http://www.thenation.com/article/155222/barbarians-gate
Barbarians at the Gate
By Eric Alterman
The Nation: October 6, 2010
It's no secret that American conservatism has run itself off the rails just
as it is poised to come to (legislative) power. Merely to list or categorize
the self- evidently idiotic contentions one routinely hears from its most
esteemed representatives could fill this magazine. And we all know about the
role that talk-radio, cable television and the many-tentacled Murdoch empire
have played in spreading hate and purposeful misinformation. What has
frequently gone unremarked, however, is the mainstream media's role in
empowering this bizarre barrage of BS.
Let's look at a few examples. On October 3 Washington Post pundit "dean"
David Broder attempted to apply a fresh coat of varnish to the reputation of
House Republican minority leader John Boehner. In decided contrast to
Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "reflexive partisanship," which "voters are
understandably sick of," Broder insists that "Boehner should be taken
seriously," for-like a Boy Scout-he is "honest," "polite" and a "serious
legislator." These virtues are apparently embodied by a man who, when asked
on Chris Wallace's Sunday morning show whether he was aware that "a number
of top economists say what we need is more economic stimulus," replied,
"Well, I don't need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists. All I
need to do is listen to the American people, because they've been asking the
question now for eighteen months, Where are the jobs?" In response to
Democrats' willingness to use comedian Stephen Colbert to publicize the
plight of farmworkers-almost entirely ignored by Congress despite rampant
child labor exploitation and other violations of basic human dignity-the
sage legislator replied that he found it odd that Democrats have "time to
bring a comedian to Washington, DC, but they don't have time to eliminate
the uncertainty by extending all of the current tax rates." Just try and
make sense out of that sentence, Dean Broder. I dare you.
Of course, Boehner at least occupies an official position of influence in
our government, however moronically he may choose to manifest it. When he
says something of significance, it's fair enough to call it news. Newt
Gingrich has no such position and continues to mouth off in a manner that
makes Boehner sound like Maimonides. I never tire of pointing out that
Gingrich was the most-booked guest on NBC's Meet the Press during the first
year of Barack Obama's presidency, despite being the only ex-House speaker
ever to be invited and despite a grand total of zero appearances by actually
existing Speaker Pelosi, and despite both houses of Congress being
controlled by the opposing party. And yet one would think that a private
citizen who professes to believe that America requires a set of laws to
prevent the imposition of Sharia law on its citizens, and who also claims to
detect a danger from "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants
to impose its will on the rest of us," should be carted off to a rubber
rather than a green room. Gingrich was recently reinvited to tout the work
of Dinesh D'Souza, who is president of something called The King's College,
which "teaches a compelling worldview rooted in the Bible," and who recently
published a cover story in Forbes magazine in which he argued (wait for it)
that, yes, "the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo
tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who
raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial
ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of
his dreams in his son." As the conservative writer Heather Mac Donald
observed, the fact that this "fever dream of paranoia and irrationality"
would appear in, much less on the cover of, a putatively respectable
business magazine is "all too representative of the hysteria that now runs
through a significant portion of the right-wing media establishment." And
yet according to the man on Meet the Press, it offers "the most accurate,
predictive model for [President Obama's] behavior."
Such talk is not merely crazy but also deeply dangerous. If what these guys
say is true, what measures would not be justified in rescuing our country
from this terrifying threat? It also inadvertently demonstrates the
limitations of the MSM in playing their old-fashioned role as the
gatekeepers of sanity, at the very least. The New York Times ran a story on
the D'Souza article in which Forbes was given a chance to defend itself
against the claim of factual errors. The problem, however, is not with the
putative "facts" D'Souza uses but the poisonous context in which they are
placed; something the rules of objectivity do not allow a reporter to state
in a forthright manner. A similar limitation was on display a few days later
when the Newspaper of Record published an obituary for the right-wing
Jew-baiter and friend to Holocaust denial Joseph Sobran. The obit observed
that the "witty, thoughtful" Sobran merely "took a skeptical line on the
Holocaust." Skeptical? Seriously? I'm sorry, but for this to appear in the
Times, of all places, is inexplicably weird. In 2002 Sobran gave a speech to
the pro-Nazi Institute of Historical Review, modestly admitting that he was
"incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen." He had also argued
that "Jews have been brilliantly subversive of the cultures of the natives
they have lived amongst.... [Jews have supported] communism, socialism,
liberalism, and secularism; the agenda of major Jewish groups is the
de-Christianization of America.... Overwhelming Jewish support for legal
abortion illustrates that many Jews hate Christian morality more than they
revere Jewish tradition itself."
Holocaust denial, I'll admit, is not exactly relevant to the current
right-wing agenda being whitewashed in the MSM. But it should serve as a
warning of how bad things can get without a vigorous, self-confident press
to demand accountability from demagogues who prey on the ignorance of the
uninformed.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1
Hey, Small Spender
By Paul Krugman
Here's the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over
a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this
proves that government spending can't create jobs.
Here's what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a
big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem
with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal
expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.
Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr.
Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn't kicked in
yet, so that can't be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under
way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No.
Where's all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.
To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance
and Medicaid, has risen - because, in case you haven't noticed, there has
been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of
help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial
institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its
money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in
mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just
hasn't taken place.
Consider, in particular, one fact that might surprise you: The total number
of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr.
Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines
at the state and local level - most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers.
Total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January
2009.
Now, direct employment isn't a perfect measure of the government's size,
since the government also employs workers indirectly when it buys goods and
services from the private sector. And government purchases of goods and
services have gone up. But adjusted for inflation, they rose only 3 percent
over the last two years - a pace slower than that of the previous two years,
and slower than the economy's normal rate of growth.
So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never
happened. This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that
Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009; why didn't that translate
into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never
happened, why does everyone think it did?
Part of the answer to the first question is that the stimulus wasn't
actually all that big compared with the size of the economy. Furthermore, it
wasn't mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600
billion cost of the Recovery Act in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent came
from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local
governments. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending.
And federal aid to state and local governments wasn't enough to make up for
plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump. So states and
cities, which can't run large deficits, were forced into drastic spending
cuts, more than offsetting the modest increase at the federal level.
The answer to the second question - why there's a widespread perception that
government spending has surged, when it hasn't - is that there has been a
disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of
fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been
effective in part because the Obama administration hasn't offered an
effective reply.
Actually, the administration has had a messaging problem on economic policy
ever since its first months in office, when it went for a stimulus plan that
many of us warned from the beginning was inadequate given the size of the
economy's troubles. You can argue that Mr. Obama got all he could - that a
larger plan wouldn't have made it through Congress (which is questionable),
and that an inadequate stimulus was much better than none at all (which it
was). But that's not an argument the administration ever made. Instead, it
has insisted throughout that its original plan was just right, a position
that has become increasingly awkward as the recovery stalls.
And a side consequence of this awkward positioning is that officials can't
easily offer the obvious rebuttal to claims that big spending failed to fix
the economy - namely, that thanks to the inadequate scale of the Recovery
Act, big spending never happened in the first place.
But if they won't say it, I will: if job-creating government spending has
failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it's not because it
doesn't work; it's because it wasn't tried.
No comments:
Post a Comment