Tom Friedman

England's Ashes - Our Future?

Richard Eskow — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:45:09 -0400

Hopefully the worst of the violence is over in Great Britain. London's fires are cooling into ashes, and with any luck they won't be rekindled. But even though the British economy is still a tinderbox, nothing that's happened has dampened some people's enthusiasm for doing the same thing over here..

The radical right, which is now in full command of the Republican Party, is exploiting the crisis for all its worth. And even though the self-described 'sensible center' (which is neither) will condemn the violence, 'centrist' Democrats and media cheerleaders like Tom Friedman will keep pushing the same policies that have brought Great Britain to its knees.

When your ideology demands a 'great bargain' that savages the social safety net, you can't let experience get in the way.

London's Burning

In the punk years leading up to England's last wave of rioting, "London's Burning" was the name of two different songs. The Clash said the city was burning with "boredom," while their lesser-known rivals The Ruts said it was aflame with "anxiety." This year's riots were born of both boredom and anxiety, along with lots of despair and rage.

Conservatives still trapped in the sixties argue that the rioters are acting out the rage of the left. But the angry crowds are really the mirror of a right-wing, instant gratification, get-rich-quick philosophy that exalts materialism and condemns anyone who can't afford goodies like those flat-screen TVs carried out of burning UK shops. The rioters know they've been thrown away by Britain's elites and they're responding in kind. The looters and burners are the flipside of greed, the castaways of consumerism, prosperity's prodigal children.

And they may be coming soon to a location near you.

In their increasingly desperate attempts to prevent the public from seeing the obvious, conservatives blame "multiculturalism" or social liberals. Andrew Roberts, for example, writes that "political leaders have constantly failed to ram home the vital message that the something-for-nothing society is as morally wrong as it is financially bankrupt." Remarkably, that sentence isn't describing politicians who coddled rich criminals, whose deregulation kindled a wave of Wall Street greed and lawlessness that ruined the economy, and whose 'soft on crime' attitudes have allowed those crimes to go unpunished, as any reasonable reader might conclude. Instead, in a piece entitled "Stop Blaming the Wealthy," Stewart's castigating left-leaning politicians - for allegedly mollycoddling the lower classes.

This attempted distraction is fatally flawed by the fact that Labour, which isn't very left-leaning these days anyway, left power more than a year ago. And multiculturalism's been part of the British social fabric for decades. So what has changed in the last year? Austerity economics came to town.

Economic Meltdown

How's that working out? The British economic forecast has just received its fifth downgrade since the Cameron government took power, and that report came after it was announced that retail sales had fallen 2.5% and household income was projected to fall another 2% under the austerity program. Last year's gains in employment have already been reversed. The number of people who have been unemployed for more than a year is the highest it's been in more than a decade.

Three years after Wall Street precipitated a global crisis, British youth unemployment reached record levels earlier this year, An analyst noted that ""Being out of work for more than a year can have a scarring effect, making it harder to get a job as well as having a negative impact on one's health and wellbeing," adding: "The Government's decision to abolish job guarantees for young people may leave a generation of young people scarred for many years to come."

By 2008, Great Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality in more than half a century, and the austerity measures imposed by the new government targeted the victims of that inequality. As a recent report showed, the poorest 10% of the population saw their real income fall over the last decade, while "richest tenth of the population have seen much bigger proportional rises in their incomes than any other group."

The riots began in Tottenham, which has the highest unemployment rate in London. Youth clubs have been closed, because the austerity economics regime slashed 75% of the youth services budget. And, as Seumas Milne points out, young people in the neighborhood said the club closings could lead to rioting, as bored and anxious young people take to the streets.

And the austerity crowd has slashed police budgets, too, just as the House Republican budget did here in the United States. Even law and order, that shibboleth of conservatism, takes a back seat to the radical austerity ideology. That makes it harder for the right and the pseudo-center to justify their discredited policies, leaving them to come up with increasingly shrill and implausible explanations for the violence.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

What do you do when your entire political platform's been discredited? If you're the right, you go on the attack. Glenn Beck said that Democrats are "intentionally going for entitlement cuts) ...to get the American people out on the streets, and I'm telling you now: It will be London, it will be Greece, it is coming. They've sown all the seeds they need to. It's a matter of time."

