Maybe OWS's most important mission isn't to provide "answers" but to insist that we start asking the right questions

Once upon a time, young uns, there were men (yes, they were almost all men) who dipped into their meat cases to select and then package shoppers' orders, finally weighing each item to determine the price. In this context arose the image of a dishonest practitioner who discreetly had his thumb on the scale -- or, still more disreputably, a "heavy" thumb. By contrast, modern-day merchants of right-wing thuggery shamelessly work their sleight of hand right out in public. Exhibit A: the currently popular "austerity" scam.

Even if you're a deficit hawk this [i.e., draconian slashing of government spending in the name of "austerity," ostensibly to "reduce debt"] is nuts. Instead of reducing the ratio of debt to the size of the overall economy, this strategy increases the ratio because it causes the economy to shrink.

Call it the austerity death trap.

Under these circumstances, the harder a country works to cut its debt, the worse the ratio becomes -- because the economy shrinks even faster.

Greece is already in the trap. Spain and Italy are perilously close. Even Britain, France, and Germany are tiptoeing up to it. And now us.

Deficit hawks have to understand: The first step must be to revive growth and jobs. That way, revenues increse and the debt/GDP ratio drops. Only then -- when the economy is back on track -- do you start cutting. [Boldface emphasis added]

-- former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in a
Nation of Change op-ed piece, "The Austerity Death Trap"

by Ken

There's a point I've been meaning to make about the supposedly deficient "goals" of the "Occupy" demonstrators. Oh, I stand by the points I've already made: (1) that I have a lot more trust in people who shout, "This whole system sucks and it's killing us" than in careerist stooges who use the cover of widespread economic pain to sneak through almost entirely unrelated, radically regressive agendas; and (2) that what passes for programmatic policy proposals these days tends to be weighted toward bought-and-paid-for think-tank bullshit.

The point I haven't made yet is really an extension of these, but an important one, I think. Before we pretend we have ready answers for the questions, hadn't we better make sure we know what the questions are? 'Cause when a pile of toxic sludge like Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor or Paul "The Boy With No Brain" Ryan opens his yap, it's pretty clear that he hasn't the remotest clue. Oh, they've got "answers," all right, but they're answers to their own questions, chiefly that Village perennial, "What's in it for me?"

Let me just disagree with Secretary Reich on one point: when he says "Deficit hawks have to understand . . . ." The fact is that deficit hawks don't gotta understand nuttin'. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes (to pick on just a pair of the more conspicuous and egregious instances) have built an entire media noise empire dedicated to ensuring that the American peasantry for which they have such bottomless contempt and loathing never understands anything, because the minute people begin to try to understand the world around them, Rupert and Roger are out of business, unless they choose to transition to the circus-clown business.

With that one caveat, Reich's message seems to me inarguable. As he has already explained:

Can we just put ideology aside for a moment and be clear about the facts? Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don't have the dough. And businesses aren't hiring because they don't have enough customers.

The only way out of this vicious cycle is for the government -- the spender of last resort -- to boost the economy. The regressives are calling for the opposite.

Just yesterday Howie treated us to an armchair tour of the Wide World of Austerity, "As U.S. Elites Demand Austerity For American Workers, How's It Workin' Out Overseas So Far?" (Do you suppose there are enterprising travel packagers actually putting together Austerity Sampling Tours for their plutocratic and plutocrat-wannabe customers?) The travelscape proved as forbidding as one might expect.

To read the infotainment noozemedia, you would think that there is universal agreement on the one and only solution to the problem of high levels of government debt: the very austerity programs we're seeing inflicted on the countries noted by Secretary Reich, with the all-too-predictably deadly results. Since austerity isn't a solution to the problem, as Reich notes, it can hardly be the "only" solution. He sketches a very different one here, and you'll find the same case being made by actual economists like Dean Baker (here's a piece he wrote for the Guardian in February, "The Great British austerity experiment," about the disastrous lesson of the U.K. austerity regime for Americans), Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, et al.

HOUSING BUBBLE? HOUSING BUBBLE? WHY,
WHATEVER HOUSING BUBBLE DO YOU MEAN?

By astonishing coincidence these happen to be very much the same bunch who warned of impending disaster from a housing bubble that was ignored or outright denied by the whore-economists favored by the infotainment noozers, and of course their mutual masters, the plutocratic oligarchs. And it's these same whore-economists who not only peddle the austerity non-solution for our situation of depressed demand but insist righteously that it's the only solution.

