You'll Be Sorry

It seems that someone is staying up past his bedtime again and is vewy, vewy, cwoss. Little Master Douthat hitches up his pants, sticks out his fleshy, quivering lower lip, and lets out a steady, high-pitched whine, because all the other kids are being mean to him. At least, that is what he tells The New York Times his Mummy when he runs home to tattle.

 

Winning an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten.

 Sorry, Ross. Thanks to the cluster of f*uck that was the George W. Bush Administration, the right no longer gets to get up on its high horse when it comes to any behavior whatsoever. No matter how hideously liberals might behave (in reality or in Douthat's imagination), the right did it first and did worse. Remember "We have a mandate," Ross? "Elections have consequences"? We sure do, and we are not about to listen to moral scoldings from the morally and intellectually corrupt.

 

This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well.

 Perhaps it's the way every US politicians encases each speech in a thick, sickly-sweet, viscous coating of Jello God blesses. God bless the American people, God bless the US, God bless our endeavors, blah blah blah. Evidently God hates foreigners because according to the US he routinely blesses our wars as well.  It's very odd that nobody thanks God when he blessed us with Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Ike and Rita, but maybe the drone-blessed Pakistanis are doing that for us while we are cleaning up our mess and burying our dead.

This means the losing coalition must be doomed to wander east of Eden, and liberals have been having a good time with this idea of late. “Those poor, benighted Republicans!” runs the subtext of their postelection commentary. “They can’t read polls! They can’t reach Hispanics! They don’t understand women! They don’t have a team of Silicon Valley sorcerers running their turnout operations!”

 

Actually, they can't, they can't, they can't, and they don't. Pointing out the sad truth is not triumph, it's pointing out the truth. Which is something that many conservatives are doing as well, in the hope that they will come back to power in their lifetimes. Liberals spent months pointing out that the Republicans were fooling themselves but the fools never listened. It's not our fault they're fools, and if some people happen to point and laugh, well, they asked for it didn't they?

 

Back in 2011, the Obama White House earned some mild mockery for its “win the future” slogan. But now that the president has been re-elected, the liberal conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have done just that — that Republicans are now Radio Shack to their Apple store, “The Waltons” to their “Modern Family,” a mediocre Norman Rockwell to their digital-age mosaic.  

Maybe it’s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction — or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance — let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning.

 

You'll be sorry, oh yes you will, liberals. You think you're so cool and hip and modern when you're really just giant poopy-heads and you'll be very, very sorry when your giant poopy-headedness ruins everything for everybody! Poop!

 

Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.  

Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.

You think you're all so smart and nice and friendly but you'll be sorry when all those people you want to help need help! Because Hispanic girls are sluts and have lots of babies and Hispanic boys are stoopid and drop out of school and how can a poor, uneducated Hispanic person get a job? They might end up doing physical labor such as building houses and office buildings or landscaping, or become maids and nannies. And that would be a terrible shock if they degenerated to that point, wouldn't it?
 

Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.

And speaking of sluts, what about single women, who sometimes have babies and therefore chaos and insecurity? Do you want to support them too? Because single mothers never marry and never support themselves and are utterly incapable of taking care of their children, forcing good, goodly married men like Ross Douthat to support them instead! If Douthat wanted to support a bunch of children he would have sex, which he won't, so he doesn't have to!

Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.

You know, I think I'm detecting a theme here: jobs. People need jobs to support themselves and their kids. Jobs lead to all sorts of things like order and self-sufficiency and morality. Perhaps we might think about that and maybe even do something to help Americans find those elusive, necessary things. Or we can shame and persecute them instead, the proudly conservative way.

What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.  

This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.  

But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.

Little Master Douthat is beginning to blubber, with big, soapy spit-bubbles floating out like in a cartoon. Democrats are never people of faith,  never members of a community, never part of a family. The Democratic way is one of dependence, chaos and immorality, because Douthat says so. All virtue belong to Republicans, except maybe that whole helping your fellow man thing that Jesus kept going on about but that doesn't count because the Bible says God helps those who help themselves. Okay, the Bible doesn't actually say that, but Douthat says that in the book he wrote and just happens to have right here for the low, low price of $13.98, which makes it the next best thing.

This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

 

And here is where Douthat depends on the chance that you didn't go to Harvard like him and therefore must never have heard of the New Deal. Nor Social Security and Medicare, which helped older people become self-sufficient and therefore less of a burden on their children, which can only improve family cohesiveness.  Or the GI housing and education bills, which created a large middle class that lived in their own stable neighborhoods.

No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.
 

Boo-hoo, Douthat sobs. Liberals will be sorry they won in the future, when the safety net they fought for is available for the people who need it and power is shared with immigrants, women, and the poor. For when wealthy white males lose power it means civilization is declining, dog and cats are living together, and Ross Douthat might actually have to succeed on his own merits.

God forbid!

Rewards

For political parties and the people who depend on them for a sense of belonging, there will never be a time to challenge, criticize or threaten their leader. From an article at the Huffington Post.

President Barack Obama made a direct, personal appeal to 30,000 of his top campaign activists on Tuesday night, asking them to stay involved in politics and to continue pressuring Republicans during upcoming tax and budget negotiations.

"I'm so proud of what you guys accomplished and I will always be in awe and inspired by what you've done," the president said on the call, which the Huffington Post listened to. "So that's the good news. The bad news is our work can't stop now. Because as we learned in the first term, in some ways an election is just the beginning. It is not the end point. It is a means to a goal and that is to actually help families all across the country."

Note that he does not speak of rewarding them for their hard work; his career successes are their rewards. Leaders believe that followers owe them, they do not owe their followers.

Obama is extremely shrewd and he knows how to manipulate people. His statement that he must cut "entitlements" or the Republicans will do it instead is one example of this and the above statement is another. He wants to keep activists' focus on what Republicans are doing instead of what he is doing.

The president, speaking from a White House phone, cautioned listeners to expect disappointments during his second term. As he has in the past, Obama warned that he was prepared to swallow some bitter pills during the negotiations, including some that would agitate the base.

"As we move forward there are going to be new wrinkles and new frustrations, we can't predict them yet," he said. "We are going to have some triumphs and some successes, but there are going to be some tough days, starting with some of these negotiations around the fiscal cliff that you probably read about, making sure that our tax system is fair. So we are going to need you guys to stay active. We need you to stick with us and stay on this."

What he means, of course, is that he needs the people who helped him get reelected to keep the rest of the Democratic party in line when they are told to accept cuts in the safety net.

But with the sour, he promised some sweets. Obama said that his White House would be more effective at community engagement. He pledged to have his team give more "clear directions and talking points in terms of how we keep mobilizing across the country." He also said that he planned to spend more time outside of the nation's capital during the next four years.

"One of my pledges for a second term is to get out of Washington more often because it is just good for my soul," said Obama.

The "sweets" are not Democratic principles and programs, they are hints that activists will actually be able to see Obama in person. Perhaps even take their picture with him! Who knows? What greater reward for selling out our elderly can one ask?

The president's comments -- the most explicit push yet for campaign volunteers to continue their election-type engagement -- came during a conference call organized by what remains of the Obama campaign. Mitch Stewart, one of Obama's top campaign aides, told listeners they would be outfitted with activist tools for the critical weeks of negotiations ahead. Stewart also revealed that some campaign staffers remained in Obama's Chicago reelection headquarters, crunching data to figure which community activist tools had worked during the election.

"As the president said, our work is not done," said Stewart. "We are never going to stop trying to be better. And there are important lessons to be learned from" the election. "There is an immediate need around the fiscal cliff that people can start to engage on," Stewart said.

Obama's priority is attacking the deficit, a non-existent problem. It is an excuse to cut Democratic programs, which will be immediately used against them by Republicans. After Obama is out of office.

