TED Fest, Part One

OK, so now that I've a weekend on Martha's Vineyard behind me (thanks, Mom and Dad!) and just over a week till college starts up again, I think I've both cooled my jets enough about Congress/the economy to go about a project I've had in the back of my mind for a little while now: introducing my devoted readers to the joys of TED.

TED talks -- of which there are nearly 2,000 and growing at the rate of one each weekday -- are billed as an opportunity for the some of the world's smartest and most interesting people to "give the talk of their lives," presenting the great insights of their life's work in 18 minutes or fewer. The TED conference used to be private only to the smarty-pants speakers and a select few guests; now, they're posting all the official TED talks online and adding others from "TEDx" events, which are locally-hosted mini-TEDs not supervised by TED itself.

So here we go. I'm planning a five-day series, and it's going to go something like this: I'll write a short intro to each talk, embed the video in the blog (just push play, and expand to full-screen view if you like with the little icon in the top-right corner) and then offer a few concluding thoughts. I'm so invested in this that I'll actually try to keep the posts to a semi-digestible length! As you're watching/reading, I ask a few things: 1) I chose these five for a reason -- I think they kind of tell a story if you're able to make the connections between them, and they cover some of the areas of life/policy/ethics/whatever that I'm most interested in. Here's your chance to get a look at the kind of stuff that fuels my brain and this blog! 2) Please please please share these. You'll get so much more out of them if you share them with friends or, best of all, devote 30 minutes a night over the next five nights (or whenever's convenient) to watch them with your family/friends. Just like movie night, only shorter and smarter! Talk about them afterwards; you'll be amazed at how much you get out of them if you process them with others. 3) Intrigued? Visit TED.com and get watchin'! I've been banging on about adding a half-hour or so of "brain time" to your day for a while now, and TED talks are a great way to do this. Better than solitaire during your lunch break, that's for sure. There's loads of great ones out there; I highly encourage you to explore for yourselves and/or email me for recommendations...

TALK ONE: Michael Pollan, "A Plant's-Eye View." Some of you probably know Pollan from his immensely popular books on food and nutrition (The Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.). The books are indeed great, and I encourage reading them. But this talk gives a pretty good 18-minute encapsulation of his thesis: agriculture and food are fecked, and it's long past time we did something about it. After all, we've most of the answers already at hand.

But Pollan's biggest point in this talk -- and the one I want you to remember throughout the week and beyond -- is his insight that we're still stuck in this zero-sum Cartesian mind-set, and it's literally killing us. Once upon a time, we lived in a zero-sum world of economic mercantilism and scientific Cartesianism. In this mindset, you have to lose in order for me to win: my empire has to exploit the New World for gold and silver better and faster than yours, since there's only so much gold in the world; in order for me to "win" food through agriculture, it follows that nature should "lose," etc.

Think about that for a minute: although the ideas of Smith and Darwin have been around for hundreds of years, the zero-sum mind-set still persists more than we like to let on. The fundamental insight of those two gentlemen was that the world is a win-win scenario, not a win-lose one. The butcher slaughters animals, the miller grinds wheat, the baker bakes, then everyone trades and benefits by trading his best wares for his neighbors'. That's a much rosier view of capitalism than we're seeing on today's front pages, no? Meanwhile, Darwin's theory of evolution allowed us to see nature as win-win as well. This is Pollan's point: we "know" that nature likes a win-win equilibrium in the sense that we've had Darwin's work for a bit over a century and a half, but we've yet to really internalize it. Hence the "concentrated animal feeding operation" and industrial agriculture: we force nature to lose so that we may gain more and more yields from our agricultural inputs.

But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if the world could be, as The Office memorably put it, a "win-win-win" equation? Watch the talk and see what this might mean in the realm of food and agriculture:

OK. Hopefully you've learned something about food and/or Darwin, but now let's think about the wider implications of this insight. As a little personal challenge, before opening your newspaper tomorrow morning, close your eyes for a moment and think: Darwinism. Win-win-win. Corny, yes. But see how the news matches up: "Corporate cash holdings up, labor earnings down," etc. If 400 people in this country control more of our national wealth than the rest of us combined (scary but true), do we appear to be in more of a Darwinian/Smithian win-win-win utopia, or a Cartesian liquidity trap? Thought so.

To the greatest extent possible, keep thinking your corny little Darwin-thought as you go about your daily life and process the news. As it sinks in, you'll probably start noticing latent Cartesianism (bad!) more and more: business or environment; labor or capital; revenue increases or across-the-board budget cuts, etc. All of this is emblematic of the Cartesian "bigotry of low expectations" regarding our own capabilities: why couldn't we have a booming carbon-neutral or (necessary) negative-carbon economy? Instead of patting ourselves on the back with "moon shot" tropes and "we'll always be a triple-A nation" soccer-mom bullshit, why not try to envision a new and Darwinian future in which we the people of the United States can prosper alongside and in concert with they the people of the rest of the world and Mother Nature? As they say, a crisis -- particularly one of the current magnitude -- is too good an opportunity to let it go to waste: let's use the present one to imagine ourselves into a new, Darwin[-win-win]ian world order. It's the only way forward, and it's past time to nut up and start working in that direction.

Finally, keep this Darwinian insight in mind as you watch the rest of the videos in this week's cycle. The more you've internalized Darwinism, the more you'll hear echos of it in the talks to follow. Enjoy!

***

EXTRA CREDIT: Matt Ridley, "When Ideas Have Sex." Need I say more? This is a nice little look into the evolutionary history of your own mind, as well as the theory that undergirds this whole project.

The United States of Austerity

The "sugar-coated Satan sandwich" passed and will be signed this afternoon, whether we like what we see under the bun or not. I pretty much yelled myself out yesterday; here's a handful of other people's reactions that I think are noteworthy:

• The MoJo article from which I shamelessly stole the title of this post, in which Andy Kroll lays out what's under the bun of the sandwich: "Education, environmental protection, and jobs programs are just the start. An array of social safety net programs—the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, food stamps, housing assistance for low-income individuals, foster care money, and basic income security programs—could lose funding under the debt ceiling plan. So, too, could critical infrastructure investments in better bridges, roads, and rail transportation." (You know, the usual steal from the rich/give to the poor stuff.) All things we have to look forward to until and unless what Paul Krugman calls the "confidence fairy" swoops in to save us.
• Here's a brilliant article by the Mother Jones editors (both women) on John Boehner's real handicap. Unlike some other powerful men from all over the political spectrum, his problem (so far as we know) isn't with too much contact with women, but too little. The speaker is a member of one of 24 remaining male-only golf clubs in the country, and the editors see that as a resounding statement of the exclusivity and disconnect that mark him and his party. And it has an impact on all of us: he might be spurning girls to go play golf with the boys, "But don't feel left out, guys: The speaker's contempt is not confined to those of the female persuasion. From the glass ceiling to the debt ceiling, Boehner and the rest of the GOP brass are not only ignoring the needs of the majority of Americans, they are actively flipping all of us the bird. And that is something new."
• David Corn on "Obama's Hope-a-Dope Strategy:" maybe, despite the fury its engendered on both sides, there's some method to the lead-from-behind, fight-avoiding madness after all? I'm not totally buying this one, as you'll see from the comment I left on the story ("hoya progressive," posted at 8:17am).
• Kevin Drum explains that when it comes to getting your agenda across (and legislated), "It's the public opinion, stupid." He notes how well the Right has done at capturing the public's opinion (and its language, and its vote...) since Reagan, then correctly lays the blame on everyone on the Left who's failed to think up a captivating/intelligent/motivational-enough narrative to win the public opinion (and control of the elusive "national narrative") back. Here, Drum wonders at the teeny-tiny percentage of voters who actually favor a no-compromise Tea Party agenda and their ability to hold the whole country hostage ("According to a recent poll, only 22% of Americans consider themselves tea party members or supporters, half the number of last November. And of that 22%, two-thirds supported a debt ceiling compromise and more than half thought it should include tax increases as well as spending cuts...So who was driving the absolutist view in Congress over the past few months? If it was the no-compromise wing of the tea party, that's less than 10% of the country. So riddle me this: how did we manage to let 10% of the country bring us to the brink of disaster? It is a remarkable thing.")
• Speaking of hostage crises, Joe Nocera tells us why we did wrong to negotiate with the Tea Party terrorists, just like with the other kind.
• For a great example of what's wrong we how we think about, describe and (in the case of the mainstream media) cover the debate right now, skim or read today's NYT "Room for Debate" panel of thinkers thinking about whether the Tea Party won the debate on debt. From a legislative standpoint, they didn't just win, they crushed it: in spite of the latest Pew poll showing that 83% of Republican and Tea Party conservatives disapproved of the debt debate (incidentally, they maintained a "decidedly positive impression of [somewhat conciliatory, almost-deal-making] House Speaker John Boehner's role in the process"), the Tea Party's legislative jihad left us with the Satan sandwich du jour. Sure, they wanted twice the cuts they got, but they got a "deal" waaaaay to the right of the American public they're so eager to defend. And what do our NYT writers (nominally of varying political persuasions) have to say? Invariably, that the Tea Party won big, and in most instances they take wildly inaccurate swipes like this one at macroeconomics: "How quickly they [Obama and co.] forget the fiscal bombs they dropped on the American people with the nearly $800 billion stimulus package, “Cash for Clunkers,” so-called high-speed rail and other Keynesian boondoggles that have accelerated our bumping up against the debt ceiling while simultaneously exacerbating our nation’s economic woes" (John M. O'Hara, "Voters Will Understand" [!!]). Color me un-understanding, but where do we even begin to make sense of that brain fart? Go back and read the GDP=C+I+G+X bit from yesterday: the Tea Party won a massive legislative victory, but that isn't the point. The point is that America lost by an even greater margin. This qualifies as "upholding and protecting" the Constitution?

And a few of my own comments:

• What is Mitch McConnell on about? As quoted in the Times after the Senate passed the Satan sandwich: "“It may have been messy,” he said. “It may have appeared to some that their government wasn’t working, but in fact the opposite was true.” Legislating, he added, “was never meant to be pretty.”" In case anyone was still wondering whether he had any grounding in reality, he went on to say that "It's never, ever personal" in legislation. Um, Mitch? When you flip off 90% of the country, it borders on personal. And when you f--- over a whole generation or three of Americans, hell yeah it's personal.
• Chances of the "confidence fairy" arriving aren't looking too good. NYT headline just below the one that announces the deal: "Stocks fall again, despite debt vote." No shit. The "confidence fairy" idea, for those who haven't been reading Krugman, is that if everyone slashes spending and goes into deep voluntary austerity, the world will somehow be convinced that we're serious about our economy and will start investing. No: cutting like that convinces everyone that we're serious about austerity, which is precisely the opposite kind of economic environment to the growth-fueled kind that investors actually have confidence (and thus investments) in. This is like an obese person deciding to not only stop eating, but to start purging. That doesn't give me confidence that the person will get healthy by going into extreme caloric debt until he's made up for all his previous excesses. He'll be unhappy and/or dead long before he's skinny and healthy. Everyone knows you fight obesity with diet and exercise, not starvation. In this hypothetical, government is obese (true, but not as badly as the Tea Party would have it), self-imposed austerity is the starvation/purging plan, and "grand bargains" (for lack of a better term for smart, long-range policy) are akin to a personalized diet and exercise plan. If you were an insurer (investor) and had to bet on one treatment to save your patient (country), which would you invest in? Exactly.
• Finally, I can't hit this point hard enough: we have shamed ourselves in the world's eyes in this debt debacle. Our leaders might not read the newspaper and even our newspapers might not cover little things like the Euro-crisis and Fukushima much if at all, but the rest of the world is watching our political suicide attempt with horror (Germany's Die Welt had the U.S. debt crisis at the top of Page One and the op-eds, and they're not impressed with us). The reason shouldn't be hard to understand: the post-WWII economy is entirely predicated on the "full faith and credit" of the United States government. T-Bills are gold and we don't even pay the credit-rating agencies for our automatic AAA rating (every other country is charged a rating fee). The implication shouldn't be hard to see: if the Zimbabwean dollar collapses (it has), no-one cares because the world is still USD-denominated. If the Euro collapses (it might), Europe is in deep doo-doo, but the world economy probably pulls through, contracting to be sure, but seeking and finding shelter in the Greenback. If the U.S. economy goes over the cliff, however, the other 193 countries shackled to the dollar can't just step off the merry-go-round. To go back to Die Welt's coverage of our crisis, for example, today's articles emphasized the self-inflicted nature of our plight and how it terrifies the rest of the world, rightly made us sound completely irrational in quoting a variety of citizens from all over the country who invariably describe the Washington "theater" as making everyone involved look bad, and mentioned that foreign tourists in America were relieved that we'd averted default. A British tourist was quoted as saying (I'm translating back into English here) that "We've been waiting for a resolution. Whatever happens in the USA invariably also has consequences on Europe." We as a country fundamentally don't understand that insight, and in these days of the "hot, flat and crowded" world, that's a political, economic and moral crime. If we want to shoot ourselves in the face by, say, completely de-funding education (oh, wait, we just did that!), we're only hurting ourselves. But when we play chicken with default, it's not just our own future we're toying with. It's also the world's, and the world is pretty unhappy to see the U.S. both politically immobilized and acting with such callous disregard to the consequences of its actions. Christine Lagarde, new head of the IMF, blasted us the other day. The U.S. getting scolded by the IMF chief might be a new phenomenon, but we deserve it.
• If you don't intuitively understand the consequences of that, read that article: "Among foreign leaders and in global markets, the political histrionics have eroded America’s already diminishing aura as the world’s economic haven and the sole country with the power to lead the rest of the world out of financial crisis and recession." Understand this: the world still needs the dollar today, this week, this month because until now, no one has thought about jumping ship from it. Now that we've proven ourselves incompetent stewards of the world's reserve currency, the world can and will find ways to de-couple itself from the dollar if it feels the need. And, as Krugman wrote yesterday, "the idea that a temporary disruption would permanently damage faith in US institutions now seems moot; if you haven’t already lost faith in US institutions, you’re not paying attention." That's called playing with fire, people, and we're so myopic we don't even understand what we're doing. The dollar hasn't always been the world's currency, but we act like it has -- and always will be. Don't think for a second that the world won't figure out a different solution if we prove that the inmates are running the asylum; if that happens, we're in for a nasty re-education in what it's like to be on a dependent currency, not the world's dominant currency.
• OMG! I think I've finally developed "the conscience of a liberal!" Krugman's post this morning:

Macroeconomic Folly

All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece

ATHENS, Greece — They descended by the hundreds — black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise — and the Norway massacre on Monday drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Got that 30s feeling, all the way.

A "deal" that will live in infamy

First off, the Tweet of the Decade, brought to you by Rep. Emmanel Cleaver II (D-MO):

"This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see."