Rush Limbaugh said rioters were "the equivalent of Obama voters."

(The right-wing quotes come courtesy of Media Matters and their hardy band of scouts. They go spelunking in the dark caves of the human spirit so sew don't have to.)

When the right isn't accusing the left of "cheering the protesters on," it's .... well, it's cheering the protesters on. This mad mentality is best exemplified by a wild rant from the National Review's John Derbyshire called "Let London Burn." Some stalwart grad student could write quite a paper on the undertones and resonances of a paragraph like this one:

"Through British veins runs the poisonous fake idealism of "human rights" and "sensitivity," of happy-clappy multicultural groveling and sick, weak, deracinated moral universalism -- the rotten fruit of a debased, sentimentalized Christianity."

Matt Yglesias makes some telling points, but we'll merely linger on the word deracinate for a moment. The word means "to uproot or displace from one's native environment." Derbyshire doesn't share his vision of a non-deracinated moral universalism or an un-debased, unsentimental Christianity, but we'll assume that the Book of Matthew has no place in it.

Derbyshire also waxes nostalgic for the time when England was "a nation" - words underscored by a link takes you to (I kid you not) a a mezzo-soprano singing "Rule Britannia," as images of the British Empire appear on the screen.

His closing words ring like an unsentimental prayer: Let it burn!

The "burn, baby, burn!" school of conservatism is accompanied by the "fire brigade" conservatives who, while not openly cheering the violence in Derbyshire style, grimly warn that patriotic Americans may be building their own barricades soon. Sean Hannity speculates that rioting and looting will reach our shores in "maybe ten years," another Fox commentator says "it's going to get nasty here, too."

Are they right? Could we be next? That's hard to say. The United States has experienced riots before, of course. Today's economic misery has been most notable for its absence of public activity or protest. But every month that passes, and every austerity measure that's passed, sends the same message to the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, the young, and the struggling middle class: You're on your own.

That's a pretty inflammatory message.

Shrinking America

The austerity crowd has dominated the Republican Party for a generation. Now it's captured most of the mainstream media and much of the Democratic leadership too. The experience of real people in the real world - reflected in Great Britain's economic performance over the past year - hasn't shaken their resolve.

Their media shock troops greeted the austerity budget of the current British government with a wave of prose that can best be described as "austerity porn." We've already discussed the sado-erotic prose employed by the cut-spending crowd as the Cameron team implemented its economic plan: "Articles about the nation's finances are filled with talk of blood, knives, and amputation," wrote Applebaum. "And the British love it."

Well, they don't seem to love it now.

As Appelbaum deployed her snuff-film imagery, millionaire Tom Friedman scoldingly told the nation that spending to reduce unemployment and stimulate economic growth was a "drug" and that the nation had a "values problem." Now, after a year of living by Friedman's "values," Great Britain's economy is in a tailspin and its society is in tatters.

Does that discourage Friedman? Three guesses. In his most recent column (written before the riots began but long after the economic results were in), Friedman's still beating the same old drum. This time he's excited about the idea that the United States and other developed countries are experiencing, not a Great Recession, but a "Great Contraction." That calls for ... gosh, it calls for the same austerity economics Friedman's been preaching for years!

Who'd have guessed? Welcome to Tom Friedman's Incredible Shrinking America.

Firestarters

A great contraction is what precedes childbirth, but Friedman as his cohort want the country to give birth to a monster. Friedman's preaching the incoherent gospel of a new anti-Jerusalem that would replace Winthrop's "shining city on a hill" with a smoldering slum in a trash-filled ravine. Friedman and others of his ilk, in the media and both political parties, are ignoring the economic experience of the last seventy-five years - and news that's as fresh as today's headlines.

Let's be clear: We're not accusing Friedman or anyone else in the US debate of having any responsibility for what's happened in Great Britain. Let's leave that sort of mudslinging to the right. And while we're at it, let's say what shouldn't need to be said but must be in this age of character assassination: To explain violence's economic causes is not to condone it, any more than it condones the crimes of Wall Street to point out that they're caused by deregulation, political corruption, and greed.

That image of America as a shining city comes from the Bible: "A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do [men] light a lamp, and put it under the bushel ... let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven."

