On Cabals

Some years ago, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton asserted that a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" had targeted her husband, President Bill Clinton.

In today's New York Times, columnist Timothy Egan stimulated a better word: "Cabal." I like "cabal" for the purpose. Cabals don't have to be vast in order to be effective.

Wikipedia explains: "A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue." Wikipedia elaborates: "The term can also be used to refer to the designs of such persons or to the practical consequences of their emergent behavior, and also holds a general meaning of intrigue and conspiracy. The use of this term usually carries strong connotations of shadowy corners, back rooms and insidious influence; a cabal is more evil and selective than, say, a faction, which is simply selfish; because of this negative connotation, few organizations use the term to refer to themselves or their internal subdivisions."

Egan didn't use the word "cabal" in his column. Instead, he referred to "a knot of Tea Party extremists who will never consider a fresh idea and a House Speaker whose notion of compromise is to tell his Democratic counterpart in the Senate to commit an unprintable act. For John Boehner, his profane shout-out to Harry Reid passed for a New Year’s toast." It was one of Egan's readers who suggested that "cabal" is a better word than "knot" for the phenomenon.

I agree with the reader. For many years now, a small group of extremely wealthy individuals, most of whom got their money the old-fashioned way  (they inherited it) and who don't actually make anything but deals, have put their extreme wealth on the scales to change the rules that served the country well until the early seventies.

These are people who show nothing but disdain for Americans who actually work for a living. And they have proven adept at using intrigue to take resources from workers to line their own pockets.

That's the real story behind the "giant sucking sound" candidate Ross Perot talked about twenty years ago. Not the giant sucking sound of jobs fleeing to Mexico but of capital and jobs fleeing to China and India.

How can American workers (of all different-colored collars) counter  this trend?

Get smart! Vote for jobs.

When everyone is back to work, get control over the banks and other financial institutions.

Uncloak the cabal.

Who Benefits

Income Gains

Rising Tide Used To Lift All Boats - Now It Lifts All Yachts

Who Pays?

Nice Chart From Ezra Klein's WonkBlog. I think there is an error in the legend: "20-60 percentile" should be "20-40 percentile."

Cui Bono?

I may yet comment on the good news/bad news about the "fiscal cliff."

Sometimes a Latin phrase delivered with a lifted eyebrow can suffice:

"Cui Bono"

Reflections On The New Year

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  

 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others  


Reflections on the past and on the future.  What are the chances of a clean break with the past?

Not high. Mark Twain put the matter in perspective:

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Reforms And Other Illusions

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson (Mark Twain)


There is talk of reform in the air.

Hang onto your wallets.

Based on experience of the last couple of decades, there's nothing so harmful to ordinary working people as "reform."

Remember the song about the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer?" That was about reform.

Examples:

Tax reform. Translation: Rich people pay less tax. Workers pay more.

Welfare reform. Translation: Mothers go to work. Who raises the children? TBD.

School reform. Translation 1: Take money and resources from public schools, divert them to charter or private schools. Translation 2: Blame problems on teachers.

Entitlement reform. Translation: Reduce entitlement programs.

Social Security reform. Translation: Reduce benefits.

Election reform. Translation: Make it harder for poor people to vote.

You get the drift.

Happy New Year!

Bad Bargains

It can be well nigh impossible to undo a bad bargain.

Slavery was a bad bargain in 1787/1789. It took three quarters of a century and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives to undo that bad bargain.

Would it have been better to let the slave states go their own way? Possibly.

The settlement of the disputed election of 1876 (Hayes/Tilden) was a bad bargain. It ended reconstruction prematurely and left the former slave states free for nearly another century to do as they wished with their own citizens. It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and the loss of yet more lives to undo that bad bargain.

The Second Amendment was a bad bargain. It sought to limit the coercive power of the federal government by depriving it of a standing army in lieu of state militias. In the end, we got both.

Unification of the armed forces was a bad bargain. A classic case of a solution in search of a problem. Coordination between the Army and the Navy was quite good throughout World War II. Coordination between the Army and the US Army Air Forces was not so good. USAAF wanted to go off and fight wars on their own. That was not ever a really good idea. It is even less so now. But we'll never be able to undo having a separate independent Air Force. Even if no one any longer remembers who Douhet was.

Deregulation was a bad bargain.

The Bush tax cuts were a bad bargain.

Deregulation and tax cuts together have enabled the super rich to redistribute wealth upward from working people to wealthy plutocrats.

Pardon me if I fail to salute the idea of a grand fiscal bargain.

Seventy Years Ago: War In The Pacific

December 31, 1942. The Japanese military high command decides to evacuate forces from Guadalcanal. It will be a complex and challenging undertaking to withdraw forces, and will take more than a month. There will be more battles.

USS Essex, lead ship of a more powerful class of aircraft carriers, is commissioned today.

On New Guinea, after more than two months of jungle fighting against well-defended Japanese positions, the US Army I Corps was nearing victory at Buna on the north coast of New Guinea. Victory here will relieve pressure on Port Moresby.