I don't have Twitter and I've never heard of the Representative before, but that's the best use of 140 characters to come out of Congress in the last decade. Referring to the deal as merely a "shit sandwich" (as MoJo's Kevin Drum just did), though accurate, doesn't hold a candle to that turn of phrase. But that's enough complimenting Congress for one day. On to the juicy stuff.

***

I woke up this morning feeling two unfamiliar and extremely disheartening things. First, I finally internalized last night in a way that I've never done before that my generation (and likely the next one) is the first to have been sentenced to live shorter, unhealthier, less-prosperous lives than our parents. And there is virtually nothing we can do about it: even if we instantly re-imagine our economic, agricultural, environmental and political systems such that starting this afternoon we live in a no-growth, happiness-based, organic-locavoric-flexitarian-slow food-eating, carbon-scrubbing, functionally-governing la-la land, I'm not sure we can beat the spread. Some of us -- namely us Hoyas who have money, time and leisure to watch TED talks, stay fit and eat organic/local/flexitarian/slow food -- will surely benefit, and we'd all be able to re-start the American dream for our kids. But can we safely assume that we could rescue all of today's kids, about a quarter of whom are overweight or obese before they can even vote, from the final destruction of the American dream as we knew it this past year?

Second, I awoke today deeply, deeply shamed and embarrassed to be an American. I'm not a blind believer in the exceptionalist gospel, I'm not much of an Americapologist and I've already noted in this space that I can admit that we as a nation are full of shit to about the same degree as everybody else. But this debt-ceiling crisis has left me profoundly disillusioned about our nation's ability and/or desire to be a global citizen. To a frightening degree, these past weeks have shown how unwilling or unable we and our elected Representatives are to acknowledge and accept that we do not exist in some kind of global vacuum. As a good little SFS-er, I've always been for engagement with the world, but after experiencing the wider world for myself in the way that only study abroad can do, the combination of Tea Party myopia and Obama's "lead from behind" doctrine in world affairs now appears so morally and politically broken to me I'm at a loss for words. Though we've enjoyed great security thanks to our relative physical isolation, it is obscene and shameful that we still entertain ideological and emotional isolationism in today's hyper-connected/"flat"/free-trade world. Especially given that the world economy is predicated on the U.S. serving as the global buyer of first and last resort, it is absolutely unconscionable to flirt with committing economic seppuku before the rest of the world's horrified gaze. These days, it's not just our own future we're sacrificing. It's theirs, too, and they've every right to be repulsed by our callousness.

I stand by yesterday's points regarding political grandstanding if the "sugar-coated satan sandwich" passes tonight (anyone who dares to pat him- or herself on the back for getting a deal done at the price of the American dream and American credibility should be pilloried). I'd also like to remind our jilted-lover-in-chief that he's not the only one feeling a little let down these days. You know something, Mr. President? Despite my cynicism and better instincts to the contrary, I decided to buy into your idealism, hope and change. You were the first president I voted for, and when you won, I thought "we'd" won. I ran down to the White House to celebrate your victory on election night. I stood in the freezing cold to catch a tiny glimpse of you at the pre-inaugural concert and at your historic inauguration. I actually thought that the country's first 21st-century "progressive" candidate might bring about a 21st-century progressive politics. Sorry for being so stupid. I've tried to cut you as much slack as I could over the past few years, but leading from behind while the crazies kill the American promise is neither hope, nor change, nor progress nor inspiration. As Paul Krugman wrote immediately after the "deal" was announced, you've "surrendered." And that's what I can't forgive. You can belay the sniffling press conferences already. Your time's already over. Mine's just beginning, and it's already stolen. Sorry it didn't work out between us, but you'll start drawing Social Security in just over a decade. Don't come crying to me about your raisin in the sun of a presidency.

And to the Republicans: at long, long last, have you no sense of decency, sirs and madams? I sincerely hope you are prepared to spend all eternity derided in the history books as the Hoovers of the future who killed the Dream for fear of looking weak. We still vilify Hoover today for feeding cattle while people starved as he doomed the country to the Great Depression. When the Great Recession and its fallout are in the history books, "Don't be John Boehner/Sara Palin/a Tea Partier!" will have replaced charges of Hoover-ism 80 years from now. I hope you all are satisfied with yourselves. And I hope you are secure in the knowledge that the Baby Boomers, offspring of the "Greatest Generation" and originators of the cultural revolution that was going to save the world, have betrayed both the legacy of your parents and the future of your children and your children's children. Look back on your words and actions in this time and know shame.

Deal or no deal?

Great conversation going on on CNN right now. Finally, finally, on the eve of a potential debt-ceiling deal passing through Congress, CNN's Ali Velshi is saying what has needed to be said throughout this process, and he's stridently challenging CNN's token Republican correspondent Alex Castellanos while he's at it. Maybe he (or others) have been saying this before and I haven't been picking up on it since I don't watch TV. What's he saying?

• It's the unemployment, stupid. As long as unemployment remains at 9.2%, all else is basically a moot point in the economic conversation. People who don't have jobs don't have money and don't spend the money they don't have on stuff they don't need, which is what we call "growth." (That's my dig on modern capitalism, not Velshi's, but it needs to be part of the conversation.) High unemployment = sucky economy = self-reinforcing economic death spiral. Simple as that. As long as unemployment remains mysteriously absent from the political debate, we're inherently talking band-aids at best, not real fixes.
• The debt-ceiling crisis is entirely self-imposed (by Republicans -- and we can't say that enough). Castellanos made a U.S.-Greece comparison, saying that we're spending ourselves into oblivion like Greece, and Velshi jumped in to say that's not it at all: Greece can't issue bonds; we have (deservedly or not) a AAA credit rating and can issue all the bonds we want. Apples and oranges. The Greeks spent themselves into oblivion, we put the gun to our own heads.
• The multiplier of government spending, and the un-economics of the cuts-only proposed deal: ostensibly, cuts and tax hikes have equal effects on the economy (they both take money out of citizens' hands and arguably reduce confidence/investment). As Velshi points out, though, government spending disproportionately affects the least-well-off citizens, who put most or all of the money they receive right back into the economy to purchase essentials. (I'd note that the implication is that essentials might be foregone if the government doesn't aid these people, but since they neither matter nor make themselves heard, I'd probably just be howling at the moon.) Anyway, tax cuts benefit the more-well-off, who don't spend every dollar they have (witness the record corporate cash holdings and CEO pay packages co-existing with the historically shitty economy). Bottom line: we'll see nearly 100% of money given to the neediest re-invested in the economy almost immediately, while money retained by the wealthiest will trickle into their trust funds and not "down" throughout the economy.
• Velshi's greatest hits: "I [speaking as the Republicans] just saved a life because I didn't kill somebody tonight." "We have now plugged the hole that we [Republicans]...shot into the bottom of the boat." "I don't understand how this [cuts-only deal] will create a single job."
  

