Flannel Shirt

Hostages

An excellent essay about what this is all about. I've always said that racism is a means to an end. The author agrees.

When I have described the well-considered, coherent political and economic strategies of the conservative white South, as I have done here, here and here, I am sometimes been accused of being a “conspiracy theorist.” But one need not believe that white-hooded Dragons and Wizards are secretly coordinating the actions of Southern conservative politicians from a bunker underneath Stone Mountain in Georgia to believe that a number of contemporary policies — from race-to-the-bottom economic policies to voter disfranchisement and attempts to decentralize or privatize federal social insurance entitlements — serve the interests of those who promote them, who tend to be white Southern conservatives.

Just as a strategy is not a conspiracy, so it is not insanity. Ironically, American progressives, centrists and some Northern conservatives are only deluding themselves, when they insist that the kind of right-wing Southerners behind the government shutdown are “crazy.” Crazy, yes — crazy like a fox.

Another mistake is the failure to recognize that the Southern elite strategy, though bound up with white supremacy throughout history, is primarily about cheap and powerless labor, not about race. If the South and the U.S. as a whole through some magical transformation became racially homogeneous tomorrow, there is no reason to believe that the Southern business and political class would suddenly embrace a new model of political economy based on high wages, high taxes and centralized government, rather than pursue its historical model of a low-wage, low-tax, decentralized system, even though all workers, employers and investors now shared a common skin color.

So the struggle is not one to convert Southern Baptists to Darwinism or to get racists to celebrate diversity. The on-going power struggle between the local elites of the former Confederacy and their allies in other regions and the rest of the United States is not primarily about personal attitudes. It is about power and wealth.

For some time, the initiative has rested with the Southern power elite, which knows what it wants and has a plan to get it. The strategy of the conservative South, as a nation-within-a nation and in the global economy, combines an economic strategy and a political strategy.

The economic strategy is to maximize the attractiveness of the former Confederacy to external investors, by allowing Southern states to out-compete other states in the U.S., as well as other countries if possible, in a race to the bottom by means of low wages, stingy government welfare (which if generous increases the bargaining power of poor workers by decreasing their desperation) and low levels of environmental regulation.

The political strategy of the Southern elite is to prevent the Southern victims of these local economic policies from teaming up with allies in other parts of the U.S. to impose federal-level reforms on the Southern states. Voter suppression seeks to prevent voting by lower-income Southerners of all races who are hostile to the Southern power elite. Partisan gerrymandering of the U.S. House of Representatives by conservatives in Southern state legislatures weakens the votes of anti-conservative Southerners, if they are allowed to vote.

If voter suppression and vote dilution strategies fail, the Southern conservatives can still try to ward off unwelcome federally-imposed reforms that might weaken control of the Southern workforce by Southern employers and their political agents, by policies of devolving federal programs to the states, privatizing federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, blocking the implementation of new federal entitlements like Obamacare or a combination of these strategies.

To date the response of progressives and centrists, as well as moderate conservatives in the North (who have a quite different tradition) to what might be called the Southern Autonomy Project has been feeble and reactive. The South acts, the rest of the country reacts.

Here Midwestern Republican legislatures or governors try to copy the South’s anti-labor “right-to-work” legislation, and labor activists and liberals react.  The legislatures in the South and their allies elsewhere pass voter suppression laws, and civil rights groups scramble to counteract them. Now the Southern-dominated Tea Party in the House shuts down the government and threatens to force the federal government into default. In this game of “Whack-a-mole,” the Southern right and its neo-Jacksonian allies in other parts of the country always has the initiative.

Instead of waiting for the next Southern conservative outrage, and treating it as a single, isolated example of inexplicable craziness, the rest of America from center-left to center-right should recognize that it is dealing with different aspects of a single strategy by a regional elite — the Southern Autonomy Project. It is time for the non-Southern American majority, in alliance with many non-elite Southerners of all races, to target and attack every element of the Southern Autonomy Project simultaneously. If the neo-Confederates want to wage political and economic war, their fellow Americans should choose to respond with political and economic war on all fronts, not on the terms and in the places the Southern conservatives choose.

Setting political difficulty aside, it is intellectually easy to set forth a grand national strategy that consists of coordinated federal policies to defeat the Southern Autonomy Project.

A federal living wage.  At one blow, a much higher federal minimum wage would cripple the ability of Southern states to lure companies from more generous states which supplement the too-low present federal minimum wage with higher local state or urban minimum wages.  (Strong national unions could do the same, but that is not a realistic option at present.)

