Sometimes facing reality means a lack of hope. Anyone who was optimistic about Europe in the 1930's was clearly blind.
Sometimes all you can do is protect yourself from the forthcoming insanity, like stop talking about converting your savings to euros and actually do it.
Did you see the Lakers game last night? Just a beat down. Grey skies are going to clear up!
Seriously, though. This is harshing my mellow. Not because you make me worry about America, but because you make me worry about you.
I cannot offer a point-by-point rebuttal to the phantasmagoria on bitchphd's page. So let me say this instead. If you are worried aboutthe culture, do we not live in an unprecidented age of define-your-own lifestyles? A big issue of the past year was gay marriage. Gay Marriage! That's increadible! This could never have been raised in 1985! I don't want to diminish the real harm done to homosexuals by discrimination, but can there be any doubt which way the arrow of culture is pointing?
Worried old people will be pauperized? Again, can anyone look at the current US budget and say "gosh, old people get the shaft here." We're the richest country on earth! Could a 30% decrease in SS benefits really turn us into Lithuania?
Perhaps the middle class is being squeezed. Hard as it is to evaluate "class" designations in a country with enormous immigration from poor countries, I think it's probably true that globalization and technology are pushing down wage growth in the middle. But again, we're talking about (say it with me) the richest, freest, country in the history of civilization! I hear the concerns about the two-income trap, about health care costs, about increasing bankrupcies. I do! Let's not overlook the fact that we are fantastically rich by all comparative and historical standards. (and by we, I mean the median household we
Come on, Ogged! It's almost springtime!
We're the richest country in the world, but that doesn't mean the people who live here are rich--and look at what's happening to the dollar. If/when Europe decides to start buying oil with euros instead of dollars, that's going to cause some serious problems, no? If people who earn good money start having to pay for their own health costs, that's going to increase the instability of the middle class. Already, having children is the biggest risk for poverty, and increasingly (see the LA Times link in my post) the middle class--even those making good money, like the former dot-commers--is seeing a lot more risk and uncertainty than we did in, say, the 70s (despite the recession then). Fucking around with social security is going to make that worse, too. You may be making good money, but if you lose your job, your savings won't hold you forever, as many are finding out. And what happens then?
Uhm, can someone give me the financial plan for pessimists?
We're the richest country in the world, but that doesn't mean the people who live here are rich
No, but it does mean that despite high levels of immigration by poor people, the median household income is $40,000, and has been growing YoY for the past decade.
Medical inflation: a legitimate worry! More bankrupcies/instability: likewise! Neither, in my view, represent cause for concern about the health of the American experiment. Just wait. When Hillary wins in 2008, it will be morning in American again.
Medians and averages don't count for much when the system is as top-heavy as it's gotten, I'd argue.
Financial plan? Well, I like Maynard's idea of converting one's savings into euros. Of course, one has to *have* savings to do that. My plan is to pay off my fucking debt, make my husband get a job, and start socking away as much as possible in things other than the U.S. stock market. Short version: bet against the dollar.
'Course, I'll probably never have enough money to put this plan into effect. See you in the bread line.
Medians and averages don't count for much when the system is as top-heavy as it's gotten, I'd argue.
I will not touch that one.
Long the Euro is good, Fontana. You could also stockpile food, gasoline, guns, and rare numismatic coins.
baa,
Thanks for the attempt, but unfortunately it ain't cutting it for me.
I'd give up something to get a sense of financial security. I seriously remember when you could NOT get fired from my company unless you broke some magic rules like drinking booze on the job or punching someone.
I remember when they used to conduct a yearly survey of employees to find out how they could be an even BETTER company to work for.
Imagine that.
Bush uses our insecurity about terrorism, but I don't even feel those. I'm insecure about my financial future. I'm squeezed from both ends with college costs for my kids and homecare costs for my parents. I'd love to quit my job but can't, and yet it may not matter because my job may get outsourced to China at any time.
My biggest worry is that we are teetering on the edge of a truly massive explosion in healthcare costs, such that many employers will cease offering health insurance as a benefit, particularly for non-salaried employees. If you couple that with the bursting of the housing bubble that so many have predicted, you would see middle class net worth absolutely devastated.