But the austerity future is a diminished one, a contracted destiny collapsing into itself like a black hole. Its only light would come from the burning garbage reflected in the windows of its abandoned buildings. We've seen their future, but the lessons of Britain haven't discouraged them. They're still demanding a British-style economy, even while the ashes of London are still warm.

It's incredible, really. As the ruins smolder over there, our most influential people act like children playing with matches. They may use different language, but John Derbyshire's words are the ones that best capture the soul of their vision for America:

Let it burn.

Austerity Chic: It's This Year's "Weapons of Mass Destruction"

Richard Eskow — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:38:31 -0400

Sometimes our political commentariat seems to go fashion-crazy. When a new trend gets popular it overwhelms everything in its path: logic, poltical divisions, even expert opinion. The latest vogue is deficit reduction, and our nation's Anna Wintours tell us we simply have to have it. In Washington, screaming about being in the red is the new black.

Call it "austerity chic," and it's catching on fast. We've already written about an odd quartet of recent austerity-chic pieces from pundits that included Tom Friedman and Anne Applebaum. These pieces tell us why we should find this new style appealing: Self-denial is what makes a nation great.

We've seen this herd mentality before, of course, most notably in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The experts warned us what would happen, but our keyboard-clacking dedicated followers of fashion thought they knew better. Ever eager to issue the clarion call for sacrifice - on somebody else's part - they issued their calls to arms. Their support played a pivotal role in building support for the invasion.

How'd that work out for you?

Once again, the experts tell us that the warning lights are flashing red and the fashionistas aren't listening. That was made clear again this morning, when a conference call was held to announce that 300 economist and civic leaders have signed a statement saying that "there is a grave danger that the still-fragile economic recovery will be undercut by austerity economics." The statement, released by the Institute For America's Future*, adds: "A turn by major governments away from the promotion of growth and jobs and to premature focus on deficit reduction could slow growth and increase unemployment - and could push us back into recession."

Contrast those sentences with the fetishized way Friedman approached reduced spending in his column. "The Greatest Generation's leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice," he writes, whereas today's Americans "had a values breakdown." Here's what Friedman's missing: With 15 million people unemployed and 44 million in poverty, a lot of people are sacrificing right now. As for Applebaum, her orgiastic descriptions of "axe-wielding," "slashing" British budget cuts have to be read to be believed (although I did provide a summary here, if you're the type who shuts their eyes during slasher movies.)

Friedman and Applebaum aren't the only dedicated followers of fashion to join the austerity trend, of course. As we noted in the Friedman/Applebaum piece, Megan McArdle high-fived another business writer for dismissing retirement as a "vacation" while adding that "decades-long" vacations are an indulgence we can no longer afford. And Fareed Zakaria has flirted with the Austerians more than once, although he leans more toward letting all the tax cuts expire. Zakaria's followed at least two other trends recently - the notion that fear of Obama is hampering business investment and the idea that the Great Recession was really your fault - so this isn't a great surprise. (I'm not as down on Zakaria as it might sound. He's a smart guy and his TV show's usually quite interesting. Maybe his "fashion sense" just gets in the way of his common sense.)

In the world of political fashion, Republicans set the trend and others follow. Austerity chic's no exception. As with Iraq, it has just enough Democratic support to provide the "bipartisan" gloss needed to give it critical mass. The latest supporter is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who upped the rhetorical ante recently by declaring the deficit a "national security threat." Erskine Bowles and Rep. Steny Hoyer are among the other prominent Democrats who have jumped on the bandwagon.

But if some Democrats are including are wearing a splash of this year's color, right-wingers are painting their faces with it. John Boehner's call for a 15% cut in domestic spending would plunge the nation back into a deep recession. The Tea Partiers' calls for deep cuts in Social Security would immediately plunge 20 million seniors into poverty, followed shortly thereafter by a massive spike in unemployment as their purchasing power leaves the economy. And their cuts to Medicare and education would further crush our already-wounded economy. (For more information, see Adele Stan's Five Ways the Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Supporters.)