The president's call to the cavalry will be welcome news to Democrats who complained Obama reverted to an inside game during his first term. Equipped with an email list of 13 million activists and more devoted followers, Obama spent much of his first four years trying to move legislation through backroom negotiations.

Of course he did. The activists were no longer necessary so they were shut out of any legislation. Now that they are needed again they are activated again.

Tuesday night's conference call suggests more of a reliance on an outside game approach -- something that the campaign has hinted it would do. In an early November conference call with Democratic-leaning reporters, Jeremy Bird, the president's top grassroots organizer, explained that the campaign was specifically constructed to be "long-lasting."

Here is the game approach they are using:

It will last as long as it is needed and then the backroom negotiations will recommence.

Pride and Prejudice

Eww. There's something nasty crawling on my computer screen. Why, I do believe it is a Megan McArdle column about affirmative action. Thankfully the ACLU is very experienced in combating deeply inbred prejudice and can do the job of dredging this fetid swamp for me.

Put on your hazmat suit, folks. We're going in.

Continuing on yesterday's demographic theme, I've seen a fair number of people--including conservatives--arguing that the GOP needs to tack to the right on immigration in order to bring socially conservative latinos [sic] into their base. Since I'm in favor of more immigration, I would welcome that. But politically, I doubt it's sound strategic advice. As Heather MacDonald points out, Latino voters do not vote 100%, or even primarily, on immigration.

McArdle is linking to a National Review article, which is humiliating in and of itself. National Review gave us such gems as grossly racist and sexist John Derbyshire, vacuous twit and Jesus-humper Kathryn Jean Lopez, and libertarian economics writer Veronique De Rugy, who is wrong even more often than McArdle, if such a thing is humanly possible. The article itself is neither offensive nor ignorant but McArdle's reliance on such venues for intellectual support is very revealing of her point of view, and hopefully, her future employment.

They are heavy users of government services and generally fairly fiscally liberal. It seems more likely than not that the GOP would be supporting a drive to make millions of more Democratic voters, at least in the short term. The GOP strategists may well reckon that they are better off holding the line and letting assimilation bring latinos [sic] over onto their side.

McArdle, like many conservatives, assumes that Latinos will become more conservative as they become farther removed from the immigrant experience, despite the fact that she just said McDonald's article says the opposite. From the latter's article:

A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds — “it favors only the rich”; “Republicans are selfish and out for themselves”; “Republicans don’t represent the average person”– compared with 7 percent who objected to Republican immigration stances.

McArdle's hopes are resting on the assumption that everyone is like herself and wants to pull up the ladder after she has gained advantages.

Nor do I see the case for tacking left on affirmative action. I'm agnostic on affirmative action as a policy matter:it's an unjust way of rectifying a deep injustice.

Then she's not agnostic, is she? This is merely another attempt to seem fair-minded and avoid responsibility for her words, which otherwise might have some troublesome repercussions. Verily, there is nothing more unjust than being just! Affirmative action is only unjust if minorities are not disadvantaged in an historically WASP society. Let's hear from the ACLU:

From the end of the Civil War up until the middle of the 20th century, discrimination in many forms was a pillar of the American way of life. No laws protected racial minorities and women from biased employers, who were free to pass over a black worker in favor of a white worker or to reserve better paying jobs for white men only. Women were even barred by law from various jobs and professions.

I saw a television show from the early sixties (The Fugitive) that showed a man looking at want ads. There were separate columns for jobs for women and jobs for men. Without affirmative action McArdle would be teaching English in high school, or, more likely, teaching in an elementary school until she married, at which time she might be fired since before the Pill it was assumed that married women would become pregnant and quit.

What about now, in what conservatives say is a post-racial society?

Despite setbacks, the legal edifice of discrimination is gone, and the participation of minorities and women in the life of the nation has increased substantially. Nonetheless, stark inequalities remain.  

Women earn 55 to 75 percent of men's salaries.  

Many Latino and Asian workers face bias because they look or sound "foreign," according to a report published by the federal General Accounting Office. Stricter immigration laws have also triggered discrimination by employers, who, presuming that Latinos or Asian Americans are illegal aliens, often refuse to hire them.  

The face of poverty is disproportionately female and nonwhite. For example, 70 percent of black women hold "typically female," low wage jobs.  

The federal Commission on the Cities, convened in 1988, found that today's poor are poorer, and have less chance of escaping poverty, than 20 years ago.  

One third of all African American, and one fourth of all Latino, families live in poverty, compared to one tenth of white families. Native Americans remain the most impoverished minority in North America. Their communities are plagued with disproportionately high rates of unemployment, infant mortality, alcoholism and suicide. 

The unemployment rate for racial minorities is double that of whites.  

One in four African American males is in prison, on parole or on probation more than are in college.  

The ACLU believes that even though no single measure can eradicate discrimination, affirmative action remains a moral imperative and an indispensable strategy for giving those disadvantaged by discrimination a temporary leg up. In addition, the unique diversity of its human resource pool gives our nation enormous potential for developing solutions to all the problems it confronts in education, criminal justice, childcare and affordable housing, to name a few. The key to maximizing that potential is an end to discrimination and fulfillment of the Constitution's promise of freedom and equality, so that all Americans can have a chance to live productively and contribute to society.

My goodness, affirmative action sure is unjust and unnecessary!

McArdle:

And it's far from clear to me that on net it's good for the students who are admitted.

That's because McArdle assumes affirmative action recipients are inferior to white applicants.

ACLU:

Q: Don't affirmative action remedies force firms to employ unqualified workers, or universities to accept incompetent students, simply because they happen to be nonwhite or female?  

A: Absolutely not. Affirmative action has never been about hiring or admitting people solely because of their color or sex, without concern for any other factors. Affirmative action guidelines urge employers to make a sincere effort to find and train qualified people who have historically experienced exclusion from many occupations and professions. Or they urge universities to enhance their recruitment methods in order to find qualified African American, Latino, Native American and Asian American students, who generally have far less access to higher education than whites.  

In addition, employers are asked to drop "qualifications" that are unrelated to a job, but that have had the effect of excluding certain people. Such irrelevant standards include: requiring applicants for manual labor jobs to have high school degrees; experience requirements that largely disqualify women who apply for traditionally male jobs like truck driving, and tests requiring high proficiency in English that screen out people for whom English is a second language. For example, in 1990 some Cambodian immigrants charged that several industrial employers in the vicinity of Lowell, Massachusetts imposed English language based tests and high school diploma requirements for manual labor positions, among other arbitrary standards, to avoid hiring Cambodian applicants. Affirmative action policies that have challenged employers and schools to bring their standards into stricter line with the actual skill requirements of jobs and educational programs have reduced discrimination and made hiring and admissions processes fairer for all.  

Finally, it must be said that the widespread juxtaposition of affirmative action with "unqualified" itself reflects the pervasiveness of racial and sexual stereotypes in our society. Studies have shown that women and people of color, just by virtue of who they are, are automatically assumed to be less competent than white males for any task. This presumption of inferiority is so entrenched that even a woman or person of color who is actually more qualified is often perceived as being less so. Only by increasing diversity in American workplaces and on campuses will such stereotyping die out.

McArdle:

But that's rather beside the point, because it's a policy for a minority-minority country. In a nation where minorities are the majority of students, it's just ethnic quotas. Indeed, that's already somewhat the case; my understanding is that most of the extra spaces that go to black and latino [sic] students are taken from Asians, not whites.
 

McArdle is, as usual, incoherent when she claims affirmative action takes education spots from Asians and gives them to other minorities. Using McArdle's reasoning, without affirmative action high-performing Asians would take spots from whites, since McArdle obviously assumes other minorities are low performers. "My understanding is" is such a convenient phrase for those who don't think.

ACLU:

Q: Isn't affirmative action essentially a quota system?  

