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The Democrats/Republicans are weak and the Republicans/Democrats are nuts

A friend of mine who's a professor and chair of a college's political science department posted from his Android phone to Facebook on Friday, July 29th, perhaps in a moment of exasperation: "The Democrats are weak and the Republicans are nuts." Possibly, truer words have never been communicated by a droid since C-3PO said, "Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1."

The last time the Republicans were weak and the Democrats were nuts as completely as is the reverse-case now was, perhaps, 1876, when the Democrats got an end to Reconstruction so they could be more effectively racist in the South, and the Republicans agreed to it in a backroom deal so they could get their presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, who pledged to serve only one term (and did so)--and who couldn't even win the popular vote--to hold the White House briefly with his dearest wife, Lemonade Lucy. ("Water flowed like wine" in her White House.) Hayes promised "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government" in the South and returned the nation to the gold standard.

President Hayes once noted: "The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth." Which is of course what all good Republicans think. Oh, wait.... 

(Image: "Rutherford B-3PO." Click to enlarge.)

Casualties of debt ceiling drama; restoring 1961 tax rates on the wealthy; a look across the pond; rancor

Michael Gerson and Mark Shields converse with Jim Lehrer about the debt ceiling politics unfolding in Washington. 

Shield's summary of the Republican position, one

'Well, if you put a penny of revenue, a penny of revenue, if you even suggest that a registered nurse in an emergency room and a New York firefighter shouldn't pay taxes twice the rate of a hedge fund manager, we leave. We're not going to be a party to that.' That's -- that's basically where they were.
......
This whole experience, Jim, of this deficit and debt ceiling has so diminished everybody involved in it. I saw embarrassment, total professional and personal embarrassment, on the part of members of Congress this week that they were a part of this. And that diminishes confidence and trust and optimism about the government's ability to do anything. That's one of the casualties of this.

Think Progress notes:

Institute for Policy Studies’ (IPS) Sam Pizzigati... cites an IPS paper from last spring to make the argument that if corporations and households making more than $1 million paid the same rates as they did in 1961, our debt would virtually disappear in a decade:

Some numbers — from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring — can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been. If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year. In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.

As ThinkProgress has previously reported, the richest Americans are paying their lowest taxesin a generation. Additionally, Center for American Progress experts Michael Linden, Seth Hanlon, and Jordan Eizenga have shown that the United States is actually very low-tax compared to other developed countries.

There's some evidence that the coalition government's austerity measures in the UK aren't helping the economy there: UK GDP grew by a mere 0.2% over the last nine months. Some may argue that's because the full effects of the austerity measures haven't kicked in yet. Others may point out that President Obama's stimulus package has done little better for the US. Still others may then point out that the stimulus package was about 22% tax cuts, actually, not direct stimulus. Some might complain that the tax cuts weren't sufficiently aimed at corporations or too strongly geared towards the President's commitment to fulfill his campaign pledge to cut taxes for the middle class. Others might note that almost none of the stimulus was directed towards a massive new works (jobs) program. Yet others might then point out that it's hard to imagine what those jobs would be. Is it realistic to have out of work Americans doing the hammer, nails, and shovel sort of work the WPA used in the 1940s, since today's severe infrastructure needs--everything from roads and bridges to internet access and energy supply and distribution improvement--are comparatively technical? Some might then argue that the WPA didn't help the economy; that employment and the economy improved because the US switched toward war-related production. Others then note that war-related production is government-sponsored job creation: the government is the buyer, paying with taxpayer or borrowed money, and offering incentives to businesses to switch over to war-related production.

Yet others would say all of this is less important than the wealth disparity problem in America.

But others, like Michael Gerson (above), might note that dysfunctionality in Washington makes action on wealth gaps, including the racial one, or pretty much anything else, unlikely.

The discussions and back-and-forth can go on and on.