Nationalization of social insurance.  Social insurance programs with both federal and state components, like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), allow Southern states to be stingier than many other states, creating more desperate workers who are more dependent on the mercy of employers and elite-dominated charities. Completely federalizing Medicaid (as President Ronald Reagan suggested!) and other hybrid federal-state social insurance programs would cripple the Southern Autonomy Project further.

Real voting rights.  Using the authority of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Congress should completely federalize voting requirements for all federal, state and local elections, making it as easy as possible for U.S. citizens to vote — over the objections of kicking and screaming neo-Confederates.

Nonpartisan redistricting.  Partisan redistricting by majorities in state legislatures should be replaced by nonpartisan redistricting commissions, as in California, New Jersey and other states.  The redistricting commissions should be truly nonpartisan, not “bipartisan” arrangements in which incumbent Republicans and incumbent Democrats cut deals to protect their safe seats from competition. (Electoral reforms like instant run-off voting and proportional representation are struggles for a more distant future).

Abolish the Senate filibuster.  The filibuster is not part of the U.S. constitution. It has been used by Southern white conservatives from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first to preserve Southern white power and economic privilege. This relic of premodern  British parliamentary politics should be abolished. Democracy means majority rule. If the Southern Right loses a battle in Congress, it can try to round up allies and win next time. It should no longer be able to paralyze the Senate, the Congress or the federal government as a whole.

Abolish the federal debt ceiling completely.  The federal debt ceiling is another institution like the filibuster which has now been ruined by being abused by Southern conservatives. Now that the Southern right is trying to turn it into a recurrent tool of hostage-taking when it loses votes in Congress, the federal debt ceiling should be abolished. The federal government should be authorized to borrow any amount necessary to fund spending appropriated or authorized by Congress, if there is any shortfall in tax revenues.

Put all these policies and perhaps others together, and you have a National Majority Rule Project capable of thwarting the Southern Autonomy Project. The best defense is a good offense.

Does saying this make me, a white Southerner, a traitor to the South? Among the beneficiaries of a National Majority Rule Project, if it succeeded, would be middle- and low-income white Southerners, whose interests have never been identical with those of the local oligarchs. Particularly among the Scots-Irish of Appalachia and the Ozarks, there have always been many Southern white populists and radicals — from the West Virginian and Kentucky Unionists of the Civil War to New Deal liberals in Texas — who have understood the need to ally ourselves with non-Southerners in national politics to defeat the local Nabobs, Bourbons and Big Mules. The true Southern patriots are those of us who want to liberate the diverse population of the South from being exploited as wage earners and from being disfranchised or manipulated as voters. Another term for the National Majority Rule Project might be the Southern Liberation Movement.

Will the initiative remain with aggressive Southern reactionaries, as their fellow Americans try to appease them or react on a case-by-case basis against a feint here or a diversion there? Or will an aroused national majority, tired of being pushed around by a selfish Southern minority of the shrinking American white majority, finally fight back?

The Tea Party insurrection

For a group of people who claim to like the Constitution, why do they want to violate it?

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." —Amendment XIV, Section 4.

 By the time that long-obscure, lately apposite sentence became part of the Constitution, on July 9, 1868, the insurrection that occasioned it had been thoroughly, and bloodily, suppressed. Throughout the Civil War and afterward, Republicans in Congress had enacted some of the most forward-looking legislation in American history: a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive abolition of slavery—all thanks to the extended absence of delegations from the self-styled Confederate states. Now that era was about to end.

The party of Lincoln, grand but not yet old, feared the mischief that Southern senators and representatives might get up to when their states were readmitted to the Union. The Republicans’ foremost worry was that Congress might somehow be induced to cut funds for Union pensioners or pay off lenders who had gambled on a Confederate victory. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers went further. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, explained that the national debt would be safer once it was “withdrawn from the power of Congress to repudiate it.” He and his colleagues didn’t say just that the debt could not be put off, or left unpaid. They said that it couldn’t even bequestioned.

The new insurrection is different from the old one, and not only because this time it’s the Republicans who are the insurrectionaries. The old insurrectionaries wanted to destroy the government; the new ones wish merely to decimate it. The old ones’ weapons of choice were muskets and bayonets; the new ones confine themselves to mendacity, demagoguery, and obstructionism. The old ones were exclusively white and Southern; the new ones, while overwhelmingly white, are more widely distributed. The old ones no longer wished to be citizens of the United States; the new ones, some of them, profess to wonder if the President is a citizen at all.