As Dean Baker pointed out on this morning's call, government spending is not the cause of our current deficits. Two wars and a massive tax cut turned a surplus into a massive deficit. (I'd add a massive bank bailout with no reqruiements to limit profits or increase lending.) And, as Baker observed, greater unemployment always leads to greater deficits. Robert Reich, another participant in the call, observed that last quarter's slowdown in the growth of the economy is a warning sign in an already-grave situation. Theresa Ghilarducci suggested that an increase in Social Security could help stimulate growth. All agreed that greater spending is urgently needed to stimulate the economy, leaving deficits to be addressed once economic conditions are healthier.

If "austerity" is this year's "WMD," that doesn't mean that's deficits aren't a concern. They are, and so is the need to keep powerful weapons out of the wrong hands. It's a matter of proportion and priority. The economists who signed today's statement understand the need to reduce the deficit. But they also know that the economy needs to recover first, and that budget cuts - like military might - must be directed toward genuine threats.

Right now the 300 people who signed this statement are as outnumbered as the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. Let's hope they do as well. As for Applebaum and Friedman, is it churlish to point out that they were both cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq? I don't think so. Then, as now, they embraced and promoted a Beltway trend without sufficient thought or foresight. And they've demonstrated a stubborn resistance to face reality in both cases. Applebaum greeted the bipartisan Baker report on Iraq with resentment. She continues to insist, against most experts' opinions, that we won't know whether the war went well for at least a decade. And now, unbowed by past errors, she's trying to drum up support for an attack on Iran.

As for Friedman, he said "we need to give the war six more months" so many times that observers began describing these intervals as "Friedman units." Friedman's enthusiasm for that war led him to the most notorious moment of his career, when he told Charlie Rose that it didn't matter which country we attacked. Any Muslim nation would do, he said, as long as Muslims everywhere saw "American boys and girls going door to door and saying ... you don't think we care? ... You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this."

That was fifteen Friedman units ago, and people change. Friedman's done his mea culpa on the war, which is commendable, and his support for a government-backed "green revolution" is an excellent idea (one that contradicts his newfound austerity passion). Still, he's about to do another major disservice to the American people. He may think it's wise and even inspirational to frame spending cuts as a form of national sacrifice. But the wrong people will be sacrificed,especially in this political climate The economists who signed today's statement understand better than Friedman does what will happen if austerity wins the day.

When asked what piece of fashion advice she would give, Catherine Deneuve suggested that women look in the mirror before going out and remove one piece of jewelry. Austerity-for-its-own sake is a bauble that makes its wearer look overdressed and leaves other people unclothed. We need to have the courage to invest in the future, rather than slashing spending out of political trendiness and a failure of nerve.

A lot of people are hurting right now. To let them languish would be Washington's way of telling them to "suck on this." But helping them would also help the economy recover and grow, which would benefit everybody. It would also send a message to them, and to the world, the this country still believes in its own future. It would be a signal of renewed confidence in the American Dream.

Sure, it will be hard work to turn things around, but it's like the old folks used to say: Hard work never goes out of fashion.

_______________________

*I am a fellow at the Campaign For America's Future, the Institute's sister organization.

(UPDATE: Yet another fashionista dresses himself in austerity chic as a journalist applauds.)

(UPDATE II: Via Glenn Greenwald, we learn that Digby told us of an an austerity-chic pioneer who can afford all the newest fashions.)

For more information on the statement, see here, here, and here.

As the Aging Stoop to Their Labors, Prosperous Pundits Lecture Them About Sacrifice

Richard Eskow — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 03:48:28 -0400

The aging American workforce has been vilified a lot lately, in much the same way the poor were in previous decades. Politicians who once might have spread myths about "welfare queens" are now describing retired people as "greedy geezers." Not to be outdone, well-paid pundits are rushing to lecture people on their moral failings and urging them to rediscover the nobility of sacrifice. But sacrifice for whom, exactly, and to what end? It doesn't seem to matter - and that's the problem.

Fortunately, not everyone's joining the crusade. Today's shining example is John Leland from the New York Times, who took the time to review the data on aging workers. What's more, he even went out and talked to some of them.

Here's what Mr. Leland learned. As a new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research demonstrates, "one in three workers over age 58 does a physically demanding job ... including hammering nails, bending under sinks, lifting baggage -- (a job) can be radically different at age 69 than at age 62. " Leland also met workers like 58-year-old Jack Hartley, who "works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack."