A: Not at all. Calling it a "quota system" distorts the reality of both what affirmative action intends and how it actually works. Affirmative action, which simply takes race and sex into account, is in some cases a legal remedy applied to a specific case of discriminatory exclusion, and in others a compensatory opportunity that an institution or employer provides voluntarily and temporarily to members of groups disadvantaged by discrimination.  

When a court orders an affirmative action plan as a legal remedy, it usually does so only after proof that persistent discrimination has resulted in total or near total exclusion of racial minorities or women, and only after other methods of achieving equality have failed.  

For example, in the 1974 case of Morrow v. Crisler, a federal court ordered the Mississippi Highway Patrol to make the hiring ratio of whites to blacks more equal. At the time, African Americans were 36.7 percent of the state population, yet not one black officer served on the Patrol. In 1979, the underrepresentation of Asian Americans on the San Francisco police force prompted a lawsuit that resulted in court ordered goals and timetables for hiring officers who could speak both English and Chinese. In both cases, the courts' decisions came only after the hiring practices were found to be discriminatory, and only after other, voluntary measures for promoting equality had proved ineffective.  

In cases where discrimination has been found to be extreme, the only reasonable way of remedying it is to set numerical goals that can reasonably be met within a prescribed period of time. Such goals, in effect, estimate the circumstance that would most likely prevail were there no discrimination. Seeking to discredit affirmative action, some critics insist on equating these remedial goals with "quotas." That equation is utterly false. The truth is that such goals are flexible, temporary and are remedial instruments of inclusion, while quotas are fixed, intended to be permanent and were used historically to exclude members of some ethnic groups from jobs and education.  

When used as a compensatory opportunity, affirmative action provides broad opportunities to racial minorities and women to make up for disadvantages they have long suffered because of discrimination. Universities and employers are asked to make an extra effort to seek out applicants whom they would not likely find through traditional methods of recruitment. Compensatory affirmative action sometimes means that a qualified candidate from a disadvantaged group is chosen instead of a candidate who is white and/or male.  

Affirmative action is only one method and not a perfect method of fighting a multifaceted, difficult problem. But the ACLU believes that affirmative action is a fair and moral remedy for institutionalized racism and sexism that must be used on an interim basis, where appropriate, if we are serious about achieving an equitable society.

McArdle:

So what should a new Republican politics for a majority-minority nation look like? I'm not sure. But I am fairly sure that future GOP platform will not look like current Democratic politics. And for that matter, neither will the future Democratic policies.

She hopes. But as we all know, McArdle's prognostication powers, not to mention intellectual powers, are a little weak, and conservatives' habit of basing one's political analysis on prejudice and ignorance is one of the reasons why we just elected President Obama, not Mitt Romney.

Always Wrong, Etc.

Shorter Megan McArdle: There are no villains so why regulate the markets?

Money quote:

 Neither markets nor government are perfectible; the best we're going to get is ones that work pretty well most of the time. In 2005, everyone--homebuyers, bankers, regulators, legislators--was making essentially the same mistake. And while it's more comfortable to believe that this was malevolent, the more prosaic truth is probably that sometimes large groups of people get stuff badly wrong. We can't plan our way to a risk free system. The best we can do is a system that fails a little bit better. 
 

Inded. Since we can't eliminate risk, let's eliminate regulations!

Bonus in the comments: Moral hazard does not apply to bankers.




 

Stupidly Evil or Evilly Stupid?

Megan McArdle explains the economy to us.

The other reason you shouldn't expect much in the way of radical new plans [after the election] is that we are now officially out of money. The recession is still grinding down tax revenues, and the bills for long-promised entitlements are coming due. There's no cash in the till for big tax cuts or new spending. And while there might be some shift in emphasis as to how we ultimately resolve our budget crunch, Obama does not have negotiating room to raise it all with a massive tax on Warren Buffett, and Romney is hardly going to get much support for turning Social Security into a free coupon for half-priced beverages at Denny's. The zone of possible agreement is actually pretty small, and either man is going to find himself stuck with a solution that neither he, nor you, will very much like.

You see, there is a till and when it is empty America has run out of money. It's not like we can just "print" more.

McArdle has to be lying; she cannot possibly be ignorant of monetary sovereignty.

Can she?

It's Mine, All Mine!

The 1% will never have enough.

Goldman Sachs has dropped 33 partners since it last disclosed the number of elite bankers at the firm, according to regulatory filings. Being a Goldman partner is one of the most coveted positions on Wall Street, unlocking access to a lucrative compensation scheme on top of the prestige the title holds. The bank's partners own more than 11% of shares between them, valued at more than $6bn (£3.7bn). But as Goldman looks to slash costs, it has cut partners. According to the outgoing chief financial officer, David Viniar, up to 20% of Goldman partners typically leave every two years. High-profile partners including David Heller and Ed Eisler, two co-heads of Goldman's securities business, and Lucas Van Praag, the bank's long-time communications chief, have left the bank. Some partners appear to have chosen to drop their coveted status in favour of retaining their jobs. Since the end of 2010, the bank has cut more than 3,000 employees worldwide as it seeks to reduce annual expenses by $1.9bn.

Gosh, Goldman, Sachs must be hurting. Why else would they cut costs, depriving the 9% of their hard-earned rewards?

Goldman's revenue more than doubled in the previous quarter, to $8.35bn, from $3.59bn during the same period a year ago. It has set aside $10.97bn for compensation this year, up 10% from a year ago. The sum equates to $336,442 per employee, up 15% from $292,836 per worker during the first nine months of 2011.

They will never stop until they have it all.

Fear

Charles Pierce has endorsed Obama for president because he wants to make "sure that Willard Romney is not president." He says that a third party vote is not really an option because third parties are powerless without proportional voting. And he says that he is not voting for Obama out of fear (presumably of Romney), but because he doesn't have a choice.

This is not "fear" talking. This is simply the way things are. It is important to stand against the people and the forces to which Willard Romney owes his political career. It is more important to do that than it is to do anything else. It is more important to do that than to salve my conscience, or make a statement, or dream my wistful dreams of a better and more noble politics. And that is why, today, I will vote for Barack Obama, not because of the man he is not, but because of the man his opponent clearly has become. I will do so without enthusiasm, and without a sliver of doubt in my mind.

Mr. Pierce will not vote his conscience or use his power to force his party to respond to his wants or try to change politics. He will vote for Obama because Romney and his followers are evil and we should avoid the "fearsome" consequences.

On the other hand, Willard Romney owes even more to the Wall Street crowd, and he owes even more to the military, but he also owes everything he is politically to the snake-handlers and the Bible-bangers, to the Creationist morons and to the people who stalk doctors and glue their heads to the clinic doors, to the reckless plutocrats and to the vote-suppressors, to the Randian fantasts and libertarian fakers, to the closeted and not-so-closeted racists who have been so empowered by the party that has given them a home, to the enemies of science and to the enemies of reason, to the devil's bargain of obvious tactical deceit and to the devil's honoraria of dark, anonymous money, and, ultimately, to those shadowy places in himself wherein Romney sold out who he might actually be to his overweening ambition. It is a fearsome bill to come due for any man, let alone one as mendaciously malleable as the Republican nominee. Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.

Bush jokes about weapons of mass destruction and we were shocked. Obama joked about drone bombings and we ignored it. Bush bails out Wall Street and he's serving his masters; Obama does it and he's saving the country. Romney panders to his base and we are supposed to be afraid; Obama insults and ignores his base and we are supposed to be supportive of him anyway. No matter what we do, we lose.

When you lose even when you win, continuing to play the same game is not the right choice. Mr. Pierce is right; this is simply the way things are. And they will never, ever change, because we do not try to change them. We do what we are told, vote for whomever we are told to vote for, ignore whatever we are told to ignore. Because deep down we know that we do not have a choice. Not in the sense that most people think of the situation, in which we must either vote for Romney or Obama. We don't have a choice because we would have to lose so much more before we started to win, and we are afraid.

