The Grand Bargain Was Even Worse In France

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and David Cote (c.) CEO of Honeywell international and part of the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, are joined by job creators or robber barons or modern day knights to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange

Sorry to keep harping on this but it's important and no doubt we'll be reading and hearing about this Grand Bargain bullshit all the way through Christmas, when they make their "last minute" deal-- picture the Mountie saving the damsel tied to the railroad tracks. As Digby pointed out yesterday, it's nothing but a scam. "They've ginned up this "fiscal cliff" as a Shock Doctrine tactic to create a sense of emergency in which to push through some shock therapy. They're saying they want to avert a near disaster of their own making-- by creating a slow rolling disaster as our income inequality, starved education system, degraded safety net and dilapidated infrastructure get worse and worse." She quoted James Galbraith explaining how the rich plan to use the politicians they own to gut Medicare and Social Security.

That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

And the campaign is also partly political. The fact is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the main way ordinary Americans connect to their federal government, except in wars and disasters. They have made a vast change in family life, unburdening the young of their parents and ensuring that every working person contributes whether they have parents, dependents, survivors or disabled of their own to look after. These programs do this work seamlessly, for next to nothing; their managers earn civil service salaries and the checks arrive on time. For the private competition, this is intolerable; the model is a threat to free markets and must be destroyed.

But, you know, it could be worse. In fact it has been. They call them "job creators" today and they were known as "robber barons" at the turn of the last century but long before that the were known as "cnights," and later, knights. Get King Arthur's roundtable out of your mind. As historian Tom Holland makes clear in his book Millenium, they were dangerous predators, usurpers, thugs, bandits and the Republicans of the 900s and early 1000s. Even before Obama was reelected, we looked at Holland's book to see how these early Ayn Rand types turned Europe's free peasants into serfs.

So as the year 1,000 approached-- remember this was before they had computers and Y2K-- everyone thought Jesus might be coming back and sorting things out. So the whole place went crazy and the Christian world fell apart. Anarchy in the U.K. and everywhere else. So predators started making their move-- basically common thugs and gangstas with a psychotic streak and a will to dominate. Holland uses France as an example of the Grand Bargain they worked out at the time. The clergy was trying to tamp down the lawlessness and violence and the knights weighed agreed to sit down and negotiate.

The pledges that they were obliged to give at Verdun were indisputably stern ones. All their favorite pastimes appeared to have been proscribed. No longer were they to amuse themselves by assaulting the defenseless; by rounding up livestock; by attacking churches; by setting fire to harvests and barns. Yet forbearance might bring its own rewards-- and not in heaven alone. Upstarts as many of the horsemen were, they knew that it was no small matter to be blessed in public by a bishop. Knighthood, once it had been sanctified by oaths sworn upon holy relics, could hardly be dismissed as a criminal calling. Even the most unreasonable and thuggish henchmen of a castellan, as he stood at Verdun alongside the other horsemen of the region, and knelt before the glittering reliquaries, would surely have felt, with a surge of pride, that he was being inducted into an elite. A shared code, a shared ethos, a shared commitment to the use of arms: all were being ranted him. His horse, his spear, his mail shirt: these, in the eyes of God, were what would henceforward serve to define his role in the Christian order. The division between knight and serf, between a person who carried a sword and a person who carried a mattock, was being rendered absolute. If indeed the end days were imminent [which deluded Christians have though was the case for the past thousand years and for the next thousand years and still do to this day... and are encouraged to inflict their delusions on normal people and on society at large] , then this would hardly matter: for all the different orders of society would naturally be dissolved upon the melting of heaven and earth. If, however, Christ did not return, and if the New Jerusalem did not descend from the sky, and if the seasons had continued to revolve as they had always done, year after year after year, then the organizers of the Peace of God would have effectively set their seal upon the enserfment of their very allies: the poor. Such might not have been their intention-- and yet they would have served as the midwives of a new order, all the same. Peace, it appeared might indeed be redeemed from anarchy-- but the price to be paid for it was the last vestige of freedom of the peasantry.

And this, as a bargain, was one that even the peasants themselves were increasingly too punch-drunk to resist. Better a master bound by the strictures of the Peace of God, perhaps, and a storehouse well stocked for the winter, than liberty and a pile of smoking rubble. [Now that was the Shock Doctrine at its purest!] Not that the master necessarily had to be a castellan. The men and women who toiled in the fields around Cluny as the serfs of St. Peter were far from the only peasants to have ended up the dependents of a great monastery. The concern of churchmen for the poor-- though it might be heartfelt-- was as likely, at least in part, to reflect a concern for their own finances. No less than the castellans, great abbots and bishops stood to profit handsomely from the wholesale enserfment of the peasantry-- as long as order and the rule of law could be upheld.