As Leland explains, "Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift." Says Jack Hartley, "The pain started about the time I was 50. Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders."

Politicians from both parties - some Democrats and many Republicans - have been contemplating raising the Social Security retirement age for some time, and their efforts are endorsed by analysts like Eugene Steurle of the Urban Institute. According to Leland, Steurle believes Social Security is threatened financially because people are living longer. That's a doubled-barrelled mistake: Social Security isn't threatened financially. It can pay full benefits until 2037, and could be made permanently stable just by raising the cap on payroll taxes. And the "living longer" part is a common misconception that's easily dispelled by looking up some census tables and other data.

While I disagree with analysts like Mr. Steurle, at least he's civil in expressing his views. That stands in sharp contrast to Deficit Commission co-chair Alan Simpson, the Id of the Washington Elite. We won't re-litigate Simpson's behavior, except to say that his candid articulation of the elite consensus paved the way for a growing wave of prosperous pundits who are now castigating middle class Americans for clinging to their dreams of retirement.

Consider Alison Schrager, a blogger for the The Economist, who wrote this: ""I don't know if it's ever going to be realistic that everyone saves enough to spend the last third of their life on vacation." (Emphasis mine.) Or the Atlantic's Megan McArdle, who exults that Schrager's "vacation" comment is my favorite line in my newest column for the magazine." Adds McArdle: "It was nice that a combination of rising life expectancy and broader pension coverage allowed a large segment of American workers to take what amounted to a multi-decade vacation .... But this was never going to be sustainable."

Pop quiz: Which of these two financially comfortable, sedentary writers has written the sentence that best captures the spirit of Scrooge's "are there no workhouses" speech? Is it the one who thinks retirement from a life of physical labor is a "vacation," or the one who says that's her "favorite line" while adding that letting manual laborers retire before their bodies fail completely was "nice" while it lasted?

(It was a trick question: They've both channeled Scrooge beautifully, and added a more than a pinch of Simon Legree.)

So who are these older workers with wild vacation fantasies, these shirkers looking for an all-expenses-paid trip to Margaritaville? Here are the statistics: Among workers 58 and over, 37% of men and 32% of women do physically demanding work. (The figure's 62% for Hispanic men.) They're janitors, maids, gardeners, carpenters, cooks, and people who carry out the other physically taxing jobs listed in the study. You can almost picture Megan McArdle and Alison Schrager glowering as these working Americans mow their lawns and mop their floors, looking down on them through golden lorgnettes perched on noses wrinkled in disapproval. Imagine: After paying their payroll taxes for thirty or forty years, these workers actually hope to collect a benefit that averages out to more than $1,100 per month (about $920 for women)! No wonder Schrager and McArdle are tut-tutting over the self-indulgent dreams of the hired help.

Then there's Anne Applebaum. In her latest Slate piece, Applebaum thrills to the descriptions she says have been given to Great Britain's new leadership and its fiscal policy: "Vicious cuts." "Savage cuts." "Swingeing (sic) cuts." "Axe-wielders." Never before has a government budget been greeted with such lurid, sado-masochistically charged imagery. Her piece reads like a cross between The Story of O and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. "Articles about the nation's finances are filled with talk of blood, knives, and amputation," Applebaum writes. "And the British love it," she adds enviously.

No debt, please, we're British.

Just in case you didn't get the moral point lying beneath the slasher imagery, Applebaum spells it out: "Austerity is what made Britain great." (And we thought it was the food.) She contrasts the British population's posture of enthusiastic submission, at least as she sees it, with the American people's unwillingness to submit to discipline. We just want "instant gratification," she says -- except, quoting a "quip" from Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, "it isn't quick enough for some people."

While Applebaum calls for our country to embrace "savage cuts," however, she fails to take note of the base from which those cuts would be made. The British have a fully nationalized system of publicly funded healthcare. Their current retirement age is 65 (60 for women born before 1950), where ours is 66 and scheduled to reach 67 by 2022. The British retirement age is scheduled to rise at a much more leisurely pace: to 67 by 2036 and 68 by 2046. But never mind the details: Jack Hartley must start sacrificing now. No more "instant gratification" for you, pal!