Still, there are similarities. Prominent among them is a belief that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified. Equally noteworthy is an apparent inability to be reconciled to the results of an election. Last November, after a campaign that turned largely on the issue of health care, Barack Obama was reëlected with a popular majority of five million. In Senate races, Democrats drew ten million more votes than Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans, whom Democrats outpolled by a million and a half, retained their legislative majority only by dint of the vagaries of districting and redistricting. The Confederates had a better case: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln got barely thirty-nine per cent of the vote, a smaller share than any Presidential winner since.

In the current imbroglio, Republicans threatened that, unless their demands were met, they would (a) shut down most of the government and, more alarmingly, (b) deny the Treasury the ability to borrow the money it needs to pay expenses that Congress has already authorized. The first threat was carried out on October 1st. As for the second, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, suddenly offered last Thursday to postpone the deadline for carrying it out—but with conditions, and for a mere five weeks. The new proposed deadline is November 22nd, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The ransom demands kept changing. At first, it was the Affordable Care Act: in exchange for a few weeks of fiscal peace, repeal it; defund it; delay it; dismember it. Then the price ballooned, with some two dozen additional conservative fever dreams: plutocrat-friendly tax cuts, Medicare means-testing, a green light for environmental depredations, financial regulatory rollback, even the end of Internet neutrality. Then it was immediate “entitlement reform” (meaning cuts in social insurance) and “tax reform” (meaning lower rates for corporations and the rich). “We have to get something out of this,” one bewildered backbencher finally bleated, “and I don’t know what that even is.”

When Lincoln faced secession if he continued to resist slavery’s expansion, he remarked, “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you—and then you will be a murderer!’ ” Obama updated Lincoln, minus the lethal imagery: “If you’re in negotiations around buying somebody’s house, you don’t get to say, ‘Well, let’s talk about the price I’m going to pay, and if you don’t give the price then I’m going to burn down your house.’ ” Neither quip quite captures the perversity of the extortionists. They propose to shoot themselves as well as their hostage, and the house they would burn down is their house, too.

At the weekend, as public esteem for the Republican Party plunged to record lows, the elephants stampeded for the exits, raising clouds of dust. At this rate, the government shutdown may itself have been shut down by the time these words are read, with or without a fig leaf to cover the pachyderms’ privates. But the fanatical denialism of a large faction of the Republican Party is such that a default or the serious possibility of one may still be in the not too distant future. What then?

The President is constitutionally sworn to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but if he enforces the debt ceiling, established by one law, he cannot meet obligations that other laws command him to fulfill. Nor can he submit to blackmail, lest the Constitution be informally amended to provide that any law, duly passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the President (and, if challenged, upheld by the Supreme Court), may be effectively voided by the action of one faction of one party in one half of the national legislature. And he absolutely cannot permit default, the consequences of which would be global and catastrophic.

It is widely said that the Obama Administration has “ruled out” recourse to the fourth section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Not so. In 2011, when the Republicans test-drove their debt-ceiling gambit, Timothy Geithner, then the Secretary of the Treasury, read the section to a breakfast gathering of reporters. A squall ensued; the President calmed it, saying that “lawyers” had advised him that the Fourteenth was not a “winning argument.” Similarly cagey equivocations have been forthcoming this time around. Obama has been careful to keep the option on life support. At his news conference last Tuesday, he noted that there had been some discussion about his powers, under the amendment, to “go ahead and ignore the debt-ceiling law.” He continued:

Setting aside the legal analysis, what matters is that if you start having a situation in which there’s legal controversy about the U.S. Treasury’s authority to issue debt, the damage will have been done even if that were constitutional, because people wouldn’t be sure. . . . What matters is: what do the people who are buying Treasury bills think?

What also matters, of course, is: compared with what? In the end, Obama could have no honorable choice but to invoke the Fourteenth. There is little doubt that he would prevail. The Supreme Court would be unlikely even to consider the matter, since no one would have standing to bring a successful suit: when the government pays its bills, who is damaged? The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s. It would be all he could do to head off a post-Bloombergian boomlet to somehow get around another amendment, the Twenty-second, and usher him to a third term.

What has become of the Party of Lincoln?

Marching on the White House behind a Confederate flag.

Just to let you know what the Republicans are up to

Here is the important part, especially for anyone who has lived or plans to live past 65.