These are all excellent, well-made points that are absolutely critical for the country to hear and understand. I might be a C+ student in economics, but since the Tea Party have clearly never taken economics, I'll take the liberty of running through a quick econ lesson here:

GDP = C + I + G + X, where GDP is the Gross Domestic Product (the most-used indicator of economic performance, the total value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given time), C is consumption (people and businesses buying stuff), I is investment, G is government spending and X is the export balance (value of exports minus value of imports). Pretty much since the Industrial Revolution, we've experienced the (completely unnatural) miracle of unceasing economic growth. That is, GDP has been steadily rising throughout the world (especially in the global North and West). Even with notable hiccups like the Great Depression, we're so conditioned to the false norm of perpetual growth after centuries of it that the economy is completely unprepared to confront the end of the party. Now, the music hasn't stopped, but C, I and X have taken huge downturns in the recession. That's pretty much what defines recessions: individual and corporate consumers lose confidence and/or disposable income, so they decrease spending, investment and export. To keep growth steady or increasing, the only option left is G: government spending. This is basic Keynesian economics, borne out by the Great Depression, New Deal and WWII: economy (C + I + X, GDP) crashed, FDR borrowed to increase G through the New Deal, then G finally went into overdrive to fight WWII. War and Depression over, C + I + X went way up as we all know. So did G, but the post-War "American Century" was fueled by private spending. Long story short: government spending is critical to picking up the slack in C + I + X during recessions (that's a lot of slack), and the only way to do so is to borrow. If the current stimulus has failed, it has thus failed through smallness, not over-largeness.

Secondly, unemployment is a "lagging indicator:" it stays low as recessions develop (it still takes time to lay people off), but stays high even after recoveries (it takes a while for businesses to decide to hire and then do so). Thus, to claim that our despicably high unemployment rate is a direct failure of the Obama administration is wishful thinking at best: remember, the recession started under the Bush administration, and unemployment picked up under the Obama administration mostly because it took until after "01/20/09" for the "lag" to end. That unemployment hasn't been a higher (i.e. all-consuming) priority of the Obama administration is inexplicably crazy to me, but to simply assert -- as most Republicans do -- that it is somehow purely the fault of Obama and his agenda is fallacious and/or outright untrue.

And some points of my own:

• Let's unpack the oft-cited "family finances" argument trotted out by the Tea Party. They claim that the government needs to live within its means like families. First of all, plenty of families don't do that: they have credit cards, they have mortgages, they have home-equity credit, whatever. Second of all, it is definitely not how the government operates, nor how it's meant to. We actually started building our AAA credit by taking on more debt, not balancing the budget: Alexander Hamilton (one of those Founding Father types the Tea Party are so eager to talk about) consolidated all post-Revolutionary state debts into Federal debt as a way of enticing the states to hang together politically and support the Federal government. That it worked isn't justification for indiscriminately taking on debt, but it's worth noting. Next, it's vital to keep in mind that the money the administration is requesting now is needed simply to pay off our old obligations: in family terms, the mortgage, not the fancy vacation. Families in dire straights should think twice about going deep into debt to buy expensive trinkets in future, but ceasing payments on the mortgage just because they suddenly realized there was a money crunch is neither logical nor possible. Where were today's debt hawks when we were tax cutting and double-war-fighting our way from a budget surplus to the current deficit?
• What's really in the new "deal?" I haven't had a chance to fully read through it yet, but this is important stuff. In addition to putting the government on a certain path for the foreseeable future, it will also tell us what each party's agenda, non-negotiable and compromised points are. That said, consider the cuts in context: is cutting defense spending a good idea in the abstract? Yes. But in the middle of two still-unfunded wars? Probably not. Remember the "Pottery Barn rule?" ("You break it, you buy it.") Well, we invaded two countries and we now have a moral responsibility for the end game in each of them, as well as the continued material and financial support of the (precious few) men and women actually doing our fighting for us. If we suddenly decide to save money on armor and bullets in an IED- and enemy-rich environment, the country will have failed its troops. The NYT ran a poignant story the other day about soldiers and Marines asking Chairman Mullen about what would happen to their paychecks if the government defaults when the Chairman visited Afghanistan. How dare the Republicans, Tea Partiers and anyone else who wants to mess around with default keep wearing those obnoxious little flag pins and spouting "support the troops" and "God bless America?" You go drive the IED-infested roads in a thin-skinned Humvee with nothing but your lapel pin for body armor and no paychecks coming in.
• Even if we get an 11th-hour deal, it won't be good enough, no matter what's in it. Re-imagining the U.S. and global economies is far too big and important a task to cobble together in the nick of time. Let's say this deal passes (it's probably better than even money). Any representative, senator or administration official who grand-stands, photo-ops, signs autographs, sings their own praises or otherwise takes any more credit or draws any more attention to themselves than to hang their head in shame and apologize to the American people for the lunacy of the crisis deserves public shaming and no chance at re-election. If the deal passes, we will have loaded the gun, put the barrel in our own mouth, fired and somehow dodged the bullet (this time). That should be cause for sober, somber reflection, not self-congratulation. By the same token, any media outlet that runs a couple of days of triumphal headlines and then moves on to the next celebrity melt-down or crisis du jour deserves equal blame. We've done tremendous damage to ourselves domestically and internationally (yes, Tea Party, there really are 193 other countries in the world -- and they're watching us, even if you're not watching them) in this manufactured crisis, and if we accept anything less than sincere apologies and honest work going forward from our government, we will only have allowed ourselves to have been duped again. If this doesn't convince us to demand better, we have the government we deserve.
• On changing the terms of the debate: the Times ran an article yesterday on freshman Tea Party representatives discovering "the power of saying no." (No wuckin' fay, right?) Multiple Tea Partiers said with straight, pained faces, how hard it was to look Boehner in the eye and tell him "No, sir" in response to his order that the freshmen "get [their] ass in line." Think about that: the freshmen are on such a debt-jihad bender that when Boehner's inner professional politician starts getting really worried about default and starts demanding compromise, they still refuse!! And the president and the papers still tell us both parties are equally at fault and aren't that far apart on a deal. That's laying on the BS thicker than the speaker lays on the fake tan. And, "In an e-mail to Republican House members, Mr. Boehner noted that 'discussions are underway on legislation that will cut government spending more than it increases the debt limit, and advance the cause of the balanced budget amendment, without job-killing tax hikes.' " My emphasis, but note what he's doing. This is basic Big Lie tactics, people: the more you link little (not-very) subliminal messages like this in people's minds, the more they start to drink the Kool-Aid. (Oh, and the balanced budget amendment is a crock of shit: see the point on family vs. government finances above.)
• And, once more with feeling, what the hell are you doing, Mr. President? Not only is he neither educating nor leading the Congress or the country, but he's prepared to sacrifice some of the most important Democratic priorities (little bitty programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) to placate the Tea Party crazies. Not only is he way to the right of his base, he's to the right of even the majority of Republican voters! What gives? If he put Social Security on the table confident that Republicans would demand more anyway in order to show us how crazy they are, he needed to say something to that effect. That he didn't has me deeply worried that he's actually willing to horse-trade the Democrats' sacred cows (which happen to undergird the American social contract) so he can feel warm and fuzzy about making a compromise. Worse, we don't really have a say in this if he pulls it off. Thought One: what kind of raging Marxist Mau-Mau Muslim uber-socialist trades away Social Security and tax raises with hardly a whimper (i.e. when are the Republicans going to figure out they've actually got a fairly conservative President on their hands?)? Thought Two: what if (God forbid!) they do figure it out? How screwed are we going to be if and when the Tea Party realizes that, rather than a Mau Mau, they've finally got a Democrat in the White House who may very well give them what's left of the New Deal and the unions on a platter. Yes, entitlement programs need re-working, but run that through your mind...
• Finally, on the crime that is pledge-signing: when all but a handful (less than 10) congressional Republicans have signed anti-governing pledges, what are they doing in office (and why on Earth do we keep putting them there?)? Fifty years ago, the country worried that Jack Kennedy was going to be a tool of the Pope. Now, we actively encourage/demand that our elected representatives sign intransigence pledges saying, in essence, that they won't govern. People, what are we doing?! We should be more careful what we wish for, because we may get exactly that. And what do you know: farmers have come out against immigration reform, business and bank leaders have come out against the debt debacle, etc. Who's over-interpreting their mandate now?