Mr. Shields got the first word in this post, so Mr. Gerson can have the last: 

In normal times, a worsening social problem like the wealth gap [between whites and blacks] might unite creative liberals and compassionate conservatives in an unlikely policy alliance. Meetings would take place at the New America Foundation. Bipartisan legislation would be introduced. It is a Washington I can remember — but now seems impossibly distant.

What's in a marriage? (Alain de Botton on our high expectations for modern marriage)

The new ideal of marriage emerging in the mid-1700s

proposed that married people should henceforth not only tolerate one another for the sake of children, extraordinarily they should also take pains to deeply love and desire one another at the same time.

via www.bbc.co.uk

The commentator, Alain de Botton, continues about the 1700's new bourgeois vision of marriage, that it arose in connection with changing notions of work, is largely still with us today, and

is clearly not an illusion. There are of course marriages that perfectly fuse together the three golden strands of fulfilment - romantic, erotic and familial. We cannot say, as cynics are sometimes tempted, that happy marriage is a myth. It is infinitely more tantalising than this. It is a possibility - just a very rare one. There is no metaphysical reason why marriage should not honour our hopes - the odds are just powerfully stacked against us.

Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born UK resident, a writer and documentarian. His works include his documentary, Status Anxiety (2004) and his non-fiction best-seller, How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997).

For a limited time, you can hear Botton's above linked-to written essay here on BBC Radio 4.

An undemocratic recovery -- the cost of a gentry liberal political base?

The gentry liberalism that has triumphed in the Obama era differs radically from its New Deal forbearers.... [T]he New Deal was forged by a New York that was at the time a leader in economic growth, infrastructure development and social democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, small entrepreneurs and skilled craftsmen, office workers and the unskilled flocked to New York. Today those same populations are deserting the Obama bastions in huge numbers for places, notably Texas, that embrace a very different political philosophy.

Unlike the urban-centered Obama, Roosevelt also focused heavily on the nation’s less developed regions. Indeed, the Hudson Valley gentleman farmer had among his stated goals “to make the country in every way as desirable as city life…” The New Deal great hydro-electric plants, for example, literally brought light to large areas that had barely emerged from semi-feudalism, particularly in the South.... Roosevelt’s policies expanded the Democratic Party’s sway from cities to many rural areas.... [S]ometimes bipartisan enthusiasm sparked a surplus of unwise credits to boost homeownership, but at least the party embraced the lifestyle aspirations of Americans, as opposed to seeking to transform them to an urbanist model.

These approaches must be changed if the Administration and their allies want to create the basis for, as they often claim, a long-term progressive era. Here again the New Deal model could be helpful.... To be effective, and worth it to the public, a new WPA should concentrate on such things as the expansion of ports, roads, electrical transmission lines and other critical elements needed to revive American industry.

Joel Kotkin's article is interesting. By gentry liberals he means urbanites. If I am reading him correctly, he cites New York's infrastructure development in the past as a good thing, but then argues against high-speed rail investment, noting

[t]he Administration’s...dogged emphasis on expensive programs like high-speed rail [that] reveal a cultural mindset that rejects the fundamental aspirations of a vast majority of Americans to own their homes in low-density neighborhoods.

However, I have always thought of high-speed rail as infrastructure accommodating low-density neighborhoods! Kotkin keenly observes that the US, like Britain, is beset with core cities "surrounded by a large underclass and a fading middle class;" but, the those core cities have golden inner cores (e.g., Central London, Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn, etc.) with great amenities and heavy cost of living, and to which travel, every workday, very far-flung workers who are economically quite far beneath the economic top 2% (i.e., make less than c. $225,000). They suffer through very long commutes to work.

Consider that workers in New York City now have the longest average commute time in the nation--worse than those in LA or Atlanta. But, at least mass transit--the NYC subways, the Long Island Rail Road, MetroNorth, and Amtrak--though not high-speed, is nonetheless infrastructure that benefits those commuters from low-density neighborhoods, giving them opportunities to get some work done on the train or even nap (presuming the commuter gets a seat!), and providing savings for the commuter on fuel expenses and automobile wear and tear--not to mention the fact that mass transit is far less negatively impactful on the environment than masses of commuters driving alone to work.

