I asked myself the other day, just what would I do for a job.  That little demon appeared on my shoulder answering, “Why I’d star in a porn film, if my credentials would stand up.”  I know, everyone is talking about the President’s comment supporting Gay marriage.  The nominal left is gushing over the President’s remark, but to me however, this is just pure Obama.  The President says something which costs him nothing, he carefully pushes Joe Biden out in front of the cameras first to say something and if his head isn’t taken by the press, Obama follows.

Obama never walks across a street without looking carefully both ways checking the numbers and demographics which all show this issue as a fait accompli.  This is going to come soon, and someday people will scratch their heads and wonder, why this was ever an issue?  The political leadership is so behind the curve buried in the fears of Bible thumping bullshit artists.  Believing the shoveled threats of blue haired church ladies reeking vengeance come November.  Obama’s pronouncement is akin to Richard Nixon pronouncing his acceptance of the voting rights act in 1970, so five years ago.

Continue reading “Walking” »

Mitt Romney is mercilessly lampooned for being a snob.  Author Lee Siegal calls the former Massachusetts governor the “Whitest white man to run for president in recent memory,” by which he means an embodiment of a “retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.”

President Obama, for his part, is often characterized as an aloof law professor so unable to relate to the unwashed masses that he must rely on a teleprompter.  Even the not-unsympathetic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls the automaton-like Obama, “Spock.”  No feel-your-pain here; just sterile wonkiness.

Continue reading “Ordinary Folk for President?” »

So, to briefly recap where we’ve been, I’ve argued that the Austerity Agenda is so convincing as an argument, despite austerity’s repeated failure, because it appears to accord so well with people’s personal experience.  That is, individual experiences with personal debt, which involve cutting back expenses, are metaphorically transferred onto people’s thinking about government budgets and debt as well.  This occurs despite the fact that there are major differences between personal and government budgeting, primarily that governments can issue sovereign debt and they do not die, so they can borrow now, invest, and pay later when that investment has grown the economy and made the debt a smaller percentage of it.  Really, all that government does when it takes on debt is to shift some of the society’s financial resources around, transferring some from the private sector into the public sphere, but the society itself doesn’t “go into debt.”  The individual wallet metaphor misleads people into the conclusion that budgets deficits are always a problem, and always one that must be solved by cutting expenses, just like responsible individuals do.  But the reality is just too different from the metaphor to permit clear thinking about economics.
Continue reading “Austerity Agenda and The Body Politic III: Family Budget as Alternative Metaphor” »

The metaphor of the body politic is often a very good one, for both terms of the metaphor share some similarities: both bodies and governments are very complex entities with many interconnected, interdependent parts; failure or damage to one part of a body or a government can ripple throughout the whole and affect distant parts; both bodies and governments can be actors; both individuals and governments take actions such as growing, fighting, deciding, consuming, sickening, dying, and so on.  The metaphor of the political body has endured for thousands of years as an apt and useful framework for conceiving politics because both of its terms are characterized by complex interdependency.

Continue reading “Austerity Agenda and The Body Politic II: Personal and Government Budgeting Are Not the Same” »

I would like to pose the question: Why do so many people believe in the Austerity Agenda?  As Paul Krugman, David Atkins, Dean Baker, and others continually point out, austerity doesn’t work: bare-bones public budgets fail to make the necessary investments in education, infrastructure, and other public goods that societies need to for a decent quality of life – especially during recessions when the small government model lacks counter-cyclical capability.  History shows that Keynesianism leads to better economic outcomes.  Furthermore, large welfare states attend not only elevate the poor but the middle class too, securing their security and social mobility.  Since the lower and middle classes benefit most from big-government social democracy, one would expect a majority coalition to support it.

Continue reading “Austerity Agenda and The Body Politic I” »