Weekend Edition

Following up on the last post, weekend links

A couple of important posts from the professional opinion world:

• With "The Centrist Cop-Out," Paul Krugman has produced yet another simple, easy-to-digest case for what's really wrong with American politics today: we have met the enemy, and he is the GOP. In Krugman's words, "making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse." Couldn't have said it any better myself.
• Timothy Egan follows up with "A Madman and his Manifesto," detailing Rightist European and American responses to the Breivik attacks in Norway. If you listen to that lot, Breivik sold himself short: the world understood his actions in days, not decades. From this side of the Atlantic: "The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis. The summer camp were the children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures 'sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,' Beck said in his national radio broadcast." Excuse me?! True to form, Beck's disciples piled on. The first comment on Beck's site Tuesday in reaction to the news that Breivik's attorney described his client as "insane" was "I really feel for the guy. He loves his country so much that to see his own culture eroded away by multicultures that the govt is letting in, drove him to this heinous act." God forbid American patriotism take the same turn. Oh, wait... Meanwhile, things don't look much better in Europe: Mario Borghezio, member of the European Parliament (!) and Italy's xenophobic Northern League, said in a radio interview, "Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good -- barring the violence. Some of them are great." Read Egan's whole post for a great commentary on the wider -- and deeply troubling -- narrative surrounding Breivik's actions.
• Back to the GOP for a quick sec: Mother Jones's Kevin Drum points out that the level of personal animosity and vindictiveness in Congress today is something new and different. No longer do crusty Congressmen holler at each other all morning and then sit down and make deals all afternoon. "When he was trying to whip his troops into line to vote for his debt ceiling bill on Wednesday, [Boehner's] pitch was simple: 'President Obama hates it. Harry Reid hates it. Nancy Pelosi hates it. Why would Republicans want to be on the side of President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi is beyond me.' That was enough for conservative firebrand Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.). Boehner's plan wasn't perfect, he said in a Facebook post, but 'the fact Pelosi, Reid and Obama hate it doggone makes it perfect enough.' " With Krugman, remind me again why we're determined to reach for headlines that portray the Dems and Republicans as equally intransigent?

Great Utne reads to enjoy this weekend:

• "The Great Republican Sacred Cow:" if you guessed "no new taxes," you'd be right...
• "Liberating America from Wall Street Rule:" there's a novel idea. Guess how we do it: start by making things with real value (as opposed to credit-default swap "value," which is merely printing money to line traders' and bankers' pockets with). And ultimately, it's about (un)employment, stupid.
• "The Coming Economic Disaster:" not to put too fine a point on things, here's one version of the coming car crash of the American, European and Chinese economies. It ain't pretty...

Thrilled the Sox are playing well and/or glad to have the NFL back in your life? Time to "get uncomfortable" about those, too. Here's controversial military/defense writer Andrew Bacevich on the Sox' "hoo-yah" Fourth of July celebrations and, even better, Dave Zirin on the horribly anti-moral co-option and corruption of Pat Tillman's legacy. Both writers aptly cover the growing and troubling links between professional sports and the military that have sprung up since 9/11. Regardless of what you think about NFL players "going to war out there" every Sunday, consider that "When military planes fly over the Super Bowl or General David Petraeus tosses the coin to start the Super Bowl, we don’t blink. If going to war isn’t political, then nothing is. Yet this mix of sports and politics seems perfectly natural to us. It’s not seen as political at all" (Zirin). In the specific case of Tillman, Zirin not only charges that he has been more useful to the politico-military spin establishment dead than alive, but clarifies that the greater part of Tillman's valor was not in forsaking NFL millions for the Army Rangers, but for standing up to The Man: "Tillman had very un-embedded feelings about the Iraq war. His close friend Army Specialist Russell Baer recalled, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town. . . . We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so fucking illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” " From Bacevich's extended meditation on the Red Sox' Fourth of July theater:

To stand in solidarity with those on whom the burden of service and sacrifice falls is about as far as they will go. Expressions of solidarity affirm that the existing relationship between soldiers and society is consistent with democratic practice. By extension, so too is the distribution of prerogatives and responsibilities entailed by that relationship: a few fight, the rest applaud. Put simply, the message that citizens wish to convey to their soldiers is this: Although choosing not to be with you, we are still for you (so long as being for you entails nothing on our part). Cheering for the troops, in effect, provides a convenient mechanism for voiding obligation and easing guilty consciences. ...The late German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for this unearned self-forgiveness and undeserved self-regard. He called it cheap grace. Were he alive today, Bonhoeffer might suggest that a taste for cheap grace, compounded by an appetite for false freedom, is leading Americans down the road to perdition.

From the "You Are What You Eat" Department: if you think you can trust the USDA and FDA to keep you safe, think again. Here's Tom Philpott on the latest agency self-censorship in the face of Big Ag voicing its displeasure. Basically, the USDA produced a document that pointed out that devoting 80% of antibiotics consumed in this country to factory farming might have consequences, for example that "A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS." I've had MRSA. It ain't fun. And it lives in your pork chops. Getting uncomfortable? (If you want to get really excited or really uncomfortable -- or both! -- about what you're putting in your body, click here for a range of TED talks on food. I highly recommend Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman [both on page 2] and Josette Sheeran.)

Finally, the requisite happy/intriguing ending: maybe we're on to something with all this, after all (and three cheers for travel and new experience!)

Challenging the Right, on both sides of the Atlantic

Before I get to the political Right -- Murdoch, Breivik and Boehner -- I am compelled to take on religious conservatism, specifically of the papal variety. An Taoiseach, Enda Kenney, a politically and religiously conservative man and practicing Catholic, pulled no punches in lighting up the Vatican last Wednesday. Speaking on the floor of the Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, in reaction to the publication of the Cloyne Report on sexual abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach loosed all the righteous rage and indignation of a people that have been more completely under the spell -- and the thumb -- of the Church of Rome than any other in Western Christendom. I can't encourage you enough to read his whole speech (it's not very long, and linked above).

"It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children," said an Taoiseach in his preamble.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic…as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism....the narcissism .......that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”......the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

All true, and all damning of the Church's way of operating. Till now, the Vatican has been in the business of obscuring, obfuscating, demurring, clamming up and outright lying in order to protect itself. If the Church is going to maintain any credibility at all, indeed, if it has any intention at all of preaching the Gospel and holding us all to a higher moral standard and encouraging us to be our best selves with a straight face, it had better get out ahead of the crisis and start begging forgiveness instead of buying and/or enforcing silence. When a person or organization speaks in absolutes, as Rome is wont to do, it is necessarily hard to retract from those positions. This is even more the case when one speaks in infallible absolutes. The Great Commandment, on which the Church was founded, is to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It is not to "cover thine ass for all thou art worth."