We would  lose the emotional support of our tribe, our friends and family and ideological allies. They will turn on us with all the means at their disposal and immediately cast us out of the tribe, as loudly and viciously as they can.

We will lose money. The pundits would lose financial support from the party and donations from ideological supporters. We would lose even more jobs, even more services.. We would see more of the burden of supporting society shift onto our middle class shoulders.

We would lose our feeling of superiority and hope for our future. If we acknowledge that were are victims of the rich we admit we are powerless, that we are likely to become more poor and miserable, kill more foreigners, die sooner in a dirty and hot planet that cannot support our lifestyle anymore. We would have to look at our children and think, you might die sooner because of my choices. You might not be able to have a future, a family, a decent life. This is unendurable.

We would lose our sense of security. If we ignore Obama's drone wars we can ignore the fear that one day those drones will be used against us, that they will patrol our cities from the sky recording everything we do just as Obama now patrols our communications, recording everything we say. That the police state, which now ensures no massive protests will ever get off the ground will also ensure that we are never able to fight back in any way. We would watch the iron fist discard the velvet glove, and feel the oppression that only the victims of our success now feel. We would all become Muslims, and our worst nightmare has always been that one day we would be treated as we treated others; the Native Americans,  Blacks, foreigners, the very poor, women, children.

But in the end, after we have fought and lost and fought again, we would win. We are The People and our elite are afraid of us. The only thing keeping them alive is our complicity, our unspoken agreement to let them do whatever they want to us as long as we can go on dreaming and pretending that things will get better even if we do nothing to make them better but fill out a ballot every few years.

We will not fight, however. We are afraid. We are terrified. And we will do anything, no matter how much it hurts us later,  to pretend we are not.

Subverting Democracy

There is an amazing interview with Greg Palast at therealnews.com, in which he describes some of the fanatical Koch family's history of subverting democracy. Palast describes how "Charles Koch personally ordered the pilfering of oil" royalties from Native Americans.

But the most interesting thing was my question: why? He was already a multibillionaire at the time. And so the amount of oil being stolen, you have to understand, is a few hundred bucks from a family from each of these native families, and they get some royalties. I said, why, but one of his executives asked the same question, why. And we know his answer because his executives were wired. And on the tape he said, I want my fair share, and that's all of it. This is the Koch brothers.

Their father was multi-millionaire Fred Koch, one of the founders of the John Birch Society, who became terrified of communism while working in Russia. His fear became fanaticism.

He claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," and that "Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment a vicious race war." ^[19]

And he raised his children to be fanatical as well, in their own way. This world belongs to the strong, the wealthy. They own it, they want it, and they will get what they want, because nothing will stop them. Palast says that the law does not stop them because they have the laws rewritten to benefit themselves. The law belongs to them, it is their weapon and the source of much of their power. It is a terrible mistake to ignore violations of the rule of law that do not affect you. Those violations are warning signs of what is to come, the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

If your friends are violating the law and getting away with it, just imagine how much more your enemies are violating the law and getting away with it. But the two groups must turn a blind eye to each other so they can continue their once-illegal practices, so Obama refuses to prosecute Republicans for their crimes and Republicans pretend that Obama is their ideological enemy.  That giant hue and cry over socialism neatly prevented conservatives from observing that Obama was helping Wall Street over Main Street.

At that point [2010], there was this little group called Citizens United, which somehow hired the most expensive lawyer in the United States, Ted Olsen, to argue their case at the Supreme Court. But no one asked, how did they get Ted Olsen? He didn't volunteer. He was given leave from his day job as general counsel for Koch Industries. So Koch Industries, this was the way that Koch Industries—.


JAY: Which frees the Koch Brothers, in this election, to spend whatever they want.


PALAST: Right. And not only that, but (very important) it decriminalized their prior behavior. The Kochs were always giving money through Koch Industries, but it was criminal. They just decriminalized it. So it's not just what they could do now, but that they got away with their—basically, any attempt at bringing them to justice before.


And I want to give credit to a Republican senator, Fred Thompson—remember Mr. Law and Order, the guy who plays a federal prosecutor on Law and Order? As you'll see in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Fred Thompson wanted to blow the whistle on the Koch brothers, even though he was a Republican, 'cause I guess he took playing the part of a prosecutor kind of seriously, right? And he was told by Trent Lott, then the senator, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, back off, and his investigation was shut down. And why didn't the Democrats, who knew all about it, scream bloody murder?


JAY: Yeah, why?


PALAST: One did, and it's ["dik@n'sini], but they got—he told me the Koch brothers got him. That's when the Keating Five—he was smeared. And he said the Koch brothers were behind him losing his seat, 'cause he wanted to bring up this issue. But Fred Thompson, a Republican, shut it down.


And the Democrats didn't complain, because it was a trade, it was a deal, as you'll read—and true-blue democrats might be upset to hear this, but Bill Clinton apparently had taken not a small amount of change from his billionaires, called the Riady family. They're not American citizens. He met 95 times with them in the White House. That means he met with Chinese billionaires more often than his own daughter, Chelsea. And he—apparently, money went into the Clinton campaign and other favors were done by the Riadys, big favors for the Clintons. That's a real impeachable offense. Forget the stains-on-dresses stuff. This was really impeachable. And Trent Lott told Senator Thompson, we don't do the Riadys and Clinton, and they don't do the Kochs. So it was a billionaire trade. And that's how the game's played.


JAY: Okay. More of this is all in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. And if you want to get more detail on this and much more like it, it's in the book.

People tell themselves that things won't get worse, that they have a president on their side who will hear their concerns and act on them, that they can work from inside to change the establishment. But it's too late. They refused to admit that their leaders were typical authoritarian leaders who believe that they do not have to follow the rules, have no empathy for anyone not like them, and will not stop their endless grab for more power. Power is a verb. It is an action. To truly have power you must use it, see it in action, inflict it on those weaker than you, who are everyone else in your kingdom. You must make others suffer to prove that you have all the power. The suffering of the poor is music to your ears, because it means you are superior, you are rewarded by God, you are one of the chosen ones, you are worthy and everyone else is not.

The poor and middle class let themselves be mistreated, which proves that they are weak and therefore immoral, since immorality is a sign of human weakness and the legacy of Original Sin. Suffering is pleasing to God, encourages morality, is a sign of obedience. It is a very, very good thing, and Koch Industries is here to make sure that good things happen to everyone.

Especially the Koches. They want it all, it belongs to them. The workers and the rivers, the fields and the politicians, the money and the power. They took billions from the 90% and they will take billions from the 9%.

You? You're just in the way.

Read the rest.

Via Naked Capitalism

Mankind Is Counting On You

To paraphrase Tara, "Oh my god I'm cured! I want Obama!"

Found on Twitter via Whedonesque.

The Mediocrity Of The Douthat

Shorter Ross Douthat: Representing your female constituents and responding to their requests is paternalism.

The "Shorter Ross Douthat" formula is far kinder than Douthat deserves. His article is a laundry list of right-wing daily outrages such as the Julia slide show, Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham. Douthat is duly incensed that Obama sinks to pandering to women by reminding them who is the lesser evil.

But given the way Obama’s once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow’s feminists may look back on his campaign’s pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one.
 

 Douthat's link leads to an unsourced Politico article. Recent polls say Obama's numbers have risen among men and, more important, are still higher than Romney's in swing states. Elites are funny people; they are so accustomed to being told that they are leaders and bred for greatness that they tend to underestimate everyone else. Douthat and others (cough:McArdlecough) assume that their readers will either not read the links, not understand the links, or not care if the links contradict their article.

Douthat attempts to manipulate the poor, weak dears by telling them that Obama is oppressing them with his maleness and sexuality and condescending belief that he knows what is best for them.

This paternalistic pitch assumes that liberalism’s traditional edge with women is built mostly on social issues, and that Democrats — especially male Democrats — win when they run as protectors of the sexual revolution, standing between their female constituents and the Todd Akins of the Republican Party.
 