It may be that Kotkin sees only those in rural areas as being the "large underclass and...fading middle class" population of which he writes. But, I think of the "large underclass and...fading middle class" population as also being those in suburban areas.

It seems Kotkin just thinks those suburbanites are too tied to city-oriented (urbanist) economic sectors (e.g., financial services and service-related tech) that have already benefited from taxpayer largess, and thus are not deserving of further largess in the form of government-backed high-speed rail, even though high-speed rail is infrastructure, and infrastructure investment is what he's arguing for. If so, then, yes, I largely agree.

He continues (my emphases):

Most future growth would come from the private sector, but one has to ask what kind of industries should be fostered.... Perhaps policies should be redirected instead towards bolstering those “basic industries” – notably agriculture, energy and manufacturing – that since the beginning of the Administration have received, at best, mixed signals.

As Intel co-founder Andy Grove has noted, we cannot rebuild our job base just with sexy start-ups; we need to also “scale up” our emerging companies, the very thing that made Silicon Valley and its counterparts across the country such prodigious opportunity regions in the past.

Kitkon notes other sectors that more than urban ones deserve infrastructure-related investment:

[O]il and natural gas industries need, with improved regulation, to expand at a time of growing global demand and rising prices. Farmers, notably in the West, have been greeted with pronouncements...about the end of dam-building, a critical source of water, at a time of generally rising demand and prices.

Manufacturers, particularly smaller ones, have been hard-pressed by regulatory reform when their competitors elsewhere are dialing into the developing country market.

(Images: first, via NewGeography and by Tony the Misfit: a photo of a detail of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C.; second: map via The Wall Street Journal online; click either to enlarge.)

The Year of Mervyn Peake. And "The History of Titus Groan" begins on Radio 4

How to do justice to the short life and abundant creative work of Mervyn Peake, writer, illustrator, artist, and poet? It is his centenary year. (His career was cut short by early onset of Parkinson's Disease; he died in 1968.) Tolkien could almost be dismissed as but a popularizer of Norse and Germanic tales that he merely impressively reworked into stilted Edwardian English--a caboose behind the Wagnerian engine, too--compared to the originality of Peake's fantasy, his three Gormenghast books, chronicling in lush English the life and times of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast.*

They are a fantasy work--of which there were to be more than three books, and which Peake thought of as the Titus books, not the Gormenghast books--in which magical spells aren't needed because the magic's in the telling, the humanity, the threads of Dickensian grotesquery--characters (like Steerpike, Swelter, Chief Chef of Gormenghast, and Gertrude, Countess of Groan) and incidents improbable but somehow just shy of impossible--woven throughout and beaded with flecks of subtle humor and fantastic imagery, such as Fuchia's attic, the Tower of Flints, and Gormenghast itself.

Peake was much more than his Gormenghast creation. He was the child of missionaries and born in China; he was a war artist, a portrait painter, a poet, a father and husband, a proud resident of Sark island.

Tribute is paid to Peake in The Guardian by British writers, Michael Moorcock, A.L. Kennedy, Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL, and China Miéville (who I am a great admirer of).

The BBC produced a television adaptation of Gormenghast in 2000, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike, the tale's anti-hero; it was broadcast by PBS in the US, and PBS's Gormenghast webpages has a good bio and bibliography page, "Who Was Mervyn Peake?" 

There is an exhibition of Peake illustrations at the British Library through mid-September 2011, and an exhibition at the Christ Beetles gallery through mid-August 2011.

Some centenary year items via MervynPeake.org and the Peake blog:

The first part of the new six-part radio adaptation by Brian Sibley, The History of Titus Groan, is available on BBC Radio 4.... More here, on Jeremy Mortimer's blog.

Fergus Fleming in the Literary Review.

