The world of “alternative facts” is far too much to cope with, as thoughtful people everywhere recognize. The need for truth and honesty in human societies is more obvious than ever. The recent earth day rallies produced a photo of a woman carrying a sign that read “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M MARCHING FOR SCIENCE!” It is horrifying, indeed, that America seems to be descending ever deeper into the depths of fantasy hell.
Bill Maher’s recent Earth Day show was extraordinary, I thought, for the combined commitment of host and guests to identifying factual reality. Highlighting this focus, in his concluding segment “New Rules,” Maher delivered a spectacular rant on Mars: We need to “shut up” about Mars, and how cool it would be to live there, he argued, reminding us that the red planet is “uninhabitable” – no air, no water, and relentlessly cold temperatures up to hundreds of degrees below freezing. Highlighting the fact that several billionaires have fantasized about going there themselves, Maher noted that President Trump recently signed a bill calling for a manned mission to Mars by 2023, a mission that would cost an estimated $450 billion.
Then he cut to the chase: Meanwhile, he observed, Trump is slashing EPA’s budget, effectively disabling the agency under the direction of climate change denier Scott Pruitt. “Want to explore something cold and hard?” Maher asked, as the camera zoomed in on his implacable gaze: “How about the facts?” Let’s put Earth first, he suggested: “Millions of years of evolution shaped us to live here, and only here.”
The inference was that once we allow creationist fantasies to cancel out all evidence about the real universe, we are facing a flat-out denial of science, for which the religious right has increasingly obtained legal First Amendment protection: The notion that anti-science perspectives should have an equal voice in our schools, in practice, means that “faith-based” perceptions of reality gain the upper hand, wherever big money prevails – and that is just about everywhere the radical right prevails. That means that lies and fantasies about the natural sciences and the social sciences — especially economics — are bound to prevail.
It is interesting how quickly conversations on political talk shows come around to economics, always the primary concern. Panelists of this particular show included Seth Moulton, a Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, journalist, S. E. Cupp, a former Fox News Analyst, and Rescue International CEO David Miliband. Moulton commented on the growing poverty and joblessness in this country, while Miliband argued essentially that the root cause of the horrors of war in places served by Rescue International is the fact that millions of people face starvation in these situations.
R elatedly, Maher had prepared a segment on “false equivalence” in our perceptions of Democrats and Republicans. Critical of the progressive movement, in general, for being hypocritical, Maher argued that liberals are typically close-minded, unwilling to consider views with which they disagree. He agreed with Cupp, when she emphasized that liberals need to learn how to “deal with” people with opposing viewpoints, rather than insisting on only exposing yourself to people who agree with you.
In this world where “alternative facts” often prevail, it is crucial to avoid bogging down on differences of opinion or inclination. With this point in mind Maher argued that the views of Democrats are more reality-based, while for Republicans “feelings about key issues apparently depend entirely on the party that is in power.” He cited some statistics that tend to prove his point:
(1) When asked at the end of the Obama Administration whether “the economic situation is good,” 31% of Republicans said yes, but that number jumped from 31% to 61 % once Trump took over. The view among Democrats was basically unchanged (57% yes before, and 60% after);
(2) Similarly, when asked whether they thought the “amount of income tax you pay is fair,” 39% of Republicans said “no” at the end of the Obama term, but the number jumped to 65% a month later. The view among Democrats, again, didn’t change much: (38% dropped to 37%);
(3) Even more pronounced, on the question of whether to bomb Syria, only 22% of Republican voters supported Obama in 2013, but that swung to 86% support for Trump once he took over. For Democrats, where opinions were based more on the substance of the issue and less on support for their leader; the comparable numbers (38% and 37%) did not change.
To Maher, these numbers suggested that Republican voters are “more tribal,” and “less concerned with observable reality.” It is reasonable to speak of tribalism in American politics, but it’s not confined to the political Right. We’ve all evolved from the same small set of very early ancestors, and we all have similar “tribal” instincts. The more important observation about public opinion in my view, which I have not seen discussed, is that economic issues were by far the greatest concern of all voters in November 2016, as revealed by the exit polls.
Over 50% said their main concern was the economy and jobs, while the second most important issue, immigration, was a distant second at 19%. Terrorism was next, and other issues faded quickly into the background.
in an interview by Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times, April 24, 2017, here) Ben Bernanke, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, commented on public opinion regarding the all-important economic issues: “It is really striking,” he said. “The election result completely reversed people’s views of the state of the economy. Republicans who thought that we were in a dystopia now think things look great, and Democrats, the opposite. And it shows that it isn’t all based on an objective assessment of the economy.”