The only person in the Irish Church who has come through the scandal with any shred of dignity intact is Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who has been routinely passed over for election to the College of Cardinals and received an official cold shoulder for his efforts at reconciliation. Where the rest of the Church, from the Pope to the parish priests, has pointedly refused time and again to accept any blame whatsoever or to issue even a sincere apology for its sins, Archbishop Martin has demonstrated in the most elemental ways he can how sincere are his remorse and desire to reconcile with his flock. With Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, he famously washed the feet of several victims of clerical abuse during a public Mass. Moreover, he has not only apologized sincerely, but recognized (during the foot-washing service) that apologies only go so far: "Someone once reminded me of the difference between on the one hand apologising or saying sorry and on the other hand asking forgiveness. I can bump into someone on the street and say “Sorry”. It can be meaningful or just an empty formula. When I say sorry I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness however I am no longer in charge, I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me. I, as Archbishop of Dublin and as Diarmuid Martin, stand here in this silence and I ask forgiveness of God and I ask for the first steps of forgiveness from of all the survivors of abuse."

The day that Benedict XVI -- or his successor -- stands in silence and in supplication of the forgiveness of God, survivors of abuse and Catholics everywhere, instead of in his usual infallible indignation and indifference, will be the day the Church may truly begin the healing process at last. The tables have turned, Your Holiness: for the first time in over 2,000 years, it is time for the Church to go to her flock in confession and accept the penance given. And it's going to take more than a few "Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers;" for starters, I don't think a Vatican III for the 21st Century would be asking too much...

***

To tell the truth, I have not followed either the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain nor the Norwegian terror attacks allegedly perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in every intimate detail. With the rest of the world, I'm repulsed by both men and their actions (or the actions of their underlings, in Murdoch's case), sorry for the victims and concerned about the wider implications of each.

And we can't deny that there are wider implications for, or perhaps even indictments of, our culture inherent in both the Murdoch and Breivik cases. Neither are truly "lone wolves" in the sense that they cooked up in their twisted souls or unhinged minds actions that have no precedent and no demand. Murdoch's News of the World was not some unread right-wing rag, but a popular mainstream tabloid. Breivik, for all the apparent insanity of his actions, does not strike me as either truly insane nor as a lone Islamophobic crank. I am not about to claim that he is mainstream, but it is chilling that he has maintained that the world will understand his actions in a matter of decades.

Much as I sincerely hope that does not come to pass, we -- by which I mean mostly white, well-off Europeans and Americans -- do need to appreciate that Breivik is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is not nearly as foreign as we would like to tell ourselves it is. Others have already drawn the parallels between Breivik's attacks and Jared Loughner's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (remember her?) and to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but I want to draw the connection between Murdoch, Breivik and the insidiously creeping monism and xenophobia that threaten our vaunted Western cosmopolitan values.

I've written before (and I'm certainly not the only one) that there is a fundamental disconnect in the European project as it currently stands regarding who exactly qualifies as "European." For the cosmopolitan Eurocrats who have been dreaming and imagining the European community for sixty years, that is a theoretical, intellectual and/or geo-political debate. But on the national and even more so on the individual level, it is a personal question. That is more a result of microeconomics than of pure nationalism, though nationalism plays an important role. But nationalism simply proves that "when it's not about the money, it's about the money," as one of my professors like to say. Or, to paraphrase a German friend, individual "European-ness" goes out the window the moment one's own taxes and, more importantly, state entitlements are brought into question. If states extend their social-democratic munificence to immigrants, that means there are more people clamoring for a piece of approximately the same pie as there were before. And when that pie is composed of individuals' tax money, the potential for resentment is understandably high.

I do not exempt the Americans from this criticism, either. We take an equally charitable view towards Mexicans and other Central and South American immigrants as Europeans do towards Muslims and North Africans; anyone who still remembers the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy will moreover have to admit that we can indulge in the occasional bout of Islamophobia ourselves. (That, and the fact that passing a Constitutional amendment to quash the creeping danger of Sharia law remains an arguably higher -- though somewhat stealthier -- priority of the current U.S. Congress and many state legislatures, but we'll get to that.)

Both Murdoch's and Breivik's transgressions were undeniably wrong and have caused a tremendous amount of grief and hurt to a lot of people. But before we get too carried away with cheering the downfall of the media's Mr. Potter or rooting on the Norwegians in hastily upping their maximum allowable prison term from 21 years (!!) so that Breivik could not be set free at the age of 50 (into a world that would understand the actions that got him locked away in the first place?), we need to take a harder look at the bigger picture. And I quite literally mean "we," gentle readers: all of us big-name-college-attending, Polo-wearing, Volvo-driving, Northeastern liberal faux-European stock are quite often part of the problem. Either we don't understand ("Hmph! I read the New York Times, never the Daily Mail!"), or we don't pay enough attention or give enough credence to the machinations of the "other guys" whom we probably don't understand anyway (care to guess how many U.S. states have considered legislation banning Sharia law or other "foreign" legal systems? Twenty-two!! Yep, nearly half of all these United States have seen fit to debate outlawing Islamic law in these days of 10 percent unemployment, self-imposed debt crisis, etc.)

So, if you're a Massachusetts or New York resident whose morning routine involves pulling on some Ralph Lauren or Land's End number, grabbing a Starbucks, commiserating with Paul Krugman about the latest affront to "the conscience of a liberal" and patting yourself on the back for living in a state that has legalized gay marriage, you're too comfortable. If you're proud to have a black(ish) President but don't personally know or interact with any black or Hispanic people (who are, it was announced yesterday in a statistic that sounded more like an Onion headline, suffering more from the current economic environment than are whites), you're too comfortable. And most of all, if you don't fundamentally understand what's going on with the U.S. economy (i.e. what 10 percent unemployment really means to your fellow Americans and what a crime this self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis is), what's going on with the Euro-crisis and its potential ramifications in Europe and the world, and/or what the real ramifications of default or downgrade of the U.S. would be (and how criminally insane it is that our government is trying its damnedest to turn us into Greece by choice), then you're too...feckin'...comfortable!

Much as Europeans need to do some serious soul-searching to determine what an appetite for the News of the World so ravenous that it reached (so far) from Scotland Yard to the prime minister's cabinet and a cultural xenophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik (look up his manifesto and confession online for lists of the ultra-reactionary militant groups he drew inspiration from, from Britain to Scandinavia) say about their society, Americans need to do the same in response to the debt-ceiling crisis and its outcome. I'll leave the culture wars to fight another day. What is most important right now is to look -- really look at and understand -- where we are, how we got here, what's happening, what options are on the table and what they would each achieve if passed.

I'm not going to run through all the messy details. From a factual standpoint, most of what you need to know about where we're at today is contained in two of today's Times editorials, on the choices on the table (which are"between bad and worse"), and the "denial of reality" that is standard operating procedure in the Republican camp. Here are the basic facts to keep in mind:

1) The crisis is self-imposed. If the (Republican) Congress hadn't/didn't draw a line in the sand on the formality of raising the debt ceiling, there is no problem with our current credit as such. There are undeniably long-term policy problems with our borrowing, which is what the Tea Party-coddling Republican strategy is nominally reacting to, but in the short term all that stands between us and default is a congressional OK, which has previously been rubber-stamped ever since Congress got a say in the debt ceiling decades ago. The bottom line is that if we go Greece, we've no one but House Republicans to blame for it, and blame them we must.

2) In less than a week, on 2nd August (or thereabouts), there simply won't be any money left to pay the bills. Unimaginable? Yes. But it's the new reality of the Tea Party-influenced Great Recession country we live in. Either get used to it or get angry and tell Congress where to stick its misplaced, sudden and utterly hypocritical debt puritanism. If you read the second NYT editorial above, you'll get a glimpse of some of the utter BS the Republicans are spewing right now -- there's billions squirreled away somewhere; default ain't no big thing; we're not really going to run out of money because the Treasury is really just a tool of that communist Mau Mau Muslim of a President we've got, so it can't possibly be telling the truth; etc. You can't make this shit up, and no one is calling them on it. They say these things with absolute impunity because no one has found the cojones or moral courage or whatever to look Palin, Bachmann, T-Paw, Cantor, Boehner and the lot square in the eyes and say, "At long last, have ye no decency?"