The Guardian has a collection of blogs. Join the debate online.

David Blackburn writes in The Spectator.

The Irish Times.

A Sark-related comment by Matthew Bell in The Independent.

Under a Canvas Sky in Zaman.

*To be fair to Tolkien, he was, as was Peake, more than a writer of fantastical fiction: he was a philologist and scholar in his own right; and a Peake-Tolkein comparison is a forced one, as Peake was not inspired by philology or mythology at all. And it might be noted that Tolkein was less an imitator of Wagner as an opponent of Wagner's interpretations of the Germanic myths. But Tolkien looms large, and comparisons are made frequently to him relative to nearly any writer of nearly anything reviewers place in the increasingly unhelpfully broad category of "fantasy"--a term so nearly useless as to include the sea of "Tol-clone" imitations of Tolkien--of which Peake certainly was not--but also the writing of China Miéville and Michael Moorcock or even H. P. Lovecraft.

Ancient site of Olympia was buried by Tsunamis, researcher finds

Olympia, site of the famous Temple of Zeus and original venue of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, was presumably destroyed by repeated tsunamis that travelled considerable distances inland, and not by earthquake and river floods as has been assumed to date. Evidence in support of this new theory on the virtual disappearance of the ancient cult site on the Peloponnesian peninsula comes from Professor Dr Andreas Vött of the Institute of Geography of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. Vött investigated the site as part of a project in which he and his team are studying the paleotsunamis that occurred along the coastlines of the eastern Mediterranean over the last 11,000 years. According to his account, the geomorphological and sedimentological findings in the area document that Olympia and its environs were destroyed by tsunami impact. The site of Olympia, rediscovered only some 250 years ago, was buried under a massive layer of sand and other deposits that is up to 8 meters deep.

via historyoftheancientworld.com

No, We Can’t? Or Won’t?

Everybody knows that President Obama tried to stimulate the economy with a huge increase in government spending, and that it didn’t work. But what everyone knows is wrong.

Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: some of us warned from the beginning that tax cuts would be ineffective and that the proposed spending was woefully inadequate. And so it proved.

It’s also worth noting that in another area where government could make a big difference — help for troubled homeowners — almost nothing has been done. The Obama administration’s program of mortgage relief has gone nowhere: of $46 billion allotted to help families stay in their homes, less than $2 billion has actually been spent.

via www.nytimes.com

Phone Hacking Scandal Widens: News International Targeted Gordon Brown, BSkyB Bid Delayed (LIVE UPDATES)

The phone hacking scandal widened on Monday, as new reports emerged that papers beyond the News of the World were also involved in criminal behavior. In addition, Rupert Murdoch's bid to take over BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster, looked to be in serious peril.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Buffett: GOP Threatening To 'Blow Your Brains Out' Over Debt Ceiling

Republicans are playing a dangerous game by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, according to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

"We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush Administration," Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress is "trying to use the incentive now that we're going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt worthiness over time."

If Congress fails to raise the borrowing limit of the federal government by August 2, the date when the U.S. will reach the limit of its borrowing abilities, it will likely begin defaulting on its loans.

Buffett, who according to the Washington Post has helped raise money for Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton in the past, has been highly critical of the actions of the Republican-controlled Congress. In May, Buffett stated at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder's meeting that if the Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling, it would constitute "the most asinine act" in the nation's history, reports Reuters.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

July 11, 2002 - Manhattan Community Board 5's call for marriage equality in NY

WHEREAS, The issue of marriage equality for same sex couples has come to the forefront recently in New York City as well as in the national consciousness; and

WHEREAS, Community Board Five has supported marriage equality for same-sex couples per a resolution passed on July 11, 2002; and

via www.cb5.org

Hmmm...Nine years ago today.

And in the same 2005 meeting as the resolution reiterating the call for marriage equality, CB5 recommended denial of a parade permit to the Ancient Order of Hibernians because of their discriminatory policies for their ("the") St. Patrick's Day parade.