Nothing will do that

This is a very good Tom Frank article. Like everything Frank has put out this year, including his newest book, it calls necessary attention to the corrupt relationship between the Democratic political establishment and economic elites on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

And so President Barack Obama did an interview with Business Week in which he was congratulated for his stewardship of the economy and asked “what industries” he might choose to join upon his retirement from the White House. The president replied as follows:

… what I will say is that – just to bring things full circle about innovation – the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.

In relating this anecdote, I am not aiming to infuriate because the man we elected in 2008 to get tough with high finance and shut the revolving door was now talking about taking his own walk through that door and getting a job in finance. No. My object here is to describe the confident, complacent mood of the country’s ruling class in the middle of last month. So let us continue.

On the morning after British voters chose to leave the European Union, Obama was in California addressing an audience at Stanford University, a school often celebrated these days as the pre-eminent educational institution of Silicon Valley. The occasion of the president’s remarks was the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and the substance of his speech was the purest globaloney, flavored with a whiff of vintage dotcom ebullience. Obama marveled at the smart young creative people who start tech businesses. He deplored bigotry as an impediment that sometimes keeps these smart creative people from succeeding. He demanded that more power be given to the smart young creatives who are transforming the world. Keywords included “innovation”, “interconnection”, and of course “Zuckerberg”, the Facebook CEO, who has appeared with Obama on so many occasions and whose company is often used as shorthand by Democrats to signify everything that is wonderful about our era.

This is the key to understanding what's broken about American politics. It works only to promote the interests of the wealthiest class of elites to the greater detriment of just about everyone else.  But, as always, this core crisis of western democracy gets pushed further and further toward the back pages the closer we get to the election which is now at the part of the cycle where everything is about stagecraft criticism and Pokemon memes. At least Frank is still writing about things that matter.

At the same time, though, I find it strange that he hasn't yet figured out how the crisis ends.. or that he assumes it can end at all. 

It’s easy to see the problems presented by a cliquish elite when they happen elsewhere. In the countries of Old Europe, maybe, powerful politicians sell out grotesquely to Goldman Sachs; but when an idealistic American president announces that he wants to seek a career in venture capital, we have trouble saying much of anything. In Britain, maybe, they have an “establishment”; but what we have in America, we think, are talented people who deserve to be on top. One wonders what kind of a shock it will take to shake us out of this meritocratic complacency once and for all.

Frank has been writing about these issues for most of his career. So why is he still waiting for an event that will "shake us out of this meritocratic complacency once and for all"? One would think he'd figured out by now that nothing will do that.  Pundits like to impose long, well threaded narratives onto descriptions of news and politics but real life events don't fit together so neatly. The news isn't part of some grand novel. It's just a bunch of things that happen.

All of which is to say there is no "once and for all." There is only muddling through and trudging on according to whatever path best suits the people with the power to influence decisions. The Brexit vote may be, as Frank says, "a blunt and ugly rejection of some of (Hillary's) cohort’s most cherished ideas," but what does that matter? That fit has already begun to be put down.  Brexit may not even end up happening. And if and when it does, who will be hurt most? Probably not bankers and venture capitalists.

None of this is to say that Frank's analysis is wrong. It's spot on. Nor do we mean to say that it doesn't matter.  Quite the contrary.  Public policy implemented for and by elites has profound negative impacts on us all. But invariably the costs of every "shock" produced, be it a war, a financial collapse, or an ecological disaster are borne by the rest of us. The foundational power relationships that allow the ruling classes to go on ruling are never put right by any of it. So goes the history of pretty much everything.

Can that change? Who knows?  Does it mean there's nothing to be done at all? I hope it doesn't mean that. But as long as we keep lying to ourselves about an impending resolution via magical judgment "shock" imposed by the universe, we're probably barking up the wrong tree. Because what progress ever comes of fetishizing an apocalypse anyway? There are enough every day disasters to worry about as it is.