Douthat goes on to say that women have always preferred the Democratic party because they are communal, no doubt because they are motherly and nurturing and cannot deny their biological imperative to cling to a man and bear his children. Men, Douthat says, are individualist--ruggedly so, no doubt--and therefore support Republicans, which contradicts the latest poll information.

An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney’s line about “binders full of women” — in a tight-as-a-tick, economy-centric election, this is the message that Obama is relying on to push him back over the top.  

Perhaps it will actually work. Perhaps the Electoral College will save the president. But I’ll just say this: It’s awfully hard to imagine Hillary Clinton closing out a campaign this way.
 

It's just a coincidence that the Catholic Church has allied itself with the Republican party, and it doesn't matter what Mitt says because he takes both sides of every issue, depending on whom he is talking to.

This isn't the first time Douthat has attempted to use an enemy's strength against him. Predictably, chaos ensued, because Douthat is a mediocre hack who thinks he commands great persuasive powers over the foolish masses. He's unable to use Obama's real weakness against him; namely, that despite the fact that Democrats elected a Democratic president, legislature aiming to limit abortions still sky-rocketed, and that Obama refused to offer Plan B over the counter to girls under 17, the ages most likely to get impregnated by incest.

The right can't attack Obama on his many abuses because they approve of them, and thus they will probably lose to a man that they despise so much they can't even see how much he agrees with them.

Like A Virgin: The Dinesh D'Souza Story

The future Mrs. Dinesh D'Souza holds her honey close to her heart. Or some place.

Photo from BuzzFeed.

 

 

Dinesh D'Souza has outed himself as a world-class wanker, something everyone already knows but D'Souza inexplicably thought he could hide in plain sight. And speaking of hiding things in places one should not, it seems married uber-Christian D'Souza was caught sleeping with a married woman in her late twenties while at a Christian conference.

The young lady in question, Denise Joseph, a right-wing blogger, married Dec. 30, 2011, but by September D'Souza was introducing her as his fiancee.  D'Souza said they met three months ago so it was truly a whirlwind courtship; from first meeting to fiancee in only two months. However a former D'Souza staffer at The King's College, where D'Souza was president until the scandal hit, begged to differ with D'Souza's account. The Daily Beast says that Joseph has been seen at the college since "early 2012":

A former student said people would ask about Joseph, whom he described as “pushy,” but would be met with “weird smiles” and evasive answers. That student said one of his friends, a staffer who worked closely with D’Souza, was tasked with creating an official response to the speculation, which was that she was “a good friend of Dinesh.” The student said staffers he knew believed Joseph made her presence known at the college because she wanted to be more than D’Souza’s “road tail.”

If this account is true Joseph was a newlywed when D'Souza scooped her up. D'Souza told the Evangelical magazine World, which broke the story, that Joseph was his fiance and they had spent the night together in his hotel room at the conference but that "nothing happened." He also told World that he and his wife were divorcing but he did not file for divorce until reporters started contacting him regarding this story. As the story grew and he was forced to resign his presidency, D'Souza "went on the attack," accusing the conferences organizer who witnessed D'Souza and Joseph get one hotel room together and the owner of World, as liars. He claims vendetta, since he had ended World vice president's editorial consultant contract with The King's College.

Christianity Today says:

"The approach in the article ... is a clear effort to destroy me and my career," D'Souza said. "To me, that is a kind of viciousness masquerading as righteousness. That's what makes this deplorable and sad."  

Smith said any speculation that World published its report as a vendetta against D'Souza and TKC is irresponsible.  

"It is simply not true," Smith said. "It's a story we did not pursue, but once we came across it, we made a pretty straightforward journalistic determination that this is a newsworthy story."  

Smith said conference organizers McFarland and Tony Beam observed D'Souza's "highly irregular" behavior and shared the information with Smith, who was speaking at the same event.
 

So the morals police at the evangelical conference in South Carolina ran tattling to World magazine because baby Jesus weeps every time a man sins, and a man who makes a living peddling hypocrisy is hoist in his own double standard. D'Souza now claims that Joseph did not share his room, the two did not sleep together, and for the life of him, D'Souza just can't imagine why any Christian would be upset by his actions anyway.

Denise and I were trying to do the right thing. I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings. Obviously I would not have introduced Denise as my fiancé at a Christian apologetics conference if I had thought or known I was doing something wrong. But as a result of all this, and to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, Denise and I have decided to suspend our engagement.

Obviously! Why on earth would anyone expect the religious right to get upset by the sight of D'Souza cohabiting with a young woman not his wife? It's not like they and D'Souza preach constantly about morality.

Why is Obama on the social issues — and I’m thinking here of abortion, I’m thinking here of gay marriage — why is Obama so aggressive in attacking the traditional values agenda? I think the reason for it is because when Obama thinks about colonialism, about the British and the French who went abroad to conquer other countries, or earlier the Spanish and the Portuguese, I come from a part of India that was a Portuguese colony at one time, I think for Obama colonialism is identified not just with the soldiers but also with the missionaries. Remember it’s the missionaries that went alongside the conquerors, the conquistadors, came to the Americas and worked on converting the Indians and later missionaries went to China, India and Japan. So I think this is the problem, Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism. Obama’s own Christianity is more of a Third World liberation theology, a very different kind of Jeremiah Wright type philosophy, summarized in the idea that America is the rogue nation in the world.

Oh, wait. They do. Especially when they can make lots of money by lecturing about Obama's so-called anti-Christian beliefs and actions.

Happily, the future looks bright for the new couple, since the young lady is every bit as hypocritical as her paramour. Right Wing Watch helpfully excerpted a portion of Joseph's now-invisible personal blog, where she rails against those nasty liberals who are destroying marriage with infidelity.

In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists and liberals of other stripes started pointing out the hypocrisies of what they termed “patriarchy.” Time and again, they urged us to recognize human’s natural “animal instincts” in relation to traditional morality and therefore, to reject traditional institutions such as marriage as outdated because now these intellectual elites had things like biology and sociology, things like women’s studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, to back them up. They pointed to infidelity or infamous sexual desire surveys (conducted by homosexuals)[vi] among traditionally married couples to “prove” their theses. Limb by limb, they tore the traditional family to shreds until they reduced us to the shining bastion of zoological (but even animals aren’t this bad and do not depend on the state to care for them)cesspool equality that we have now in every American ghetto and which is seeping out into the middle and upper classes in less animated ways. These people, like their European counterparts, are the ones who will go extinct. For instance, we have raised an entire generation of boys who, permanently scarred by their parents’ divorces(perhaps over issues such as infidelity) cannot emotionally connect or commit to any one woman in any meaningful way and so we also have an entire generation of girls for whom that coveted diamond solitaire comes later and later in life, with more and more contractual caveats (prenups). Somehow, when it happens after 5 years of living together, after 1 year of non-exclusive dating followed by another 3 years of recurring breakups over the male’s unwillingness to “commit,” getting that ring for which you girls will surely be paying your hard-earned half, doesn’t feel quite like the fairytale it used to.

No doubt that coveted diamond solitaire will eventually make its way onto Joseph's finger, courtesy of millions of gullible right-wingers who buy D'Souza's products. And is there any doubt that it will be a much bigger diamond that that of the first (of many!) Mrs. Dinesh D'Souzas?

The Business Of America

While I have been neglecting the question of authoritarianism and morality in politics I also have been neglecting my other duty, keeping an eye on Megan McArdle so you don't have to. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out that McArdle has snuggled down onto her new little perch, where she recommences to feather her nest and peck at any lice that might prevent her from doing what she does best, letting Megan be Megan.

The Benefits of Business Experience by Mrs. Megan McArdle, national celebrity and expert on failure and how to turn it to your advantage, as will be related in her new book Permission To Suck. Not that she needs it!

It's not crazy to worry that Obama hasn't got it.