No, Mr. Bernanke, as Bill Maher pointed out, Democrats by and large, are more reality-based, and at least try to have an objective evaluation of the economy. But, as I have been developing in my posts on this site, Republican leaders and their economists are living in a trickle-down fantasy world. They limit their focus to the top 1% economy, oblivious to what is going on in the lower economy. Ben Bernanke (see my book, Reinventing Economics, at Ch. 7) has no macroeconomic concept of income inequality at all: His perception of the income inequality problem (2007) is that people with more education can command higher incomes. (Wow! Thanks for that impressive insight!) I have noticed a pronounced tendency among rank-and-fie conservative voters to subcribe to the false economic ideas of their leaders.
Thus, there is a deeper irony here: Despite everyone’s paramount concern with economic issues, the G.O.P. was able, somehow, to engineer a palace coup, installing an unpredictable and ill-informed plutocrat as CEO of the nation, to head up a government of proto-fascists who want nothing more than all the money they can get their hands on, at whatever cost to the American people, to the environment, and to the future of the planet! This failure of democracy puts us well down “the road to perdition” — and largely because almost no one really understands how the economy really works.
Corporate Gangsterism
Trump’s agenda is, quite frankly, mind-blowing: So far, the agenda has been determined by a fossil fuel industry with the clout to arrange unprecedented access to the remaining oil and gas resources in every American nook and cranny. By leasing drilling rights, industry firms take ownership possession of any resources they can gouge out of the ground, at whatever cost.
The influence of special interests in the Trump administration is blatant. (See, e.g., “Money Talked Loudest at Donald Trump’s Inaugural,” The NY Times Editorial Board, here):
“Bob Murray, one of the coal industry’s loudest voices, spent $300,000 on President Trump’s inauguration and got a lot more than good seats.
“Mr. Murray — whose Murray Energy is a serial violator of federal health and safety rules — demanded that Mr. Trump gut regulatory oversight and pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement in his first three months.
“’I’m not a patient man,’ warned Mr. Murray, who earned infamy when he falsely insisted that the 2007 collapse of his Crandall Canyon mine, which killed six miners, was due to an earthquake, not dodgy mining practices. ‘I’m going to be watching that things happen as fast as they can.’
“They did. After Mr. Trump’s inauguration Mr. Murray, his son Ryan and Kevin Hughes, Murray Energy’s general manager, stood beaming in the White House as Mr. Trump signed a law killing a rule banning coal mining waste from waterways.”
Of course, this is not just about chipping in to pay for inauguration costs, and the influence peddling is not limited to the coal industry, or within that industry even to Mr. Murray. Here, the editorial board noted large donations from communications giants Verison and Comcast, aimed at FCC efforts to scuttle net neutrality and other rules. For “Big Pharma” companies like Amgen and Pfizer, Trump backed off his promise “that government would negotiate lower drug prices for Americans.”
It is no secret that pharmaceutical companies are big-time gougers. Consider the incredible story that Aspen Pharmacare allegedly plotted “to destroy stocks of life-saving medicines” to “drive prices up 4,000 percent” (Katie Foster, Independent, April 15, 2017, here). Foster reported a plan alleged by The Times to manipulate prices of cancer drugs: “After purchasing five different cancer drugs from British firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the company tried to sell the medicines in Europe for up to 40 times their previous price.”
On this road to perdition, we are witnessing the equivalent of the plundering of Native American wealth several centuries ago, when European powers invaded the Aztec and Inca nations in Central and South America. This, time the offense is by the “top 1 %” against everyone else. Big consolidated corporations are taking full control of not only internet and cable services, but also of the utility services (electricity, communications, water) that are necessities of civilized life. My former colleagues and I who used to regulate public utility services in the public interest today are marveling at the evaporation in government, even, of the concepts of “public interest” and “public service.”
Perhaps most stunning is the utter disregard by wealthy power-brokers for environmental protection, a problem highlighted by Bill Maher on his pre-Earth Day show. Trump, by executive order, has been trying to remove all obstacles to fossil fuel extraction (fracking and drilling) and transportation (pipeline construction), including the long-standing protection of national park lands. Extensive fracking has already caused incredible damage, including a growing swarm of earthquakes in the State of Oklahoma (e.g., “Study links Oklahoma earthquake swarm with fracking operations,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2017, here). A tracker site reports two earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past 24 hours, 26 in the past 7 days, 101 in the past 30 days, and 1,400 in the past 365 days. (earthquaketrack.com, here). This is a truly remarkable development: In a fact-based scientific world, rational regulators would have long ago demanded an end to extraction activities in the region.