Is that a model for a Grand Bargain that solves all the problems created by the rich on the backs of the poor or what? And, incidentally, the Church is still playing a similar role today as it always has-- even if they suffer small setbacks from time to time, like they did last Tuesday.

Millennium-- Why Do Some Normal People Vote For Republicans?

Last year the easternmost hill in Los Feliz that borders Griffith Park was like a flowerbed of Obama signs. Almost every house was festooned with one. The creator of the iconic Obama "Hope" image, Shepard Fairey, is one of the residents. Less so this year, however. Again, there's just one lonely Republican on the high end hill overlooking the biggest metropolitan park in the country-- or at least only one that displays. It's an old bungalow from the 20's and the people living in it aren't actors or directors or screen writers, lawyers or professionals. They're old and ratty and pissed off... like their house, their house with the ratty old Romney sign awkwardly stapled to the door. Many of the mansions all around it have Obama signs, not as many as 2008, but plenty. Why are so many elderly poor white working class people backing Romney? It doesn't make any sense. Is it just the racism? Or the homophobia or the xenophobia? This is a bad neighborhood for anyone tied to any of that stuff.

I've been thinking about it a lot in the run-up to the election and I think I stumbled upon the answer today... in an odd place: a book by an English historian I discovered on Twitter. It's Tom Holland's Millenium: The End of the World and The Forging of Christendom and the picture he paints of life in the 900s is brutish and unsavory. The poor, particularly, "knew the darkness which might lurk within the human soul. Better order, then, most appear to have reckoned, any order, even the harshest, than the lack of it. And so it was, in counties ruled by iron-willed princes, where the new laws, though brutal, could nevertheless be regarded as legitimate, and despite all the suffering and the misery and the restlessness which accompanied their introduction, that the poor did not revolt." Nope they went along with the Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, Sheldon Adelsons and Koch brothers of the day. And those laws of which Tom Holland is speaking-- laws that turned free men into serfs in France-- reshaped the country. He explains the word "pauperes."

This word, which in ancient times had been used to describe the poor, had gradually, by the tenth century, come to possess a somewhat different meaning: "the powerless." ...They were "lazy, misshapen and ugly" in every way... men who were presumed to eat, and sweat, and rut like beasts... The peasantry toiled in the fields; their betters skimmed off the surplus. It was a simple enough formula, and yet upon it depended the dominance of even the greatest lord.

...Inexorably, the easier it became for a lord to enforce restrictions, and to privatize what had once been common land, the faster it occurred. The poor man out with his bow and arrow in the woods, tracking some game for his cooking pot, just as his forefathers had always done, suddenly found himself branded a poacher, a criminal. Those who wanted food would now have to work for it in the fields the whole year round.

...No less than princes, peasants lived in dread of anarchy. They might find the iron demands of an unjust law fearsome, yet there was one thing that they tended to fear even more: a world in which no laws existed. For then the weak would find themselves the prey of the strong indeed... [T]orture... robberies too and rapes and kidnappings: all were deployed with brutal gusto by the squads determined to trample underfoot every last vestige of independence in the countryside, and to reduce even the most prosperous of peasants to servitude.

The 900s were brutal. And it wasn't until July 14, 1789 that the French finally stormed the Bastille and not until January 21, 1793 that Louis XVI had his head separated from his body. I guess the Koch brothers figure the odds are in their favor. Jump ahead a few years and we found in 2008 President Obama beat McCain in Pennsylvania 3,276,363 (55%) to 2,655,855 (44%). That's big. But of the 11 southwest, traditionally Democratic working class white counties, Obama won one-- Allegheny... and that one has Pittsburgh and sizable African-American and progressive constituencies. He lost Somerset (37%), Fayette (49%), Greene (49%), Washington (47%), Westmoreland (41%), Beaver (48%), Butler (36%), Armstrong (37%), Lawrence (47%), and Indiana (46%). Four years earlier Kerry had won not just Allegheny County but also Fayette, Washington, and Beaver counties. White, working class voters were doing the exact wrong thing for themselves and their families.