But surely, you say, the prescription of Reich, Baker, Krugman, Stiglitz et al. -- increased government spending to stimulate the economy and reawaken demand -- has been tried and failed. Isn't that what every Republican tells us sneeringly? Well, yes, that's what they all tell us, but that's because they're a consortium of liars, criminals, hoodlums, and ignoramuses. As we on the Left have been screaming for three years now, they have systematically and deliberately done everything in their power to prevent any solution to the country's economic crisis, for their own selfish political and economic gain. From it the thug-igoramus Republicans get a return to power and their plutocratic masters get the more or less final piece of their transformation of the U.S. (and, really, world) economy into a feudal system where they are the lords and the rest of us their serfs.

The Republican thugs used their clout -- notoriously availing themselves of their ability to prevent things they didn't want to emerge from the Senate from emerging -- to cow the eminently cowable President Obama into unilaterally disarming any attempts he might have made to attack the economic crisis. Once again the actual economists were pretty much united in insisting that the "compromise" stimulus package had to fail, both because it was too small and because it was too filled with Republican garbage like tax cuts. The Republicans' only concern was ensuring failure, and if that meant inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the American people, so much the better!

(One might also point out that it was the very same plutocratic overlords and their associates who did so much to create the debt problem, not by paying schoolteachers and garbage collectors living wages, but by enslaving the general population in all the debt they could, both as a way of avoiding having to share their skyrocketing profits in the form of fairly earned wages and as a way of enchaining them to the system the new economic reality they were forging.)

EVEN WHEN REPUBLICANS BLOCK POLICIES THE
PUBLIC SUPPORTS, THEY WIN, SAYS GREG SARGENT

And yet it's the whore-economists who are still always listened to, and the America-destroying right-wingers who always come out ahead politically. Greg Sargent had a great "Plum Line" post this morning, "Why GOP benefits from blocking jobs policies the public supports," taking off from an AP report on a poll ("AP-GfK Poll: Public down on economy, Obama cures") which included an interview with 58-year-old Illinois manufacturing equipment salesman Dale Bartholomew:

Bartholomew said he agrees with Obama's proposed economic remedies and said partisan divisions have blocked the president’s initiatives. But, he added: "His inability to rally the political forces, if you will, to accomplish his goal is what disappoints me."

Says Greg:

I don’t know if this voter is representative of broader sentiment or not, but I suspect he is, and his reaction to what’s happening is important to flag as a clue to a dynamic we should be watching. Voters either don’t understand, or they don’t care, that the GOP has employed an unprecedented level of filibustering in order to block all of Obama’s policies, even ones that have majority public support from Dems, independents and Republicans alike.

Their reaction, in a nutshell, seems to be: The Obama-led government isn’t acting on the economy? Obama can’t get his policies passed? Well, he must be weak.

The AP poll, Greg notes, "finds that only 41 percent say government can do much to create jobs, a finding that’s borne out in other polls." He suggests that "if the GOP’s strategy is to deliberately create government dysfunction out of a belief that the public will blame Obama for it and lose faith on government in general, turning to GOP ideology instead, it very well may be working."

He points to "the truly awful reporting we're seeing from multiple news orgs on what's happening here," citing Jed Lewison's Daily Kos roundup "of headlines this morning that only tell readers that the 'Senate' rejected the $35 billion in state aid to protect the jobs of teachers and firefighters."

Again: News orgs that don’t clearly report that Senate Republicans filibustered the overall jobs bill, and are doing the same with individual pieces of it, refusing to allow a straight up majority vote on any of them, even though they have broad majority public support, are simply misleading their readers and viewers.

This comes after news orgs widely blared the news that the Senate GOP had introduced its own jobs plan without soliciting the views of independent experts on whether that plan would actually . . . create jobs. These epic media pathologies, as Kevin Drum has termed them, benefit Republicans, pure and simple.

So what else is new, Greg? It's not as if the economic elites and their allies and stooges -- unlike that sly butcher with his thumb on the scale -- have been all that secretive about their goals and methods. It appears they don't have to be. Some of those infotainment noozers are just stupid or ignorant, others are really, really lazy, while still others have no attention available for anything except which side their bread is buttered on. These categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and they all lead straight to this outcome, pure and simple.

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