QOTD

Thomas Frank on pretty much the problem with American politics right now:

One of the things about a meritocracy, and this is a line I repeat many times in the book, there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. The guys at the top of the profession have very little sympathy for the people at the bottom. When one of their colleagues gets fired, they don’t go out on strike. They don’t do that. This comes from personal experience. When academic labor force is becoming adjunctified, Uber-ized, whatever you want to call it, there’s no real protest from on high, from the leaders of academia. Here and there, yes people are very sympathetic and they feel bad about it but there’s no organized counter-effort. There’s no solidarity in this group, but there is this amazing deference between the people at the top.

Frank is talking about what we at the Yellow Blog have been referring to as the "Yuppie Left" for over a decade.  They're pretty much Mitch Landrieu's core constituency and they're the people most responsible for the exploding inequality and gentrification of post-Katrina New Orleans.  Knock over all the affordable housing for all they care. Their property values are up.

Wonked to death

Thomas Frank:

Actually, let me offer a correction to Obama’s formula. What really defines our time is the simultaneous soaring of inequality and the maddening inability of most progressives (there are exceptions, of course) to talk about it in a way that might actually inspire anyone to get off their ass. Start with the word itself: Like “neoliberalism,” another favorite lefty term for many of these same developments, “inequality” is confusing. It is euphemistic and aloof. It gets easily muddled with other, similar-sounding issues like marriage equality, gender equality and equal housing opportunity. Its tone is also needlessly clinical, giving the whole debate a technical and bloodless air.

Still, to read around on the subject is to get the feeling that certain liberals like it that way. “Needlessly clinical” is exactly their style. The subject, for them, must be positively cloaked in wonkery. They don’t talk much about “class,” like some troublemaker from the ’30s; they talk about “inequality,” which is a delicate and intricate signifier. Oh, it is extremely complex. It requires so many charts.

There are several factors that contribute to this phenomenon.  Sure, some of our so-called liberal politicians and pundits are just kind of spineless.  But still more of them really do just identify too closely with the people who created the problem in the first place to challenge them directly.

One often wonders whose side Mary Landrieu is even on, for example.

“I’m a die-hard Republican, but I love Mary Landrieu,” said Lafayette resident Mark Miller, who owns and runs multiple Louisiana-based companies that drill and offer support services to other energy firms. “You can’t overstate what it means for this state to have her experience and influence, especially with the energy chairmanship.”

Among other things, Miller cites Landrieu’s support for the Keystone Pipeline extension, her opposition to cap-and-trade legislation, her defense of offshore drilling after the Gulf oil spill and her support for the industry’s tax advantages. Landrieu has also garnered support from shipbuilding magnate Donald “Boysie” Bollinger, noteworthy because Bollinger helped bankroll the GOP’s takeover of the Louisiana Legislature.

But, more to Frank's point, too often arguments over substantial crises involving real life villains are sanitized as the passive consequence of circumstance rather than the deliberate product of policy choices.

The rich got so goddamn rich, in other words, because the signature policies of the Great Right Turn were designed to make them rich. And, as the world knows, these policies weren’t limited to Republicans; Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—plus, of course, their resident economists and cabinet members—all more or less endorsed the basic tenets of the free-market faith. They are all implicated.

So inequality, now that we’re having a “conversation” about it, must of course turn out to be massively complicated, something no one could possibly have seen coming — sort of like the 2008 financial crisis, come to think of it. Furthermore, it must be seen as another technical problem, a matter for the experts to solve, like the budget deficit or entitlement spending.

Which brings me back to Tulane academic and Preservation In Print contributor Richard Campanella's carefully chosen words describing the "green dot" plan in this NYT piece.

Decision makers may see a disaster as “an opportunity to finally get things right,” said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, but during those times, “everyone else craves normalcy.”

Of course it isn't Campanella's job to say "Decision makers Plutocrats may see a disaster as an opportunity to finally get things right take advantage of tragedy in order to improve their position, but during those times, everyone else craves normalcy victims may push back." But his phrasing does paint the parties more likely to help him get his work published in a forgiving light.  And keeping those types happy actually is a big part of his job. 