I'm certainly not pulling for it, what with having a mortgage and two kids, but it would mean the GOP would be out of power for a generation or more, fairly or not.
apostropher, did you see this?
During his confirmation hearings, incoming Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Secretary Michael Leavitt called for renewing the national debate over the future of the healthcare system and spoke of "the transformational need of detaching healthcare and employment." I've also seen something somewhere, unfortunately I can't find the link right now, about getting rid of the business deduction for employee health insurance costs. When/if that happens, no business owner in his right mind will provide health insurance.
Not to seem a wayward companion, but there is some sense to insurance portability, i.e., decoupling insurance from employment. At a minimum, it makes job movement easier. For example, if you get your insurance through your guild, you don't have to include the risks in a change in insurance in making employment decisions. You are much more likely to stay in your profession than with a specific institution that gives you insurance as compensation. IIRC, HillaryCare supported insurance portability. (How's that for leftist support?)
That's not to say that I'd trust this group not to, willing or not, fuck this up completely. By now, I think the dsquared theses take their place right after all the bits of quantum mechanics as the most tested hypotheses in history.
Tripp,
I won't say a word against tight labor markets: I miss 1995 as much as the next guy. That said, I think there needs to be frank recognition of the realtionship between mandated job security and unemployemnt. If companies can't fire, they are less likely to hire.
Health care costs: big issue. Predictably, perhaps, I think it's an error to focus on the issue of who pays. Middle class people will be paying most of their own tab whether the structure is national health care, employer provided, or off-the-rack at costco. The question is how to structure the system to increase effectiveness and reduce costs. Nothing increasing at 4X the rate of inflation is going to be cheap.
But all this is a side point to the "universe of gloom" comments that started us off. There's a big difference between sayign "man, are people ever squeezed by health care" and saying "behold, a new dark ages sweeping the land." We're most of us here blogging at work. The dark ages weren't like that.
First, I'd like to say to baa, the right-wing booger face, that it's really good to have smart and patient dissent and I'm sure I speak for everyone when I thank you for hanging here.
I'm surprised too at the turn the comments took (although baa started with the economic analysis). I understand the Bushies aren't helping, but the deep structural problems people are describing are beyond partisan, and, as is the case with, for example, expectations for families, gender roles, and careers, beyond politics.
And it's really very hard, as the apostropher notes, to hide economic disaster behind misleading rhetoric. So I'm hopeful that economic problems are more amenable to diagnosis and solution. Now, it might take rioting mobs tearing down the gates on gated communities, but at least I think that people might actually do that.
B's original post was about rising fascism, and that worries me far more, not because the threat is necessarily more immediate or more likely, but because it's a threat of something that can take hold of a country for a very long time, with disastrous consequences. And I complain about it because the current administration--hell, just a few people in this administration--could do a lot to slow our slide into becoming an oppressive country. They don't have to insist on torture, on the unchecked power of the executive, and on detention without trial, but they do. And plenty of people go along. That makes me plenty gloomy.
Portability is fine; the problem is that individuals and families cannot foot the bill as individuals or families. That's why taxes exist in the first place: it is cheaper and more efficient to spread the cost across a large population than it is for every individual to pay their own way. Moreover, the real problem of shifting risk from large corporations/organizations/the govt. to individuals, is that again, a large organization can absorb costs much better than an individual can: where I'll be wiped out if I get, say, cancer, my employer won't.
No one is saying it's the dark ages. There are plenty of examples of modern states that, through extremely shitty financial management, have tanked their economies and destroyed the middle class.
I think signs of incipient fascism, much like signs of impending moral collapse, tend to resistant to consensus. Chomsky, we know, thinks the US is a phony democracy *now* and was so under Clinton. Many others think society has already entered a state of irrecoverable moral collapse. I have my opinions on how close to truth both these camps are, of course. The interesting question, it seems to me, is what will count as evidence. A few years back, Ari Fleisher's almost comments on the Bill Maher flap were touted as the first sign of fascism. I think that's ludicrous. And I fear this type of overheated response has characterized much criticism of the administration. Maybe it has made people me too ready to dismiss good criticism as well.