Applebaum saves her most jaw-dropping statement for the final paragraph: "I don't hear anyone in America talking about cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security," she writes. Really? She hasn't heard Simpson's repeated calls for cuts? Or John Boehner's suggestion to raise the retirement age to 70? Or House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who made the same suggestion?

Applebaum doesn't even seem to realize that Obama created a Deficit Commission, or that he specifically (and in my view unwisely) authorized it to look at Social Security and Medicare. Let's read that sentence again: "I don't hear anyone in America talking about cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security."

Applebaum's Scrooge moment comes when she contrasts Americans unfavorably with their blade-happy British cousins, and then offers this explanation: " The last period of real national hardship Americans might remember is the 1930s, too long ago for almost everyone alive today."

She might want to run that whole "we can't remember real hardship" notion by the more than six million Americans who are trapped in long-term unemployment, or the other 10 million who are currently unemployed. She might also want to double-check it with the 45 million Americans living in poverty as of 2009, after the highest single-year increase in the number of poor people since they started tracking their numbers. Or with the one out of five children in this country now living in poverty.

The United States now has the third highest poverty rate among developed nations, according to the OECD, behind only Turkey and Mexico. Household participation in the food stamp program passed 41 million for the first time ever in June. A"period of great hardship" is anything but a distant memory for these Americans, who would presumably be among those expected to 'sacrifice.' Which gets us to back to our original question: Sacrifice for whom? She doesn't say.

Neither does Tom Friedman, who devotes most of today's column to scolding children from a lordly height (based on Paul Samuelson's inability to accurately interpret school test scores - but that's a topic for another day). Friedman's displeased with their parents, too. Like Applebaum, Friedman believes our unbalanced budget proves that the nation has a "values problem." "All solutions must be painless," he says dismissively of his fellow Americans. "Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans?"

That's a false equivalence. The stimulus Friedman dismisses as a "drug" is really an urgently needed cure, but you have to be aware of the suffering around you to know that. Many economists who worry about killing the recovery too soon are urging immediate stimulus spending to get the economy moving again. They say cuts should come later, after the economy is stabilized, and shouldn't be applied unjustly. Friedman can't wait. He's too eager to hear "our generation's leaders ... utter the word 'sacrifice'." And he's not too interested in the specifics, either. He never mentions Social Security or any other program by name, but his calls for denial complement and reinforce the anti-Social Security stance of his fellow commentators.

Friedman holds up the "Greatest Generation" as an ideal, the apogee of national self-denial in service of a greater cause. Sure, they're to be honored for their hard work and nobility of spirit. But that same generation enjoyed income equality, retirement security, and prosperity built on the purchasing power of a thriviing middle class. Those are the things that are most threatened by Friedman's rhetoric.

Friedman says our elders called for sacrifice "the only way you can, by saying: 'Follow me'." But that generation sacrificed so that their children could have a good education that would lead to even greater opportunities than they themselves had. They sacrificed so that they could look forward to a financially secure retirement. They sacrificed to reduce poverty, and to build a society where everyone had the opportunity to work and prosper.

What kind of world do Friedman and Applebaum want us to sacrifice for? As we said, that doesn't even seem to matter to them. They're making a fetish of austerity, without any greater vision or purpose. That's fatuous and dangerous, especially when their calls for self-sacrifice are applied with false evenhandedness in the face of rising income inequality, unemployment, and poverty. Sacrifice for the greater good is a fine and admirable thing. But sacrifice for sacrifice's sake, bloodletting for the thrill of seeing a swinging axe, the yearning for a vicarious sense of national nobility at the expense of others -- these are the thoughtless expressions of people who prefer symbol over substance. They're the product of an indulgent form of self-mythologizing that interferes with analytical thinking and anesthetizes the human conscience.

And as for McArdle and Schrager, there's not much more to say. A "vacation"? That's just horrible.

The Growing Power of the Fair Trade Uprising

David Sirota — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:32:19 -0400

LOUISVILLE, KY - I spent yesterday in Ohio's three biggest cities - Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. With the Buckeye State among the hardest hit by lobbyist-written trade policies, it wasn't surprising that NAFTA was at the center of discussion at events for THE UPRISING in Ohio (you can listen to my Ohio NPR interview from yesterday here for a taste).

