Bidenomics Works

From Philipp Plein's Billionaire clothing line, via Yahoo Sports. 

Heather Cox Richardson puts together a couple of things I really should have put together myself: Bidenomics, seen as a definitive turn from Reagan-era neoliberalism, and the amazing character of the US economy at the moment, as reflected in the current numbers on growth, unemployment, and consumer spending:

with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, lawmakers claimed that concentrating wealth on the “supply side” of the economy would enable wealthy investors and businessmen to manage the economy more efficiently than was possible when the government meddled, and the resulting economic growth would make the entire country more prosperous. 

The problem was that this system never produced the economic boom it promised. Instead, it moved money dramatically upward and hollowed out the American middle class while leaving poorer Americans significantly worse off. 

Trading Places

Via Indusrtrial Workers of the World.

I dared to address Loomis on this subject, for the first time since the TPP debacle, when he started suggesting that Democrats might be protesting against Trump's proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum for the wrong reason:

Does it strike you how etymologically bizarre that is, objecting to the way "liberals" "start" to defend "free trade"? I thought the simple problem with tariffs on solar cells and now iron and aluminum was that they'd clearly cost far more jobs than they saved, but.....

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 3, 2018

With the thought that whatever "liberal" has meant from the 1850s until now has some kind of connecting thread in it, like the idea that there's an intrinsic value in generosity and offering others latitude, whether it's in poor relief or encouraging people from other countries to try to sell stuff in yours (Hayekian liberalism or neoliberalism in the strict sense being about being generous and latitudinarian with yourself, and the hell with other people).

Poor Jonah

Update: Hi MBRU fans, thanks Blogenfreude!

Pieter Aertsen, The Egg Dance, 1552. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, via Wikipedia.

Goldberg is so guileless, really, it's almost kind of sweet:

Donald Trump almost never uses the language of traditional American conservatism, with its emphasis on classically liberal notions of limited government, constitutionalism, individualism, and free trade. He prefers to talk about “strength” and “winning” while vowing to restore the “greatness” of yesteryear through his indomitable will.

The language of traditional American conservatism, dear boy, has never won an election and never will, because the voters don't give a shit about it, unless you mean when you're talking about their taxes, and they're the kind of voters (as we mostly are, unfortunately) who look at their paystubs and don't realize that the bulk of what's deducted from the gross pay is insurance for old-age health care, pension, and unemployment, and the amount dedicated to cash for welfare clients and foreigners vanishingly tiny.

Friedmanic Depression. II

Image via OceanDesign.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Sad-Eyed Mustache of the Lowlands, is still depressed, thanks to a rather cool-sounding book by an old collaborator of his, Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era, which

argues that the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy were an aberration — an era when America became so overwhelmingly more powerful than any rival that it got geopolitically drunk and decided that it didn’t just want to be a cop on the beat protecting our nation, but also a social worker, architect and carpenter doing nation-building abroad.

Well, do tell, Tom. You've certainly been wearing that thinking cap lately.

I'd like to just let him alone for once, or indeed single him out for praise, but there's one bit I can't let go, because it provides a remarkable example of the use of bad grammar as an obfuscatory device:

Friedmanic Depression

Image via YouPouch.

Just days, it seems, after thrilling the world with his conviction that the Obama administration could make a crucial difference in the Middle East by funding, um, tertiary education and whatnot in Iraqi Kurdistan (devastated by the collapse of oil prices), land of advanced democracy and place where Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Archmustache of Dreamland, is quite often invited to share his wisdom, Tom himself, filing another column from Iraq, suddenly seems deeply down in the dumps, in part, apparently, because he's just learned how complicated the Kurds are:

If you think there is a simple answer to this problem, you ought to come out here for a week. Just trying to figure out the differences among the Kurdish parties and militias in Syria and Iraq — the Y.P.G., P.Y.D., P.U.K., K.D.P. and P.K.K. — took me a day.

Did he really only find out about that this week? Oh dear.

Was Marx a Neoliberal?

F. Engels, by Akai Shizuku at DeviantArt.

I wanted to find something to say about the trillion-dollar trade deals between the US and China from the APEC meeting and between the Indian government and WTO, where the US has averted a longstanding crisis by backing down on its insistence that India stop its food security program, which subsidizes grain farmers to provide cheap wheat and rice to the—I think I heard 400 million on the radio—poor. But I'm as bad as everybody else when it comes to trade policy, and too much thinking about it makes my head hurt.

I did find something to share, though, by Friedrich Engels (vintage 1888) on Comrade Marx and his views on trade policy, which were decidedly on the liberal side in the 19th-century sense:

Wut we need *moar* stupid?

A mysterious result of Googling "neoliberal kittens". From Radioactive Mongoose.

Teaser from Peter Beinart's new foreign policy piece in the Atlantic:

A new critique of the president's "don't do stupid shit" doctrine is emerging—and it's coming from within his own party.

Honest. Like that cowardly Obama, refusing to deploy the stupid-shit weapon, which has served us so well in the past.

Beinart sets up a left-right-'n'-center trichotomy of Obama criticism with a right represented by Senator McCain demanding that the administration do more bombing, and a left represented by Prosecutor Greenwald denouncing the Obama administration as a prolongation of the war-mad dictatorial Bush administration, just with different faces, with which thoughtful citizens can't negotiate at all, only groan "O tempora! O mores!" and go their weary ways. The center, in this picture, is what you might call the hipster faction, as in "you probably haven't heard of them yet":

Neoliberal watch: This is going to be a bumpy ride

Moloch. From the Oedipus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher, 1652. Wikimedia.

Remember Kenneth G. Langone, the Home Depot founder warning that it was Kristallnacht time for our beleaguered billionaires?

“I hope [the supposed ongoing shift to populism is] not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” (Slate, March 2014)

Or proposing to shut down Pope Francis with all this inequality talk with a bribe of an unspecified number of millions (somewhere between one and nine)?