By contrast, what counts as torture, and what rights terrorist combatants should have seem to me immensely difficult questions. Getting these questions wrong would be very bad. But I don't see the path to fascism from this route.
On the economic arguments, I think baa's bar of measure is mistaken. I don't just mean "it's not the dark ages," but the whole idea in general that, well, things aren't nearly as bad as they could be. Imagine that you're rooting for your HS football team, not a single player who is shorter than 6'4" or weighs under 210. Against the rest of the league, featuring average high school kids, your team has a 4-4 season. Hey, that's not so bad. But geez, shouldn't you have, you know, done much better? But it's not so bad.... That's basically how I see this economic argument.
My plan is to pay off my fucking debt, make my husband get a job, and start socking away as much as possible in things other than the U.S. stock market. Short version: bet against the dollar.
The problem with shorting US investments is that global financial markets move together even more closely than they used to. As long as US consumption powers the world production system, when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
That's why the transition to a multi-power global economy is so fraught with peril. A couple wrong moves and we lose our current engine, but it will take a long time for policies in Asia (and Europe to a lesser extent) to catch up with a new role that balances consumption and export. Those will be painful years, especially for a country sliding out of the status of world consumer, and especially for middle and working class people.
A shorter cw: read brad delong.
cw, yes I know this (and I should read Brad DeLong more often), but what are you gonna do? Stick it under the mattress?
Bph:
If you're really worried about inlation, the traditional hedge has been gold, which, yes, you should put under your bed. Or, if you are really, really sure about inflation, go to your local bank, borrow as much as you can, and invest in hard assets. Then sit back and relax while inflation pays the debt off for you.
As to healthcare insurance, part of the problem is that the market is so huge (15% of the GDP, last time I was interested in it) and so poorly understood (even experts have a hard time telling you anything about quality of care) that any claimed "solution" appears more speculative than most are comfortable with. But whether you pay for insurance through your employer (by not receiving more cash) or directly shouldn't effect the risk you are asked to bear for a given premium. To the extent that it does now, it's b/c as an individual you don't have bargaining power or audit power; if you get through a guild or state created pooling agency, that's less of a problem.
I wonder if the term "fascist," as commonly used, is too ill defined. I certainly don't think I could define it as an ideology. Instead people tend to use "fascism" as a reference to some series of characteristics associated with historical fascists. So, curtailment of individual civil rights by the state, state propaganda, rampant patriotism, militarism, loyalty oaths, claims about "traitorous" insular groups betraying the country by their opposition to the state, and hand-in-hand cooperation with business all get tagged as "fascist" when practiced by the Right. When practiced by the Left (except for the last), it's called communism. Both seem to be aesthetic terms more than anything else these days.
Furthermore, a lot of the above list of abuses get used by every government, because they're effective tactics to create consensus. So I'd think the real question is something closer to "how far over the line is this deployment of [X]?" And b/c, as ogged pointed out, at some point we'll all trade liberty for security, begs the question of how well any given Administration is making those trades. To my mind, the Administration is well over the line, both because the "abuses" are severe (here I think of the Padilla assertion) and the risk to our security is so minimal. If you are substantially more risk averse than I am, if you think radical Islam represents a serious existential threat to the US (greater than the Sovs, for example), then all of the above seems pretty legitimate. I think that level of risk-averseness is crazy, but that might be cultural as much as anything else. I think exurbs and gated communities are creepy responses to unlikely fears. Lots and lots of others disagree.
Tim, they might disagree, but they would be wrong. Gated communities are extremely creepy.
baa, let me echo Ogged: I appreciate your patience with us alarmist libs. You are an excellent reminder of the sobriety that can exist across the aisle.
if you think radical Islam represents a serious existential threat to the US (greater than the Sovs, for example) [SCMT's hypothetical, not yours]
See, this is where I jump off the wagon. I just can't get exercised about radical Islam. Yeah, they pulled off one big impressive attack, but then so did McVeigh, and I don't spend my time worrying about psycho white militia guys either. They just aren't a threat to me here, except in the vaguest sense. My school board poses a more direct threat.