Why are filthy-rich hedge fund managers, so enamored of Obama in the 2008 race, turning on him now? I endorse the rhetorical explanation: Barack Obama has made a habit of bashing financial types and rich people. Bankers and rich people, being people, do not like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces. So they are naturally disinclined to support him. I am shocked at how many New Yorkers I had thought to be rock-ribbed Democrats are attending Romney fundraisers. Not a huge number, mind you; it's not like they're going to tip New York from blue to red. But if any New Yorkers of my acquaintance were attending GOP fundraisers in the past, they certainly weren't admitting it in public, unless they already worked for National Review. So it does seem like a real change . . . and what they say when I ask them is that, well, they don't like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces.

Only a fake like McArdle could be a success in journalism without mastering that little thing call attribution. Salmon named some billionaires, why will McArdle not defend them by name? Who are the "rock-ribbed Democrats"? Here, also, is where things get a little fuzzy. It seems that either New Yorkers of McArdle's acquaintance are all hedge fund managers or all of McArdle's acquaintances think exactly like hedge fund managers. Since McArdle has a history friendship with a wide circle of DC libertarian and somewhat liberal bloggers and New York liberals, it turns out that lots and lots of people think just like hedge fund managers. Who knew?

Furthermore, we are supposed to believe that "rock-ribbed Democrats" are now attending Romney fundraisers, which means they are already contributing to his campaign and might contribute more. Anyone who has been reading the left bloggers recently will notice that rock-ribbed Democrats wouldn't vote for Romney if you held murdered babies over their heads. So to speak.

Megan McArdle: Mr. Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager! I am so very surprised to see you at this fundraiser!

Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager: Well, you know how it goes, Megan. All your beliefs go out the window when you hear your president deliver a few lukewarm populist statements in an election year. Some people might think we would be delighted with laws that cater to our needs, bank bailouts, a healthy stock market, and enormous rise in income equality but we know different. Barack Obama was in the White House for years but he never did anything with it.
 

It's entirely possible--nay, probable--that the hedge fund managers are still whining about mean old man Obama who told them to get off his lawn, as Felix Salmon relates in the post linked below, but it is impossible to determine the facts when none are offered. We must just suppose that as Megan McArdle's acquaintances go, so goes the world.  The only real new information we are given is that McArdle hobnobs with hedge fund billionaires or at the very least people who think like them, which is, no doubt,  central to her point.

Not everyone agrees with McArdle, strange though that may be.

Felix Salmon, however, offers a different view:

There’s a limit to how far you can go asking people to justify their Hitler analogies, so Chrystia asks Cooperman about his “never worked a day in his life” comment. It turns out that by “working”, Cooper means that Obama “never made payroll. He’s never built anything”. In other words, this is very much the Romney version of the great-men-of-history worldview: one where a handful of visionary builders use their skills to create jobs for the masses and wealth for themselves. Recall Nick Lemann, profiling Romney in last week’s New Yorker:

He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company — Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s — it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero.

If you’re the billionaire principal of a business you built yourself, then you are very likely to see the world through this lens — and as a result, you’re very likely to be very supportive of Romney’s candidacy.

Felix implies that there is something faintly ridiculous about this.

 

Who's that shyly peeping out from beneath McArdle's skirt? Why I do believe it is Ms. Ayn Rand, tireless* purveyor of the great-man-of-history worldview and Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle's philosophical hero. McArdle is much too afraid modest to admit to being a Randian since the intellectual elite ridicule the poor quality of Rand's work, but McArdle's desire to worship the elite is obvious.

I myself am on the record as saying that being a CEO does not make you a good president. And yet, I do think there is something to this complaint.

First and most of all, any discussion of a CEO presidency must immediately address the subject of Bush, Geo. W., who just a few years ago spent eight years as president of these United States, well within the memory span of Ms. McArdle, who is nearly 40. Bush was celebrated as our CEO president and we all know how that turned out. Yet McArdle utterly ignores Bush and the little fact that Romney's business experience was in vulture capitalism, not manufacturing or retail. He ran a chop shop for rich men, which is business experience of a sort but not the kind you want to use when running a country. And according to McArdle, she chose Bush 2004 not because he was a CEO president, but because she was afraid Kerry would nationalize health care and "cut and run" in Iraq. In fact:

  I don't think the president has much, if anything, to do with how the economy runs, unless he's one of those disastrous tinkerers, like FDR and Richard Nixon. Neither of the current candidates is such a lackwit, meaning that their impact on the economy will be minimal indeed. Neither candidate gets my vote here.

So obviously the president doesn't need CEO experience after all.

Obama has almost no experience with the private, profit-making sector: a few summer jobs, and one year as an editor at a business intelligence service.

Obama was a low-level editor in Reference Services, working on reports describing economic conditions in various foreign countries.

By all accounts, he disliked the work, not just because it was pedestrian and boring, but because it was in business. "He calls it working for the enemy," Obama's mother, Ann, wrote after a phone conversation with her son, "because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in [Third World] countries."

Of course, we've had many good presidents with no business experience. But Obama's whole administration tends to be light on people from outside the academia--NGO--government triangle. It's something that's increasingly true of Washington in general--and, I think, increasingly problematic.

McArdle's head is so firmly fixed up her gargantuan copy of Atlas Shrugged that she can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Just as conservatives cannot leave the happy Land of Imagination in which they are the respected inheritors and protectors of western civilization, McArdle's libertarian fantasy world is a Willy Wonka candyland of boot-strapping men and women who built noble industries with the sweat of their brow and a handful of beans. These Randian Ubermenschen suffer horribly from the depredations of the effete,  elite intelligentsia, who all want to destroy the rich to compensate for their own inadequacy. Only by understanding McArdle's point of view, a wandering mishmash of anecdotes, personal biography and economic hero worship, can one even begin to make sense of this post.

Let's join her as she defends her noble captains of industry, who must steer the ship of state safely between the rocky shoals of liberal extravagance and wind-swept waves of conservative meddling. To do this we must immediately jump from poor, persecuted hedge fund managers to mid-management company employees, two creatures who have little in common, but it takes very little imagination to conclude that McArdle wants to imbue the financial elite with the virtues of the middle class businessman to make the former seem a little less like Whiny, Sleazy and Greedy, three of the Seven Dwarfs of capitalism.

 I have now worked in journalism for (gulp) almost ten years, longer than I've done anything else. But before I worked in journalism, I had permanent, full time jobs as a secretary, a help desk technician, an admin at a corporate training firm, and some higher-level jobs designing and building networks for financial clients.

I don't think "permanent" means what she thinks it means. Perhaps she meant to say that she considered these jobs as permanent, which would be most unusual for someone as educated, ambitious and indebted as McArdle. Still, one hesitates to call a lady a  liar over such a small thing. Although it is also difficult to understand how a secretary or help desk technician gained the ability to assess CEOs. Her professors must have covered such things in business school but they were academics, and as McArdle tell us quite often, academics know nothing. Or everything.

When I was unemployed in New York, I started developing my own technology consulting business for small firms, with all that implies in the way of paying taxes and going on sales calls and managing cash flow.

Since McArdle has said that she was desperately poor while being provided with room and board by her parents on the Upper West Side of New York, one surmises that the business was not successful, and therefore perhaps McArdle's understanding of business experience might not be the same as that of a CEO or even presidential candidate.

I also, as long-time readers know, spent a year doing administrative work in a construction trailer down at Ground Zero.

She ran the copy machine. 

These were not jobs that were designed to season young people before moving them up, nor waystops for same; they were mostly permanent jobs, whose main focus was on making customers happy, not nurturing tomorrow's elite. (And indeed, probably half my co-workers had either never attended college, or never finished.) We measured our results in profit and loss, not newspaper writeups or web links.

So these lower level jobs did not lead to high advancement. This will be important later. 

