's holding forth on how Ronald Reagan disapproved Congress's spending during his WH years, that "he certainly exercised great restraint" because he had a Republic Senate and could have vetoed any of those bills.