I grew up in the 80s, when our "enemy" contained enough nukes to crack the planet in half and a delivery system to boot. Now I'm supposed to be mortally worried about bin Laden or Zarqawi? Puh-leeze. Homocidal punks they may be, but homocidal punks is all they are. So, baa, when you say "Iraq was a problem with few good options, of which invasion was the best," I think: cracker please (sorry for moving my response from that thread to this, but I'm deep into my cups and too drunk lazy to get it in the right discussion). We should be so lucky as to have problems like pre-invasion Iraq. They weren't any kind of military threat, as we proved decisively in 1991. I would have given them Kuwait because really, who the fuck cares who runs Kuwait, Inc.? God knows I don't and if Americans were honest about it, neither do any of us that aren't from Kuwait. Quick, no googling: who's the head of state in Kuwait? Brunei? UAE? See what I mean?
Was Saddam a nasty fellow? Well sure. But so what? The world is full of nasty fellows in charge of governments. When I do the back-of-the-envelope math, I can't see how invasion is even in the top 10 of decent options. As threats go, Pakistan so thoroughly outclasses Iraq that it's embarrassing.
The only real argument I can see that holds water is that we couldn't afford to maintain the no-fly zones forever. Okay, fine. But I think they were a waste of time anyhow. Call it callousness or realpolitik or what have you, but the political freedom of Iraqis just ain't my fight any more than the political freedom of Uzbekis or Nepalis or East Timorese. More power to 'em, but I ain't sending a silver dollar for their struggle.
Iraq was going to bust out into warfare whenever Saddam went, no matter the cause. The only relevant question as whether we wanted to be standing in the middle of it when it happened. As far as I can see, that's about the easiest question possible. No. You want to be far, far away from it, and you sure as hell don't want to claim it as your own.
No possible result, including Paul Wolfowitz's fondest fantasy outcome, makes it worth the cost. None.
Anyhow, trying to move awkwardly back to the crux of this thread: no, we're not teetering on the edge of containment camps, if that's how you define fascism. I understand eye-rolling as far as that goes. However, if the economic legs are cut from underneath the middle class, do I think they'd acquiesce to, and even cheer, proto-fascism? Oh yes, I do.
I think that if you're worried you're going to be hauled off to a death camp, or that the United States is functionally over, it's helpful to keep in mind relevant episodes in American history: is the present moment as bad as, say, the Wilson administration, when white people lynching black people was accepted normal behavior in large parts of the US and you could get arrested for making antiwar statements in public? As bad as when slavery and genocide were regular occurrences here? Somehow things got better. Painfully, but it happened, because people kept fighting and reminding others of the difference between the rhetoric of the country's founding and the reality.
The bar's set pretty low, yes. I cannot stand the current administration and things could be a lot better; it sucks to be even semi-poor here these days-- you don't get any second chances at all. But the key is staying in the zone between complacency and hopelessness, and I worry that in attempting to shock others out of their complacency liberals are busy scaring themselves into a catatonic fear that makes it impossible for them to do anything. Using metaphors other than 1930s Germany might a step to show the way forward.
bitch, yeah, no good options. all that gold and borrowing shit depends way too much on knowing the direction and timing of markets. no one has a good track record with timing events like these.
I believe in investing emerging markets just because they have to be a huge part of the world's future in any hopeful scenario. but there's a good chance a few well-placed people will capture most of the returns while lots of us lose our shirts.
Well, admittedly the problem with the word "fascism" is that everyone immediately thinks "Hitler." I don't think people are going to be herded into camps (though arrested without recourse to counsel, apparently), and Hitler wasn't the only fascist ever. Mussolini, Pinochet, arguably Peron--what I was getting at was more that we're fostering instability and anxiety and war while corporatizing the state. The whole demonizing-intellectuals thing worries me a lot, too.
So, though the Hitler thing is obviously the Achilles' heel of using the f-word, it doesn't do, I don't think, to not point out what's happening and where it could lead. One thing 1930s Germany *should* have taught us is that believing that a civilized society couldn't possibly go down that road is clearly naive.
A lot of these kinds of "how bad are things/can things get?" discussions focus more on economics and foreign policy, but at least as important is the legal context in which we live.
I just came across this article by Bruce Ackerman on the stakes involved in Supreme Court appointments. I'm not sure that the pessimistic scenario of the last few paragraphs is all that likely to happen, but it's worth a read.