3) This is major-league politics with major-league consequences, and it's being conducted by a bunch of bush-league freshman representatives. In short, U.S. government default ends the world economic system as we've known it since WWII. The slightly less ominous prospect of a credit rating downgrade will permanently increase borrowing costs on the Federal government and by extension on state and local governments and on consumers. Planning to take out a mortgage on a house or a car? Those rates are tied to Treasury rates, and they'll be going up if we get downgraded, which may happen whether or not we raise the debt ceiling. (Side note: just who the hell are these all-powerful ratings agencies and who elected them lords of the world economy? Vague threats from S&P's, Moody's and others have kept the Euro-crisis unfolding, cast a pall over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and kept the markets in uncertain flux since 2008. Like the Tea Party, no one seems willing or able to tell them to take a hike.) In any case, paying an extra $200-$400 a month on a $200,000 mortgage might not amount to diddly-squat if you've "gone rogue" to the tune of a few million dollars (Palin), spent $4,700 on your hair and makeup since you started campaigning (Bachmann) or spend whatever Boehner spends on his tan, but in real-people terms, another Benjamin lost to interest every week or two is real money.

Politics is one thing. Playing party politics (which both sides are doing) is another. But outright lying with a straight (bright orange) face is another. Remember when the punditry got all worked up about how Obama had "lost control of the narrative" to the Republicans? Think what an understatement that really is. If Obama is willing to sacrifice entitlements, health care, tax reform and who knows what else from the liberal agenda and that's still not enough for the Tea Party, what does that say about each side? Think for a minute about how completely the New Right has seized control of not only the congressional narrative, but the vocabulary of daily life: we can't say the words "liberal," "entitlement" or "tax (increase)" without flinching or embarrassment; things like cost-cutting, "best practices" and supply-side economics are firmly entrenched in our way of looking at the world; no one in politics is willing to admit that there is 10 percent unemployment, much less deal with it (despite my Paul Krugman jibe earlier, he's been on a roll lately as one of the only serious and respected voices dutifully reminding us a couple of times every week that unemployment is the clearest and present-est danger to the economy); we can't regulate anything or anyone worth a damn and refuse to prosecute anyone but private citizens who cheated on the order of thousands of dollars in the wake of the crash; we instinctively deride "Obamacare" as creeping un-American socialism; and we let politicians of all stripes but especially Republicans lie through their teeth about everything from the President's citizenship to the death of Osama bin Laden to the real reasons for the debt crisis. How anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is solely responsible for the Great Recession and the biggest spending binge in history is absolutely beyond me. The crash started during and was a direct result of the administration of George W. Bush, and the earliest and most expensive stimulus measures were passed by the Bush administration. Besides, basic economic principles demand more government spending (yes, deficit-funded spending) in recessions to stimulate demand, not government cut-backs. To suddenly "get serious" about debt after cheering the Bush tax cuts and two unfunded boondoggles in the Middle East is the height of hypocrisy.

To be fair, I have lost a lot of faith in President Obama as this crisis has worn on. His willingness to concede fundamental points and programs to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship and compromise has been uninspiring and unimaginative. His speeches have been likewise. His patrician whining has been exasperating and unproductive (if you're the only adult in Washington, sir, act like it -- teach, cajole and/or spank the "kids" into line, don't cry about it to the voters). I had hoped that the election of the first independent President in modern times (let's face it, he's not really a Democrat, as evidenced by congressional Democrats' howls of protest at being shut out by the Oval Office) would bring with it a new, 21st-century chief executive who had a plan and the energy and bare-knuckled political will to educate the country about it and then set about enacting it in vintage Jackson/T. Roosevelt/F. D. Roosevelt style. Sadly, we got the compromiser-in-chief.

You can't expect to transform Washington by expecting it to compromise on its own. That's business-as-usual to a fault, and if the past three years haven't made that abundantly clear, I don't know what will. Though the Tea Party is completely out of touch with reality, it has hit upon something in seizing on constituent concerns and politicking for all it's worth to respond to them. That those expectations are ginned up, trumped up and hypocritically misrepresented is inexcusable, but at least the Tea Party has set an agenda and fought for it. I do not for a moment wish to see a President elected who would embody or follow the morally bankrupt Big Lie tactics of the Tea Party, but it cannot be denied that it is much easier to control the narrative when you actually have a narrative. Obama isn't trying to get even or get ahead; increasingly, he's not even getting mad, just whiny. Though we should have been doing so long ago, appealing to the nation to call their representatives and demand a deal when you, the President, can't get one done, is hardly the "adult" way of going about things.

Just like individual complacency regarding anti-Sharia initiatives, racial/socio-economic disparity, unemployment, and failure to be informed of and understand what's really going on in the world must be made uncomfortable, political complacency with lying, cheating, stealing, moral bankruptcy and focusing on the wrong issues for the wrong reasons must be made uncomfortable. If President Obama finds it less uncomfortable to let the Republican narrative go unchallenged and their intransigence stand than to confront them ("You want to bang on about birther/truther/deather/debt-puritan bullshit when we've got 10 percent unemployment, a broken economy, a hurting environment and an unsustainable population to worry about? Get out of my sight, and get the hell out of office!"), we as citizens need to start calling the White House as well as the Capitol and reversing his order of preferences. If Congress can't figure out how to "just say no" to pork, Laffer curves, non-regulation, pointless legislation and self-inflicted intransigence (even senior Republicans were admitting last week that their pledge-signing and apocalyptic/absolutist rhetoric had put them in a bit of an ideological Alamo), then we need to vote 'em out. Representatives are up for election every two years. If, as the current batch have, they have been an embarrassment to themselves and their country while in office, they need to go.

But most of all, if we can take anything from the events of the past several weeks, it is the lesson that it is long, long past time to open a serious, adult (though I hesitate to use that word), moral conversation in this country and the world. The Vatican must be put on notice that it's "Blessed are the peacemakers [Abp. Martin]," not "Blessed are the obfuscators [Benedict and pretty well everyone else involved]." Europeans and Americans need to start feeling uncomfortable about the privileged, wholly-unsustainable bubbles we live in. We'd better figure out how to deal with people who don't look, act, dress or believe the same as we do, and we've got to sort out how to stop conspicuously consuming resources at a rate that would require 2.5 Earths to sustain before we exhaust the one Earth we've got. And politicians everywhere have got to start either feeling uncomfortable about being crooks and/or cowards on their own, or we've got to make them uncomfortable.

Let's face it: we're not going to "win the future" with moon-shot platitudes when we don't even operate a space shuttle any longer. The longer we tuck ourselves in at night with the comforting thought that we once made it to the moon, the further out of reach we put the future. I'm not worried about maintaining "American exceptionalism" for its own sake, I'm worried about making sure that we demand the honesty, honor and moral courage of ourselves and our politicians to ensure that we create and hand off a better America -- and a better world -- to our children and their children. That's winning the future, and it's not mutually exclusive, either. In fact, it can't be: if being "exceptional" requires living beyond our means on the sweat of the rest of the world, we're not that exceptional nor admirable, and the world literally cannot cope with others aspiring to or achieving our level of "exception." If, however, being "exceptional" means that we're engaged in bettering our selves, our country and our world and making sure that we have the freest, most democratic, most welcoming society we can create, that's worthy of admiration and emulation, and it won't be zero-sum. Everyone can aspire to that and the world will be a better place for it.

