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Glenn Reynolds notes the common thread to the DC scandals.
“How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans — now we have one.” That was Jay Leno’s take on the Obama administration’s expanding NSA spying scandal, which has gone beyond Verizon phone records to include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and just about all the other major tech companies except, apparently, for Twitter.
The NSA spying scandal goes deep, and the Obama administration’s only upside is that the furor over its poking into Americans’ private business on a wholesale basis will distract people from the furor over the use of the IRS and other federal agencies to target political enemies — and even donors to Republican causes — and the furor over the Benghazi screwup and subsequent lies (scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail), the furor over the “Fast And Furious” gunrunning scandal that left literally scores of Mexicans dead, the scandal over the DOJ’s poking into phone records of journalists (and their parents), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ shakedown of companies she regulates for “donations” to pay for ObamaCare implementation that Congress has refused to fund, the Pigford scandal where the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund” appears to have been raided for political purposes — well, it’s getting to where you need a scorecard to keep up.
But, in fact, there’s a common theme in all of these scandals: Abuse of power. …
David Brooks reviews an interesting book. Interesting in that it reveals and displays the unhappiness of the American left at a point in time before we learned about the massive data-mining undertaken by the government. Interesting also in that it is written in the narrative style of the “USA Trilogy” by John Dos Passos.
… Packer rarely comes out and says what he thinks. This is a book of nearly pure narrative, and his meanings are embedded in the way he portrays people, those he likes (outsiders) and those he doesn’t (bankers, the political class). There are some passages of outright analysis in this book to show that America is “unwinding,” that the structures of everyday life are crumbling, that the nation’s leaders have “abandoned their posts,” that the void has been filled with “the default force in American life, organized money.” But I doubt the analytic passages together would fill more than a few pages of this 434-page book.
The stories that do fill its pages are beautifully reported. There are a few dominating figures who pop in and out, like Jeff Connaughton, the perfect political No. 2, who in the early 1980s hitched his wagon to Joe Biden and became an aide, a fund-raiser, a lobbyist and a Washington insider. But during the financial crisis Connaughton grew disillusioned with politics, and he gives Packer an absolutely brutal portrait of Biden as a coldblooded operator, a staff-abuser and a people-user, who cares about nothing but his own presidential ambitions. (This portrait is cartoonishly overdrawn.)
There is Dean Price, a young go-getter who opened a chain of truck stops and then fell for some crackpot suggestions that the world was about to run out of oil and moved off into biodiesel. After being the political flavor of the month for a while with his speeches on energy, he was charged with not paying his taxes, his company tanked and things ended badly.
There is Tammy Thomas, a woman from Youngstown, Ohio, who worked hard in the city’s auto parts plants and took an early retirement buyout as the local economy crumbled around her. She lost a large chunk of her savings in a Ponzi scheme. Outraged at the changes around her, she has become an activist and community organizer.
To repeat, Packer does an outstanding job with these stories. “The Unwinding” offers vivid snapshots of people who have experienced a loss of faith. As a way of understanding contemporary America, these examples are tantalizing. But they are also frustrating. The book is supposed to have social, economic and political implications, but there is no actual sociology, economics or political analysis in it.
By “the unwinding,” Packer is really referring to three large transformations, which have each been the subject of an enormous amount of research and analysis. The first is the stagnation of middle-class wages and widening inequality. Depending on which analyst you read, this has to do with the changing nature of the information-age labor market, changing family structures, rising health care costs, the decline of unions or the failure of education levels to keep up with technology.
The second is the crushing recession that began in 2008. Depending on which analyst you read, this was caused by global capital imbalances, bad Federal Reserve policy, greed on Wall Street, faulty risk-assessment models or the insane belief that housing prices would go on rising forever.
The third transformation is the unraveling of the national fabric. Depending on which analyst you read, this is either a gigantic problem (marriage rates are collapsing; some measures of social connection are on the decline) or not a gigantic problem (crime rates are plummeting, some measures of social connection are improving).
Packer wants us to understand these transformations, but ultimately, narrative and anecdotes are not enough. They need to be complemented with evidence from these long-running debates and embedded in a theoretical framework and worldview. …
The above by David Brooks reviewing a book by the New Yorker’s George Packer is a good illustration of why the American left cannot understand the damage done by the current administration. To see how things might be different, and we could once again have an economy that could generate as many as one million jobs in a month as it did during the recovery of the Reagan Presidency we have Forbes contributor, Carl Schramm, who makes the moral case for policies that foster growth.
… The moral implications of non-recovery causes Washington to look culpable for human costs that politicians would just as soon not consider. In every recession or slow-growth situation, every one of them, the poor pay a higher price. Just the same, in most recoveries the poor do better than the rich. Think about it. Right now well off people hardly know that recession-like conditions persist. In fact, the incomes of the top one percent have climbed steadily through the last few years.
Poorer Americans, including black people, have had to deal with the problem of chronic unemployment and retreat entirely from the labor force. How is it that advocates for the poor don’t really seem to understand that when our economy doesn’t grow there is no possible way that poverty will ever be reduced? Perhaps it’s because the poor are now permanently attended to by the profession of community advocates.
In America, even as the world uses the American model of entrepreneurial capitalism to push back poverty, we have institutionalized poverty as an intractable social condition! The ideological solution is to take from the rich despite the tautological reality that their invested capital creates all the new jobs. If you don’t think the poor can or want to work, that they should be permanent wards of the state, and you wrap yourself in the feel-good pop-morality of “social justice,” what other solution can you reach? Tragically, America’s cadre of public policy professionals seems to believe the poor will always be with us, at pretty much the same percent of population, no matter what. Thank goodness China, India and, now, countries in Africa don’t buy this assumption!
Where in the rhetoric of those who advocate for the poor does one ever hear of the eradication of poverty outright through the expansion of minority entrepreneurship and the growing up of scale businesses? The notion that somehow entrepreneurial capitalism is not what the poor could use to their benefit is bolstered by a set of memes that serve to make growth itself somehow morally questionable. Experts in community activism and social work, as well as some philanthropic supporters and growing numbers of college students, appear to believe that it is better that people live in an eco-friendly static state of near-poverty than be cogs in the destruction of the environment that is the inevitable (but not really true) cost of economic growth.
In a confused world of economic policy there is only one true north – growth! Growth means the expansion of human welfare at home. Public policy that is not first and foremost focused on economic expansion of our own economy imposes unnecessary and horrific costs on individuals, most importantly the poor, right here in America.
Here’s how old Pickerhead is. When traveling from Rhode Island to Valley Forge for the 1957 Boy Scout Jamboree, he can remember the train stopping periodically for ice for the air conditioning system. CNN has a story on the man who helped create the ice business in America.
Frederic Tudor not only introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days, he created a thirst people never realized they had.
In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston, Massachusetts, were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream.
They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies.
It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”
Ice man cometh
Nothing in Tudor’s early years indicated that he would invent an industry.
He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of 13.
After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming.
When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate’s pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do. …