Dana Blankenhorn

Night of the Concern Troll

You can fool all of the people some of the time.

That's one-third of a famous quote, from Abraham Lincoln. Cynics depend on that to maintain power. After all, in a democracy you only have to fool most of the people once in a while, at the time of an election, to rule.

At a transformative time -- and this is such a time -- that trick doesn't work. But it does work most of the time, which is why concern trolls continue to trot it out. Even now.

"I'm not a racist. I'm an adult. But most people aren't," they'll say. "Most people are easily manipulated. They're fools. Want proof? They listen to me."

Want further proof? Just look at the polls.

In the face of such "overwhelming evidence" it is easy for idealists to get discouraged. The worst thing that can happen, however, is that you accept the trolls' premise. I'm an adult, you're an adult, but those people over there are children, easily led, just looking to follow.

That way lies madness.

That is the cold cynicism at the heart of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It has a long history in our culture. It was central to H.L. Mencken's derision of middle class voters as the "booboisie."

Now I think Mencken was one of our greatest writers, but his own politics were fascist. His sensibility, the idea that there is a "better" class of person and that the majority is a mob, sounds great in the salon, but if you really believe that blatherskite you should turn in your American citizenship.

Each new Thesis rises based on reaction to what came before. The cynicism of the Nixon Era, whose sunset we now see before us, was a reaction to the idealism, the Capra-corn if you will, of the Roosevelt Era. Which itself was a reaction against Menckenism.

Sudden Death

I suffered some panic attacks recently, and I  now know why.

Russell Shaw (right), my friend of many years, died suddenly on Friday. He was 60.

Sudden death is a shock to loved ones at any age.

For the young it most often comes from a bullet or a car crash. A few athletes die suddenly from undiagnosed heart conditions, and these cause the most shock of all because it's not supposed to happen that way.

Hate, Fear and Hope

The great progress of my generation is that our hates and fears have become our political divide.

That wasn't the case before the 1960s. Before the 1960s we were united in our hates and fears. Hatred of black people was endemic to the Democratic Party's mission for generations. The response by generations of Republicans was to speak to those fears while doing as little as possible about them.

The idea that this is progress came to me while watching Barack Obama in Philadelphia today. It was the kind of transcendent talk I was hoping for. It even shocked some Republicans for its bluntness, because he acknowledged the legitimate grievances of people like Geraldine Ferraro, even as he urged us all to get over them.

But he also went beyond this. In talking about Jeremiah Wright (above), and about the Trinity Church he attends, he brought home the religious nature of our hates and fears as well. Then he turned the mirror on himself:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

In giving his own confession, Obama challenged us all to testify, and in that testimony to make the changes in our hearts which are a precondition to real racial progress.

It's Not That They're Clueless

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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My blog friend Oliver Willis calls those in charge of our financial house clueless.

That's an easy mistake to make.

In fact, it's in the nature of our economic system that you go right up to the line of legality in order to maximize profit. Anyone who doesn't do that is an economic loser, either in the short run or the long run.

You want to go right up to the line, peer down over the edge, and maybe move your toes back a bit. That's what your lawyers are there for, to move your toes back a bit.

This is fine so long as the law is reasonable. If the law is reasonable and cops are on the beat, walking right up to the line of legality and staring down into the canyon is both legitimate and good business. It's what makes markets efficient.

The problem in this case is the law was made unreasonable, and the cops chose to look the other way.

All the problems Bear Stearns caused were through the creation of new, "unregulated" markets. An unregulated market is a market that's looking for scandal. Because there is no reasonable line you can walk right up to, it's easy as heck to become Wile  E. Coyote in such a market -- everything is fine so long as you don't look down.

The defaults on sub-prime mortgages last year were when we started to look down.

A Grieving Process

Something interesting is going on in the Democratic primary which everyone is missing. (There is hope4survivors you know.)

While the media natters about how nasty this is getting, Clinton supporters themselves reveal a deeper truth.

Whether it's in their anger at being outnumbered, or their attempts to bargain away from the inevitable, whether it's a denial of their own reality or self-flagellating depression, what becomes obvious is we're seeing a grieving process at work.

Usually the candidate goes through this process for us, and delivers the campaign's death blow in a seppuku-like speech. The Edwards campaign went like that. One day you're out there, and the next you're not – it's a car crash way to go.

As a longtime Democrat I've become an expert on campaign grief, since I've gone through it so often. I can only remember supporting one winner in my entire life, Bill Clinton, and I can only remember being really happy about it once, in 1992.

Everything else has come to grief.

With Al Gore I went through all the stages long before the election. With Howard Dean I withdrew into a shell and never really “came out” for Kerry until election night, when I watched his loss roll in at a hotel ballroom with a cash bar. I avoided newspapers for days after Dukakis' loss. The size of Mondale's defeat left me stunned.

I see what's happening with the Clinton people because I know from grieving. The arithmetic of a nomination fight is inevitable. There's a cancer eating away at the prospective Hillary Clinton Presidency. Numbers. She “won” Ohio and Texas, but her gains from that were wiped out by Wyoming and Mississippi. Now the drift toward Obama has renewed itself.