Not that academia is all about flattery to power.  It has other uses. But those who would seek to represent  us on the short end of the inequality debate aren't doing us any favors by adopting its often hedged and passive rhetoric.

Some links for Sunday

• James Gill's column this morning is about ION Chariman Jay Lapeyre and his role in helping Bobby Jindal bring the SLFPA-E to heel.
  

Lapeyre is not just a big shot in Texas. He is most active in his home state of Louisiana where, for instance, he chairs the committee that nominates candidates for seats on the Flood Authority. The committee gives Gov. Bobby Jindal two to choose from when a member’s term expires, which (John) Barry’s has.

Barry was a certainty for reappointment until Jindal lost his rag over the lawsuit. None of the official reasons for the administration’s dudgeon make any sense, but the oil and gas industry has never lacked friends in high places. At Lapeyre’s urging, four members of the committee joined him in voting against Barry. That produced a 5-5 vote, and Barry was a goner.

“Whew,” the roomful of ION customers would exclaim, “that was a close one! Where would we be without Jay?”

Various civic and educational institutions are represented on the nominating committee, where Lapeyre’s sponsor is the Campaign for a Better Louisiana. Not that much better, though. A blatant conflict of interest is evidently still jake.



• Also from The Advocate,  a front page feature on the still very much in doubt future of Avondale shipyards. Avondale currently employs 1500 of its one time 5,000 strong workforce and is scheduled to close once the final order from its Navy contract runs out next month.

As various players scramble to put together a new strategy for the shipyard, the bulk of the 3,500 displaced workers are still in limbo.


Amid the slowdown, it’s hard to gauge what’s has become of the yard’s nearly 3,500 displaced workers.

Ault said he has had a hard time convincing people to drive or move the 120 miles to Pascagoula, where thousands of openings remain unfilled. He said the union has kept in touch with laid-off members, and many of them have stuck around. “Bringing back people would be a fairly rapid transition,” he said.

Bollinger — who employs about 3,000 people in Louisiana and whose firm typically has hundreds of openings, mostly at its repair facility in Amelia — said he expected to be deluged with resumes when Avondale’s closing was announced. But it didn’t happen, and his company has hired only about 50 former Avondale employees.

Neither going to Pascagoula nor working for Boysie Bollinger seems particularly appealing to these folks for some reason.

Google's plan to turn your every idea or public discussion about anything into an advertisement.

When the new ad policy goes live on Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people. If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album. Such product endorsements, especially from friends and acquaintances, are a powerful lure to brands, replicating word-of-mouth marketing on a broad scale. Social advertising — which includes a wide range of ads, including endorsements — is a $9.5 billion business, according to eMarketer, accounting for 8 percent of digital ad spending.

Related: Here is Thomas Frank writing about the Silicon Valley (which we really should think of as the new Madison Avenue) obsession with monetizing "creativity" whatever that might be.

Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.

That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.

And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?

Here's an amusing stunt by comedian Sam Hyde who passed himself off as a presenter at a TED show. For the uninitiated, TED is kind of a tent revival circuit of motivational talks for middle managers who worship the Creativity consensus thinking Frank describes. Hyde bullshits his way onstage and delivers... well.. this.

Bill Moyers on the House Republican rump:

Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees; they demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline; they demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled and the big bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.

When the president refused to buckle to this extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship.

From Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech:

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

Yesterday, as the shutdown talks moved back to the Senate, Harry Reid kept up the hardball stance.

At an afternoon news conference, Reid said he wanted a shorter period for stopgap funding and a longer extension of the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Reid particularly wants to scale back deep automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, which were passed during the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown and will take effect every January for the next decade, unless Congress amends them.

Exclusive footage of Senate negotiations between Reid and McConnel

Speaking of stomping on the Tea Party, the Saints kickoff in New Engaland in about an hour and a half. This means, among other things, I'm going out for beer. Here, via B&G Review, is a moment of greatness for you to ponder in the meantime.