The House GOP framework, pushed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), would raise the borrowing limit for six weeks while replacing across-the-board spending cuts (known as sequestration) with cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits. It would also set up formal negotiations to resolve spending disputes and address the next debt limit increase. But the White House and Democratic leaders have rebuffed that approach. "That's over with. It's done," Reid said of White House talks with the House GOP. "They're not talking anymore."

The shutdown continues

The fissure between the Tea Party and Big Business

The problem with reactionary populism is that eventually it cannot be controlled by the people who control the pursestrings. Billionaire oil men the Koch Brothers, have been behind the Tea Party from its inception. The Tea Party benefited from the incomplete recovery from the Great Recession, which itself was caused by a lack of government stimulus. Now the Tea Party, having shut down the government, is on the verge of defaulting on our debt. The problem with that is that while the Kochs and the rest of the oligarchy don't mind millions of Americans not having health insurance, they don't like the idea of the government defaulting on its debt with the potential of throwing the world into another recession/depression. 

As I predicted elsewhere, the Kochs are trying to steer The Titanic away from that iceberg.

Also, not surprisingly, one of the Kochs, as a younger man, was a Holocaust Denier.

Killing the poor

Across the country.

It is outrageous that millions of the poorest people in the country will be denied health insurance because of decisions made mostly by Republican governors and legislators. These people will neither qualify for their state’s Medicaid program for the poor nor for subsidized coverage on new insurance exchanges that are being established in every state by the health care reform law.

Their plight is a result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down the reform law’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid and made expansion optional. Every state in the Deep South except Arkansas has rejected expansion, as have Republican-led states elsewhere. These 26 states would rather turn down incredibly generous federal funds that would finance 100 percent of the expansion costs for three years and at least 90 percent thereafter than offer a helping hand to their most vulnerable residents.

As Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff reported in The Times on Thursday, two-thirds of the country’s poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers and more than half of the uninsured low-wage workers live in those states. The reform law originally sought to help poor and middle-income people through two parallel mechanisms. One was a mandatory expansion of Medicaid (which in most states cover primarily children and their parents with incomes well below the poverty level) to cover childless adults and to help people with income levels above the poverty line. Those with slightly higher incomes would be eligible for federal subsidies to buy private policies on the new insurance exchanges.

That approach fell apart when 26 states decided not to expand Medicaid, at least for now. There is no provision in the law to provide health insurance subsidies for anyone below the poverty line because those people are supposed to be covered by Medicaid.

The Times report, based on an analysis of census data, found that eight million Americans who are impoverished and uninsured will be ineligible for help of either kind. To add to the insanity, people whose incomes initially qualify them for subsidies on the exchanges could — if their income fell because they lost a job — end up with no coverage at all.

There are no easy solutions to the difficulties wrought by the Supreme Court decision and the callousness of state officials who seized on that opening to victimize the poor.

States like New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee that are still flirting with the idea of expansion should do the right thing and expand. States that have adamantly refused to expand should relent and take the generous federal funds. And if Congressional Republicans ever give up on their obsession to destroy the health reform law, Congress could surely find ways to make certain that the people most in need of help get it.

What do they want?

Why we are here.

Pressed on what House Republicans want to get out the national government shutdown, Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) said yesterday: "We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."

We've seen this movie before. And I don't mean the 1995/96 shutdown or the impeachment sequel three years later. This is more like that 70s era made for TV movie.

The down and outs have hijacked the school bus and taken the kids captive. But now the cops have shown up. They're surrounded. It's pretty clear our heroes are not getting the million dollars in unmarked bills or the plane to Cuba or Shangri-La or ThreeTimeLoserStan. So now they're fidgety and angry, a mix of desperate and threatening. They're not even sure what they want or perhaps more candidly, what they can get. But they better get something!

It all makes negotiation challenging.

From Harry Reid's pocket

Harry Reid has been carrying this piece of paper in pocket for a long time. It reads:

"I was there, fighting the fight, one of twelve, voting against Medicare, because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965." - Sen. Bob Dole

"Now we didn't get rid of it in round one because we didn't think it politically smart ... But we believe (Medicare) is going to wither on the vine." - House Speaker Newt Gingrich

"Medicare has no place in a free world. Social Security is a rotten trick ... I think we're going to have to bite the bullet on Social Security and phase it out over time." - House Majority Leader Dick Armey

Agree with them? Ready to get rid of medicare yet?

Yes, I remember the petition

I vaguely remember that petition, to make it illegal for Rob Schneider to make a movie in California. But I thought he was supposed to be incarcerated.