The “gotchas” which the Clintonites see as his “bad week,” the Rezko trial and the Preacher Wright flap, have merely reminded people that she has financial skeletons and that Obama is, in fact, a Christian. (You can't hammer on him about the evils of his Church of Christ pastor and call him a Muslim at the same time.)

 

A Bigger Crime Than Iraq

With very little fanfare, a bearded bureaucrat about my age recently committed a bigger crime than our entry into the Iraq War.

Ben Bernanke, whose title is Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is committing half your country's capital -- $400 billion -- against securities  he knows are bogus, home mortgages that should never have been made, collateral instruments that should never have been created.  He compounded this crime yesterday by explicitly bailing out Bear Stearns, the investment bank which more than any other created this Big Shitpile.

The excuse, given even by liberals like Paul Krugman, was that Bear is "too big to fail."

Bullshit.

The Magic Word for 2008

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Production.

Say the magic word and the debate, as well as the choices, of 2008 come into sharp focus.

The only way to get out of our current economic problems is through production of new goods. The only way to launch the War Against Oil is through production of new types of energy.

The two points are directly related. The key to production at a profit lies in reducing the energy costs of production. And the energy costs of distribution.

Speaking of which, a focus on production is how you address questions regarding the Internet. Our Internet infrastructure is in sorry shape. It needs a serious upgrade. These are the canals or roads of our time, and we need to treat Internet access just as seriously as our forefathers did those routes to market.

Production also puts many issues into sharp focus because of how the two parties have proposed to boost it.

Republicans want tax cuts. They want "incentives" for companies to boost production of oil and gas, of coal, and of Internet capacity. These have been at the heart of their economic program for years.

Democrats want competition. A Democratic program for production would focus on increasing the amount of competition in all markets.

A floor price for energy would be a good start. Lock in the current gains, tax away oil and gas whose price comes in under the floor (it won't once the floor is in place) and you provide plenty of incentives for both the production of new energy and increasing the efficiency of industrial production.

Competition is also the answer to our Internet problems. Demand that current networks, both wired and wireless, open up to new competition, as was done in the 1990s. Problem solved, thanks to Moore's Law, because it is only by violating Moore's Law and squeezing more money out of the same services that the current duopolists have stayed afloat.

Production is the answer to not only our labor problems, but (in part) to our crime problems. Production creates lots of relatively low-skill jobs. High demand for low-skill jobs will increase wages for those jobs, and create incentives for producers to take a chance on the 1% of us now behind bars. If you enable people with minimum education the chance to earn a fair living your crime problem goes down.  Create enough jobs and we can even hire Mexicans, in Mexico.  So much for immigration problems.

Production is an economic policy, it's environmental policy, it's energy policy, it's trade policy. By creating new ways to make things, which are more energy efficient, we create exports, both in the goods themselves and the machines used to create the efficiency.

Race

Northern racism is different from southern racism.

Northern racism is economic in origin. Southern racism is cultural in origin.

Not that this matters to the victim. Racism is racism.

I grew up in Massapequa, on Long Island. Many of my neighbors were refugees from what would become  Geraldine Ferraro's Congressional district.

In my day Massapequa was all-white. I never thought about this until I met a new friend in junior high school.

Too Casual About It

Tinfoil hat time!

I first got this feeling last week, with Bush's dance before his endorsement of John McCain. It was like he didn't care what anyone thought, like democracy (small d) was meaningless. (Picture from Sushimoo.)

Is anyone else out there worried that the Bush Administration is acting a little too casual and flip about its continuing efforts to undermine the Constitution?

To the complete disregarding of Congress' oversight and its treaty-making role, we now have the sudden resignation of Adm. William Fallon, who was thought to be among the few voices in the military trying to tamp-down talk of an attack on Iran.

Every week or so, it seems, I read new blog posts about buying "taser cannon" to control demonstrators, about the growing politicization of our military, even a deliberate refusal to abide by Supreme Court rulings which go against them.

It sometimes seems as if the Bush people aren't even trying anymore to hide their disgust with the popular will.

It's true that this may just be total incompetence, and it's also true that such dark thoughts as these are one mark of a generational crisis. Anyone who remembers the late 1960s remembers fearing for democracy, as their fathers feared for it in the early 1930s, and their fathers feared for it in the 1890s, and their fathers feared for it in the 1850s.

Fear for democracy's fate is a necessary precondition for major democratic change.

But still...

The Manchurian Presidency

The Manchurian Candidate is about a Communist plot to install a dupe, played by James Gregory (left in the photo at right), as President. He claims to be fiercely anti-communist, but he's really controlled by the communists through his wife, played by Angela Lansbury. (Sorry if I spoiled it. Watch it for Frank Sinatra next time -- one of his best roles.)

Ever since the movie returned to vogue politicians have been warning that their opponents are secretly working for the other side. The claim is made this cycle about Barack Obama. That is, Barack Hussein Obama.

Of course, this deliberately misses the plot. The James Gregory candidate is a perfect conservative, a neo-McCarthyite. In 2008 parlance, he's McCain.

But what if the Manchurian Candidate has already been elected? What if, in fact, he's been in office for over 7 years?