When I look at a lot of what gets written these days, I see how valuable that is. I'm not claiming that my work experience was all that comprehensive, and as an entrepreneur, I wasn't much of an entrepreneur. But what it does give me is some exposure to the legions of people who labor their whole lives at jobs that are kinda fine--and at least a little inkling about how companies, and company managers, think. Which is often not at all how the policy elites with whom I am now surrounded seem to think that they think.

To peddle Myth #1, McArdle must peddle Myth #2: Academics are all liberal obsessed with white guilt and all government workers are incompetents who just want to keep their jobs. Like teachers. And running a shoe store or small factory is just like running the country.
 

The increasingly mandarin elite, hygienically removed from the grubby business of scrounging for customers, frequently seems to have no idea at all what goes on in companies. Stop grinning, Republicans; I mean you too. Yes, too many liberals seem to believe that all infelicitous market outcomes can be cured by appointing a commission composed of really top-notch academics--during the debate over health care reform, the words "peer reviewed study" were invoked by supporters with no less touching a faith than an Italian grandmother performing a rosary for the salvation of the godless Communists.

I haven't seen "mandarin elite" since I last read The Corner. McArdle is still bitter over her loss now that "Obamacare" has been enacted. She did not notice that the right wrote the plan, the medical insurance industry favored the plan, and the insurance industry was given a huge bonus, as people who would be forced to drop insurance as the economy worsens will now be forced to keep it. She is also bitter that all that Koch money couldn't buy her tribe academic respectability and copious cosy jobs but that is what conspicuous consumption is for.

On the other hand, here comes the GOP claiming that entrepreneurship can be started or stopped with small changes in marginal tax rates, as if one were turning on and off a light. This is no less of a technocratic fallacy, even if, as with many technocratic fallacies, there is a grain of sound theory buried somewhere under that towering mountain of unwarranted assumptions.

Yes, conservatives sure are stupid, but they do have some right ideas, such as cutting taxes on the rich. But academics are even more stupid because they think they know how to run companies when they really don't and just muck up everything with their meddling instead. Which makes Paul Krugman either Fred, Shaggy or Scooby, I believe.

The result is that companies usually get treated as a rather simple variable in a model rather than the complex organizations they are. For example, you see people reasoning from corporate behavior to efficacy: if fast food companies spend a lot of money on advertising, then said advertising must make kids eat more fast food; if hiring managers demand a college degree for positions that didn't used to require one, there must be a good business reason. "They wouldn't do it," says the argument, "if it didn't work."

If you've actually worked at a company, this is a ludicrous statement. Companies do stuff that doesn't work all the time, and it can take decades to unwind even the stupidest expenditures and rules.

If companies do stupid things all the time why would we want a businessman/CEO type running the country? Or is McArdle telling us again that the only road to success is through failure?

And I had no idea that corporate advertising was stupid because it didn't work. Why on earth have corporations spent so many millions on advertising that doesn't work? Why do politicians do the same? Has anyone ever told the advertising industry this, or have they just been laughing up their sleeves at everyone all this time? Mad Men? You mean Malevolent Men!

More importantly, when they do have good reasons, they are often not the reasons that outsiders think. The elite projects their own concerns onto the company, instead of asking the company what it's worried about.

This is a sterling example of why people call McArdle an idiot. Academics, who are all elites you know, should be asking CEOs and other businessmen what the latter are worried about, so they can put their thinky minds to work solving the business problems. (Just as employees should be worrying about what their bosses need instead of worrying their pretty little heads about stuff like wages and working conditions.)  Instead of doing silly academic exercises like studying inflation or depressions or Keynsian economics they should be figuring out how to get people to buy more stuff.

Take advertising. Some of it aims to increase consumption of a product; the "Got Milk?" campaign is a famous example. But that doesn't mean it works--the Got Milk? campaign,which went nationwide in 1995, doesn't look to me like it had much lasting impact on milk sales.

Actually, if you look at the link you will see that milk sales stopped falling, the reason for the campaign in the first place, and ended up higher than before the campaign. If you read the history of the Got Milk campaign, which is very interesting, you will see that it was a California campaign meant to increase California milk consumption, which it did while becoming a cultural phenomenon in a small way and winning many awards. All in all, the campaign was tremendously successful.

Yet that doesn't mean it was unsuccessful, because the trade association that paid for it probably did achieve its primary goal: showing members that they were actively promoting the interests of dairy farmers. The members, not milk-buyers, may have been the real "audience" for that campaign.

Just like her father, who was managing director for the trade association of New York city construction companies called General Contractors Association. Evidently he was wasting his time by pretending to actively promote their interests while he really just wanted to milk them of a high salary instead. In fact, he is very much an example of the "academia--NGO--government triangle" that McArdle was discussing earlier but moved from government to private practice to academia and back again, not NGOs. It's odd that McArdle ignored the famous revolving door between business and government. Maybe it just slipped her mind. However we know he provided service in return for his high pay, contra McArdle, when the government investigated organized crime's role in construction.

Commenting on Mr. Goldstock’s [director of the state’s Organized Crime Task Force] findings , the managing director of the General Contractors Association, Francis X. McArdle, said he was ”unaware of any pervasive patterns of corruption” regarding his group. The association represents more than 100 contractors primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.

Mr. McArdle also disputed the need for a new investigative agency. ”We don’t need more people tripping over each other in search of glory, facts or whatever,” he said.

Like father, like daughter. Who needs to find out why banks fail or mortgage companies break the law? Things just happen and there's no villains and there's nothing we can do about anything.

But advertising isn't even always aimed at raising consumption. GM does not spend money on car ads because it hopes that many more people will start driving, or that some of them will buy three cars instead of one. The purpose of a car ad is to make people buy your car instead of your competitor's. It's certainly possible that this is how McDonalds thinks about its advertising, but the policy elite isn't worried about McDonalds putting Burger King out of business, it's worried about fat kids.

 Let us pause to note that McArdle is complaining that the "policy elite," also known as academics and government officials, care about kids' health instead of McDonald's profits. The bastards. How could their values be so out of wack?

And of course, we shouldn't count out the possibility that companies spend a lot on advertising because they don't know whether it works--and don't dare find out. An immense amount of IT spending is done this way.

If McArdle were actually a real journalist instead of someone who plays on tv she would do some research and find out if she was correct. If she read even one article she would discover that McDonald's spends two billion a year on advertising, that its advertising campaigns have been very successful in increasing sales and encompass everything from movie-tie-in toys in Happy Meals to product placement in movies to lavishing attention and perks on mommy bloggers, and it knows every detail of its advertising campaigns, including efficacy and cost, down to the last dollar.. It's a fascinating tale as McDonald's has such an enormous market share and is a part of American culture, but you will not hear that tale from Miss Megan, who is not one to let facts get in the way of peddling her propaganda.

To recap: we now know that advertising doesn't work because advertisements do not change behavior. Therefore, whenever the "policy elite" "projects their own concerns onto the company," they are doomed to failure. The advertising companies all know they are failures but they want to be paid so they just pretend to do their job. The corporations go along with all of this expensive Kabuki because they are afraid to find out if they are wasting their money.

Which is why we should elect a CEO president, so he can tax the country to pay for services we won't get but are too afraid to find if we will get them or not. I thought we were already doing that. 

I'm not claiming that McDonalds advertising doesn't make kids eat more, by the way; I'm just saying that this is a fact which has to be proven on its own merits, not inferred from corporate behavior.

Ah, the classic McArdle double-fake. I didn't say what I just said, I am just saying that it is possible that what I said but did not say is true. If only there were a way to find out....

The flip side of this is the people who think that companies don't do anything at all that couldn't be done better by government or academia . . . except sit back and rake the money in. This is particularly prevalent in discussions of health care, but it frequently pops up elsewhere. 