Over the last few years, polls show the public has moved to something of a consensus position on trade: full-on opposition to NAFTA-style pacts. That's for good reason as this Associated Press report shows. Tearing down tariffs and protections without regard for the consequences is not only a dangerous departure from the policies that built America's economy, but also a deliberate way to force American and foreign workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying, union-busting race to the bottom.

The AP story shows the destructive domino effect of NAFTA and the subsequent NAFTA-style agreements like China PNTR. When multinational corporations shift jobs to Mexico, right-wing trade fundamentalists in Washington offer up a "let them eat cake message" telling workers in Ohio that the shift at least helps impoverished workers south of the border. Then, of course, those workers in Mexico are forced to slash their own wages to compete with desperate workers in China. When the jobs inevitably shift to China, Mexico is left in shambles, and then Chinese workers are forced to slash their own wages to make sure jobs don't go to Vietnam or North Korea, where corporations are angling to employ enslaved labor.

Meanwhile, many of these trade fundamentalists like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria flaunt their supposed environmentalism and humanitarianism by publicly worrying about issues like global warming and the erosion of human rights in the developing world - even though the domino effect they cheer on creates pressure on governments to reduce their pollution controls and human rights in order to retain foreign investment.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to argue with NAFTA backers because they aren't interested in facts. It was none other than Friedman who admitted he vigorously backed a recent NAFTA-style trade deal without even bothering to read it. He, like every other reporter and commentator in Washington, calls NAFTA-style pacts "free trade" - despite the fact that they include thousands of pages of protectionist provisions for corporate profits, despite the fact that even the original architects of NAFTA have long admitted that these agreements aren't free, but instead create "managed" trade. That's the big problem - these deals are managed to enrich the elite at the expense of the rest of us.

Just like it's impossible to argue about reality with deranged religious fundamentalist terrorists, it's impossible to argue with deranged trade fundamentalists who cloak economic terrorism in the language of enlightenment. It gets to the point where Limousine Libertarians in wealthy enclaves like Boulder take to the websites of major newspapers to cite charts showing the decimation of Americans' wages as proof that NAFTA works for Americans.

Left for dead, of course, is a place like Ohio.

Wealthy pundits from New York and Washington drop into the Buckeye State every four years to berate the occasional Democratic presidential candidate who dares to question NAFTA at the quadrennial photo-op at an abandoned manufacturing plant. In the general election, those Democratic presidential candidates then inevitably hire teams of Wall Street insiders who back NAFTA as their top economic advisers, and then scurry to business publications to reassure corporate lobbyists that no, they aren't really serious about reforming our trade policy. Their Republican opponents, meanwhile, head to places like Colombia to tell the right-wing regime there that America - that purported beacon of freedom to the world's masses - will be helping murderous developing-world governments continue to brutalize workers.

But this quadrennial cycle of deception may finally be changing - and not because of the benevolence of any presidential candidate, but because the political tectonics of trade have shifted so dramatically thanks to those who are doing the unglamorous - but critical - work of leveraging real power.

Groups like Public Citizen and the Citizens Trade Campaign have ignored the Partisan War Syndrome that plagues parts of the blogosphere and the progressive left, and used this election as an instrument of the uprising - rather than seeing the election as an objective unto itself. They have, for instance, used the hard-fought Democratic primary to elicit concrete commitments on trade policy from the candidates - including nominee Barack Obama. Those efforts have been supported by a group of industrial state lawmakers, who have similarly leveraged the election as a way to force a conversation about trade into the national political debate. That conversation has been so intense it even wedged its way into the Republican presidential nomination through the candidacy of Mike Huckabee - a candidacy that won Republican primaries in some of the most conservative states based, in part, on his fair trade message.

These moves around trade suggest the emergence of true movement thinking out of the tumult of the uprising I describe in my book. This fair trade movement may continue to be ignored by the media (and, frankly, much of the blogosphere), but it represents one of the most encouraging transpartisan developments of the last few years. Out of the shadows of the crumbling factories that I have driven by here in Ohio may indeed come real change - if this movement continues to coalesce.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.