What A Piece Of Work Is Man

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
  — Shakespeare, Hamlet

We've got a quintessence of dust right here.

How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
In apprehension, like a God!

It is hard to describe just how surreal America's politics has become in 2012. The election is a charade because both parties represent and serve the elites who fund their campaigns. The inescapable conclusion is that all this noise, all this bluster, all this back & forth, is merely sound and fury signifying nothing, a tale told by countless idiots.

Make no mistake about it, the People have been betrayed. The People are betrayed. The People will be betrayed, regardless of the outcome.

I can only conclude that the human capacity for self-delusion is effectively infinite. What a piece of work is man!

So I wonder what goes through David Stockman's mind when he writes scathing editorials in the New York Times about the latest Wonder Boy. (Once upon a time, Stockman himself was the latest Wonder Boy.) I have favorably quoted Stockman in the past about things like crony capitalism and the disappearance of breadwinner (good-paying) jobs. I like him. He is an honest man. Surely he knows better?

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol's  ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Similarly, there can be no hope of a return to vibrant capitalism unless there is a sweeping housecleaning at the Federal Reserve and a thorough renunciation of its interest-rate fixing, bond buying and recurring bailouts of Wall Street speculators. The Greenspan-Bernanke campaigns to repress interest rates have crushed savers, mocked thrift and fueled enormous overconsumption and trade deficits.

The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

Stockman finishes with a flourish.

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

I believe Stockman is bitter. He has seen his life's work go down in flames, his hard-won, true conservative principles betrayed by the likes of Paul Ryan. In interviews he is more and more cynical, as you will see below.

In the end it is about your level of commitment. Are you still willing to play these ridiculous games or not? Stockman seems to me to be deeply ambivalent. He sees the inevitable, catastrophic outcomes, but he's got one foot in this surreal political world and one foot outside of it. How can he possibly remain loyal to this corrupt, evil political system?

For Stockman—and for millions of other Americans—it is time to choose. It is time for him to make up his mind.

 

Comments

[lightningclap]

In the 80s he represented Reaganomics, but now he's a voice of reason. The difference is that in the old days, our representatives had ideological/philosophical differences, but found a way to accomplish a few things working together. Today's leaders are off-the-charts extremists when put in the context of the recent past.

The current cartoon-world version of Conservatism must surely be distressing to old-school Repubs. Or anyone with a brain.

An election away from a heartbeat away from the Presidency!

[Ken Barrows]

They were able to work together because it was easier to "grow" back then. If we had infinite energy and no climate issues, today's politicians would get along great.

[Ben]

President Obama crushed any real emotional investment I have in politics. I simply don't care about politics in any tangible or meaningful way (i.e. voting, campaigning et cetera) anymore. That said there is some entertainment value in politics: I view Obama, Biden, Ryan, and Romney as characters (faux technocrats) in a big fucked up Kabuki Theater play.

[john c. wilson]

Meanwhile Joe Biden remains quietly sloshed.

Half asleep near the liquor cabinet is the true conservative position for an American vice president

[Wanooski]

I think Ken Barrows is right on the money. If we weren't reaching limits and stopgaps to growth, everybody would be quite happy.

[teri]

Oh My God, what a large picture of Ryan. The smirk, the hair, the lapel pin. My eyes, my eyes!

The 3 stooges (Oblahblah, Romney and Ryan) bring this verse to mind - also from Shakespeare:

ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.