My goodness, it sure is silly to think that national health care could work. And since government can't do anything right, maybe it was a mistake to let it run the war effort in WWII, or the space program, or the NIH or CDC or the highway system or anything else. Because adding a layer of profit to any endeavor is sure to make it cheaper and more efficient.

My favorite in this genre is Jerry Avorn, the professor of pharmacoeconomics who told Ezra Klein that we didn't really need drug companies because now academics with good drug prospects could simply go straight to the capital markets and raise money to fund their own projects. This is simply breathtakingly wrong. For one thing, venture capitalists want an exit strategy before they will put money in, and in biotech, exit is often a sale to a big pharmaceutical firm; no Big Pharma, no VC funds. And second, few newly hatched biotech firms have the complementary capacities to bring a drug to market by themselves. Forget the sales force; I'm talking about the expertise to get the thing through the FDA approval process and produce it in massive quantities. How do they acquire those capacities? They partner with Big Pharma, or license to them.

I doubt Jerry Avorn would tolerate someone making sweeping statements about what a hypertension drug would do without, say, making a basic investigation into the properties of the cardiovascular system. But among policy elites, there's frequently a reluctance to do this with companies, because the companies are seen as self-interested; spending too much time listening to them will only compromise your objectivity.

"The companies are seen as self-interested." Well, no wonder those elite academics are so confused and are so willing to force their body politic on the innocent, vulnerable billionaires. The government and academia think that businesses are in the business of making money and might even do things are, perhaps, in theory, a little less than altruistic. Which could never happen, and which is why all those rumors of massive pollution in Koch industries could not possibly be true.

At a salon dinner in Washington not long ago,

Ah, yes. The Atlantic salon dinners, in which The Atlantic pimped McArdle out to corporations, who eagerly repeated everything they wanted her to say.

I found myself explaining why so many people go into consulting: it's less exhausting than corporate jobs. One of my friends who went into the management training program at a telecom firm out of business school found himself managing a call center. It's a responsible position, but it's also a little stressful and not always interesting.

"I'm sorry," said one of the other attendees, a very smart and insightful person who writes beautifully and knows a whole lot about economics, "but if you get an MBA from Chicago, and you manage a call center, you're an idiot."

Likewise, anyone who pays $100,000 for an MBA and ends up training to be a fake journalist at the Koches' Institute for Humane Studies must be an idiot as well.

This is pretty much exactly wrong. If you are going to someday be a senior manager at a major telecom firm, you should absolutely manage a call center: nowhere else will you get the kind of hands on experience with the firm's customer base in their most irascible, demanding moments, or learn as much about the company's cost structure and operational challenges. And surely it is not actually idiotic, even for someone with an MBA from a top school, to want to be a senior manager at a major telecom firm?

Didn't McArdle say earlier that the lower level jobs were permanent jobs? And don't most top jobs go to people from top schools with top credentials and top contacts?

And yet, it's such an unsurprisng remark, because this so often seems to me to be the animating spirit of our governing class. The purpose of an elite education, the thinking goes, is to equip you to design and run the system by which 300 million Americans live together--and to ensure that you never, ever have to actually interact with the 280 million who did not graduate from an elite academic program.

McArdle, as always, extrapolates from personal experience.

To be sure, that's a charge that can often be leveled at consulting and finance--the two jobs where Romney got his fortune, and apparently, many of his supporters. But at least the consultants and the bankers have to convince some very non-elite CEOs to give them money, and their non-elite employees to give them information. At least their performance gets measured by a metric that's hard to fudge for very long, or spin into something more pleasing: is there more money in the bank, or less, at the end of the quarter? And the people who do run non-elite, consumer focused small businesses are also disproportionately going for Romney over Obama.

It's like the last four years never happened. No bank failures, no bailouts, no hidden bad investments. Tra-la-la, McArdle skips merrily past the truth and down the garden path.

That same article (on a poll by SurePayroll) also included the following quote:

“It’s deeply concerning that optimism plunged 15 points at a time when we’re struggling to maintain the recovery,” said SurePayroll CEO and President Michael Alter. “This suggests a lack of growth through the election, but what’s more troubling is what it could mean beyond that. When small business owners are not optimistic, they’re not investing and they’re not hiring."

It seems small businessmen lean towards Romney because they are very stupid; they form their business plans around their mental state, not the needs of their business. When small business owners don't have order to fill they don't invest and they don't hire. No matter how pessimistic or optimistic they are, hiring depends on demand, not their mood. McArdle might want to read her source material some time--it's very odd but the material frequently does not support her claims, at least not convincingly. She might want to look into that some time.

This is not to disparage jobs outside of business. I have one. So do most of my friends and family. The people in those jobs work very hard, they are often brilliant, and they even occasionally contribute something positive to the world--something that is hard to say about, say, an associate structuring a really innovative tax-arbitrage deal.

But ultimately, businesses are where all the money comes from to pay for us to opine about the state of the world--present and potential. They are the ones who generate the goods and services, the advertising dollars and tax revenue, that keep the rest of us afloat. It matters that fewer and fewer of us have any real experience at all with how they work. We sit in our air conditioned offices and presume to plan the economy, yet how many of us could keep a trucking firm in business for a whole month, sell a customer on an unfamiliar new generator technology, or turn a lawn-mower repair shop from deficit to profit?
 

"We" plan the economy? No, I don't think so. McArdle writes for a Tina Brown blog, she doesn't plan anything except her next extravagant purchase.

I'll be the first to say that I couldn't. What my time in the private sector gave me is mostly a terrific respect for how hard it is to manage a business, particularly one filled with workers who are doing a job, not pursuing a vocation.

The world appears to be overflowing with academics and journalists who could do a much better job running the Fortune 500 than those grasping yahoos in the C-Suite . . . if only they weren't so busy with their research. But I am not among them. I hate repetitive jobs unless they involve data collation, dislike telling other people what to do, can't stand to make sales calls, and have a low tolerance for the minutiae of management. And so my hat is off to anyone who manages to keep a business in the black. Even if they make a bunch of really stupid mistakes.

When Obama sat down with the auto task force to confront the problems of reorganizing GM, the first thing he asked was "Why can't they make a Corolla?"

There are a lot of answers to that--cost structure, labor practices, the structure of the American car market, the pool of automotive engineering talent available to American manufacturers. But the simplest one is that GM is not Toyota.
 

And humans are not bonobos.

Companies are individuals, with individual strengths and weaknesses, and a Car Czar cannot turn one company into another any more than a surgeon could turn you into one of your cousins. To even ask the question seems to reveal immense hubris: why, oh why, has GM not done the obvious and produced what I, in my imperial wisdom, believe to be the car of the future?

I think you can make an argument that consultants and bankers do quite a bit of this, with money and interest rates replacing policy levers. But I also think you can argue that they do somewhat less of it, because at the end of the day, they do have to get in there and deal with an actual company; if sales plummet, it's no good pointing to your model and declaring that it's still working fine.

So when America's sales plummet and America can no longer make payroll, we need a CEO president who will be able to make cold calls to Russia and China to get them to buy our iron ore and guns.

This emphatically does not necessarily mean that Romney will therefore be a great president, or that you should vote for him. I have lots of thoughts on this, but given how long this post is already, I will have to share them on another day. For now, I'll just say that whatever the flaws of Mitt Romney, or the financiers who support him, I think that the worry about Obama's lack of business experience is a fair concern--and that I wish more of our leaders and policy analysts had started their careers in the private sector, seeing how it creates the wealth that they deploy.

We started out talking about hedge fund managers but now we end up with a paean to the workers of the world, or at least the people who hire the workers of the world and create most of America's wealth. Therefore we must vote for Mitt Romney (not that she is telling us to vote for Mitt Romney, mind you) because Obama never ran a Stop-n-Go and therefore has no idea how to run the country, despite the fact that he has been doing just that for years.

People are rightly concerned with McArdle's dishonesty but her biggest problem is that she just isn't very bright.

*The amphetamines helped, no doubt.