I hope to hell you're uncomfortable by now. I hope you're squirming and the Starbucks next to you is growing cold. I hope you read the NYT's editorial page, call your congressman and bike to work. I hope you challenge yourself to be your best self and see what difference you can make. And, lest you think I'm just an angry, hopeless crank, I hope you'll read and take to heart the three most important reactions to the attacks in Norway. If we can all -- citizens, politicians, religious leaders, whomever alike -- take these to heart, we might actually benefit from the tragedy. From Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg: "Our response is more democracy, more openness and more humanity." From the Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang: "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect." And finally, from a young girl who survived the shooting spree on the island of Utoya: "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness [sic] can create." Amen.

(Oh, and I hope you watch this video, filmed on Shop Street in Galway.)

Weekend Reading

Now that I've remained in one country for 25 straight days -- probably the longest such stretch in about six months -- it's time to change gears and change blogs, and get back to my ruffling/flourishing days of yore. Since it's a weekend and I want to follow through on the "get smart" theme of my last study-abroad post, I'll eschew grand narrative in favor of putting out a sampling of links to explore and brief explanations of what's interesting in the news right now.

[Before I start, the answer to the Yemen poser from last time is that the president's name is Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is currently convalescing in Saudi Arabia after being seriously wounded in an opposition bombing of a presidential compound.]

• On corn and ethanol: for a very quick overview of what's wrong here, read this op-ed from today's Times. For a slightly longer and more slanted argument, try Tom Philpott's post from Mother Jones a few days ago. For those unused to MoJo's coverage, yes it's lefty-loosey, but the writing's good and the facts are almost always very solid, if occasionally cherry-picked.
• More MoJo madness that will make you mad: this month's special report on what MoJo is calling the "Great Speedup" -- the "recovery" that has seen wages and wealth rise at the top by virtue of making those who didn't get laid off work even harder than before -- is vital reading for all you working stiffs out there who sense that things just ain't the way they once were and something's not quite right in the job world. Here's a link to the two-page main article; those who prefer visuals should at least check out the accompanying charticle. For those who want the real quick-and-dirty: corporate profits are up 22% and "productivity" is returning, but no-one's actually getting re-hired. What gives? Turns out industry has simply decided to get back to pre-crash output by demanding more of post-crash input, especially of the human variety. Yet another example of how fallacious traditional measures of economic recovery and well-being are these days: if corporate profits go up enough, GDP will recover, but those of us not in C-suites won't feel any better because we're either working too hard to enjoy it or still unemployed.
• I haven't gotten to this one myself yet, but here's a New Yorker article (courtesy of Longreads.com) on the s---storm that is Galleon. Definitely read this if the words "Galleon" and "Raj Rajaratnam" don't mean anything to you yet. This is an insider-trading scandal of fairly epic proportions that hasn't got nearly as much ink spilled over it as the Madoff mess.
• "Bombing the Moon": a quickie about the ridiculousness of GOP "bipartisanship" and no-new-taxes orthodoxy/lunacy. Should also be taken as a reminder that Obama hasn't exactly been leading from the front on a lot of important issues. I read an NYT opinion piece the other day about the post-FDR phenomenon of the "100 days" presidency, in which we watch with baited breath to see what a new President can do in his first 100 days, and then that's the ballgame for his four years in office as the whole machine gears up for the next round of elections. Think about it. We got ObamaCare and then...what, really? Lots of hot air about bipartisanship. The GOP is making a mockery of itself proving that bipartisanship isn't about to happen right now: if Republicans walking out of budget talks because raising revenue is still on the table -- and calling for Obama to show some leadership in the matter on their way out the door, no less -- hasn't made it clear that they're not about to compromise, what'll do it? Did anyone in the White House watch the GOP "debate" a couple weeks ago? A bunch of blowhards tripping over themselves to impugn Obama as the worst president ever. (Side note: Romney, your signature accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts was RomneyCare, on which ObamaCare is based. Now you're against health care and Obama has failed the nation? Maybe it's not the Mormonism that's keeping you out of office, pal. Maybe people want leaders who actually take a position on issues.)
• The grapes of wrath: in passing Arizona-style anti-immigration, Georgia lawmakers apparently forgot to ask the opinions of the constituency that makes the most use of immigrants: farmers. Now there are fears that Georgia's biggest economic asset, produce, will be left rotting in the fields this summer with no immigrants to harvest it. Whoops! If Georgia farmers -- not exactly bleeding-heart liberals -- are honest enough to admit that they're up a creek without illegals in the fields, somebody ought to listen.
• Southern-fried sanity: those paying careful attention to my last study-abroad lead might remember my Oxford American reference; that's the quarterly "Southern magazine of good literature" that I discovered a couple of years back and now devour every season. Here's an interesting, somewhat off-beat bashing of the Bible Belt and its burr-in-the-saddle relation to the modern, interconnected world of the "global village" from the OA's Hal Crowther. Great read, especially for you Yankees that think there's only one fire-and-brimstone line of thinking below the Mason-Dixon.
• Sibhialtacht Ceilteach (Celtic civilization): three much longer reads for the philosophically-minded among ye. First, the whole article by Michael D. Higgins that I quoted from in the last post, "The Challenge of Building the Mind of Peace." Reading it may remind you of doing homework for your college philosophy class, but I think it's worth it if you've 20 minutes to spare sometime. The other recommendations are proper summer reading: Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys and Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry. These were the last books I bought for myself at Charlie Byrne's siopa leabhair (book shop) in Galway to help myself transition back across the Alantic; both are excellent treatments of the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the birth of modern Ireland as experienced by teen-aged boys in Dublin. At Swim, Two Boys is a 600-page tome that's a bit slow to wade into but thoroughly engrossing and a brilliant literary piece of work that's well worth the effort; A Star Called Henry is classic Doyle, shorter, quicker, peppered with the colourful speech of Dublin street urchins and totally anti-establishment. I've blasted through the first 200 pages in the last 24 hours and should have it finished and the next two books of the trilogy ordered by this evening.
• Grist: Gore on condoms, Obama's losing the greens and how to "put food on your family" courtesy of stupendous supermarket food waste. Three interesting -- and very short -- articles that should get your dander up. Highlights: a conservative (Wayne Christian [!], R-TX) actually admits that what arch-conservatives really want is to eliminate contraception, not just abortion; environmentalists are among the latest liberals to feel a distinct lack of hope or change coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.; and one intrepid reporter literally dumpster-dives at Trader Joe's to feed his family some of the 96 billion pounds of food thrown away in the U.S. every year (correct: "That's 263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second!").
• Traffic in paradise: ever wonder why suburbia seems a little weird when you think about it? Here's one theory: it is the most unnatural development in the world, the first human settlement built on the scale of something other than humans (namely automobiles). Worth a ponder...
• The economics of happiness: Correction -- last post, I mistakenly identified rogue British economist Tim Jackson as "Tim Robinson." Oopsie. In any case, here's his 2010 "Economic Reality Check" TED talk. It's still worth a listen if you're open to hearing that your entire lifestyle is based on buying things you don't need with money you don't have to make impressions that won't last on people you don't know (his words)!

So, happy weekend, and hit the links!