Environmentalists are deeply dismayed by the Trump agenda, to say the least. This morning I found the most recent “Sierra Atlantic” – the report of the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club for the winter of 2017 – waiting for me at the breakfast table. Here is a brief excerpt from the Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune’s blog, dated shortly after the election (November 10, 2016):
“This was a deeply disappointing election for the United States – and the world. For people all over the country, the pain, anger, and fear at the prospect of a Trump presidency are very real.*** Make no mistake – the election of Donald Trump could be devastating for our climate and for our future. Donald Trump now has the unflattering distinction of being the only head of state in the entire world to reject the scientific consensus that mankind is driving climate change.”
The Trickle-Down Scam
The bottom 99% justifiably feels betrayed by Trump. and most of us are deeply concerned about the prevailing psychological dysfunction in the White House. I will address the tax cut proposals — a subject uniquely related to my qualifications — in my next post. I would point out here, though, the incredible lengths to which greed drives the ultra-wealthy: They are not content with going to all conceivable lengths to accumulate more income and wealth — they also want to reduce as low as possible any responsibility they might be asked to accept for meeting the common costs of society. It is almost as if, in their eyes, the bottom 99% doesn’t even exist! In “Whose Freedom?” George Lakoff has observed that these people have expressed their boundless greed in terms of exercising their “freedom.” It’s not just Donald Trump — the entire plutocracy is infected with a serious psychological problem I think of as “the pathology of wealth.” Chris Mooney’s “The Republican Brain” is a good start, but psychologists interested in survival should thoroughly address the relationship between money and mental health.
The only conceivable rationale for policies designed to make the rich richer is the “trickle-down” fantasy. It is pure fantasy, deep-seated in any brain that actually subscribes to the idea. Instead of learning from experience that tax cuts for the rich do not stimulate economic growth – much less pay for themselves – the Trump economics team (with ties to the Heritage Foundation that ran the same scam for the G.W. Bush administration) continues to proselytize, apparently hoping to sway the uninitiated to the supply-side philosophy. The truth, as I have explained in my earlier posts at this site, is completely the opposite: With mathematical precision, growing wealth concentration and income inequality restrict demand, reducing economic growth.
We have been living in a failed trickle-down scenario for more than thirty years, and declining growth was the primary trigger of the Crash of 2008. Investment advisers who make their living advising wealthy investors how to benefit from a crash have been increasingly warning that the next one is on the way. These firms disagree on their perspective about how the economy works, but there is an emerging consensus among them that another stock market crash is likely soon. Bill Bonner, for example, argued in August of 2016 (here) that “The Fed’s only escape is to trash the dollar.” Bonner argued that “Yellen is handcuffed by weak growth, persistent deflationary trends, political gridlock, and eight years of market manipulation from which there appears to be no escape.”
I agree that there is no escape. But the weak growth is the result of wealth and income concentration, dictated by the long-forgotten Quantity Theory of Money, as I have explained in previous posts. For that we must blame, not “eight (Obama) years of market manipulation” (whatever he means by that), but 35 years of the “Reagan Revolution,” predicated on the fantasy that the rich can persistently gain monetary wealth forever, without wrecking the economy and its growth.
It remains to be seen how much support the G.O.P. continues to have after the significant income contraction that will accompany the next market crash. Equally important will be the degree to which the very wealthy oligarchs will be willing to stop fantasizing. I have serious doubts on that score: Why would people who are unwilling to try to save the planet — or even to keep it livable — be concerned about saving the economy? There is one reason, but only one: They would have to see that they will lose everything in a global economic collapse. Our experience with Donald Trump, so far, does not make me optimistic on that score.
Conclusion
It is hugely ironic that the minority who voted for Trump were mainly concerned about more jobs and higher incomes. The ultimate irony, however, is that, after 250 years of academic development of “political economy,” almost no one understands how the economy really works. That failure is the immediate consequence of sixty years of the tightening grip of neoclassical ideology, and the long-term result of class warfare which, somehow, has been engineered into our social psychology over the thousands of years of human evolution. These characteristics now run counter to the requirements of species survival.
Once again, we are at the point where we rely substantially on comedians and humorists like Andy Borowitz (The New Yorker), Jimmy Fallon (NBC), Bill Maher (HBO), and John Oliver (HBO) for our reality checks. This is not new: Will Rogers (1879-1935) famously provided such relief during the Great Depression. Among his most famous quotations (here) several seem to leap off the page:
“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”
“On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government for four years, no matter wat it does.”
“I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”
“I have always noticed that people will never laugh at anything that is not based on truth.”
Speaking of “truth,” I wonder how many of us feel, as I do, like we are on the road to perdition? In the excellent 2002 movie of that name, Tom Hanks plays a depression era hit man who must defend himself and his own family against the evil inherent in his own profession – in particular his own mentor, a mobster played by the great Paul Newman. We are entering an analogous period today, as most of the writers, producers, and actors in Hollywood seem increasingly to sense. Is history once again set to repeat itself? Well, famously, that’s what history does best.