In my heart of hearts I
know Barack Obama is
NOT a political hack.
The "problem," IMHO, is that many/most "experienced" Democrats in the professional center are.
In fact, IMHO, one or two of them had rants masquerading as diaries on the Rec List over the past 24 hours. In them, we were essentially told that in order to accomplish anything in Washington, one has to go along to get along in the legislative branch of our federal government. What is frequently left out of the rants of these hacks is the reality that Capitol Hill is widely considered--not just by the public, at large, but by many of its own Democratic members, no less--to be bought and paid for by the Wall Street status quo.
These days, when a new Democratic President gets into office, he wants to surround himself with folks (preferably from the same political persuasion) that know the ropes in their respective areas of specialization. Unfortunately (and quite specifically), when it came to managing our economy, President Obama opted to: a.) appoint an Independent to run the Treasury Department, b.) re-appoint a Republican to chair the Federal Reserve, and, c.) settle for just about the most entrenched member of the Wall Street status quo--a person widely considered to have been one of the primary architects of much of what was wrong and
still is wrong with our economy, today--a DINO, to monopolize much of his face-time for virtually the entire first-half of the President's first term.
Many would concur, however, as Simon Johnson reminded us just yesterday, that one of the very best things President Obama has done since he was elected was to appoint Elizabeth Warren as an advisor.
On the other hand, to paraphrase Barney Frank, who said this far more eloquently than I ever could, about a year ago: "'Things would be a lot worse without us,' is not a winning campaign slogan."
The legitimate political argument, that is just now being made (i.e.: finally being focused upon as the truly primary talking point of the current administration when it comes to their public discussion of our nation's economic woes) is that eight years of Republican laissez-faire mismanagement of our economy--within the context of, and as a subset of, thirty years of Reaganomics, no less--has dug such a deep hole for our country's economy that it'll take a good five to ten more years for us to fully recover from it. (IMHO, if we're real lucky.)
Certainly, at least from a political standpoint, when it comes to effectively addressing this most important aspect of our nation's economy--UNEMPLOYMENT--common political wisdom would dictate this course of action, as well.
Add the basic reality that we're living in an era which includes the public's witnessing of the greatest economic inequality/disparity between the social classes ever measured by our government's own metrics, and you have the electoral version of a Pillsbury Bake-Off Grand Prize-winning recipe for political disaster by whomever happens to be captaining the ship at this given point in time, too.
(Again, please refer to Barney Frank's commentary above for a little more emphasis via reiteration.)
So, what did those inadequate minds managing the President's communications strategy focus upon in their lead-up to the mid-terms as their primary talking point throughout the late Spring and early Summer of 2010? Well, it was our "recovery Summer," dontcha' know?
A veritable textbook exercise from the anti-Dale-Carnegie-school ("How To Lose Friends And Alienate People") of political communications took an even stronger hold of the message over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue! And, that train left the station, and if you weren't onboard, well you were labelled either as an "anti-Obama troll," or as a member of the excoriated "professional left"...or both!
And, anyone that dared to criticize 2010 (and 2009, for that matter) Democratic economic strategy, along with how the White House was communicating that strategy to the public, too, was labelled as a "troll" by the very folks that, even TODAY, are telling us we must go along to get along if we're ever going to achieve our objectives as a party, because that's the way "effective Democrats get things done" in D.C.!
Essentially, we're being told by some in our Party to ignore Albert Einstein's definition of insanity. To be a true Democrat, these centrists tell us we must repeat the same actions and strategy we undertook in 2009 and 2010, and we must continue to make the same mistakes. Because that's what pragmatists do!
I mean...like...get with the program! And, if someone dared/dares to resoundingly criticize that strategy, well then, "they're just a fucking anti-Obama troll!"
Meanwhile, over the past 48 hours, while folks around here were pondering their navel, or otherwise engaging in "101 Ways to Bury Their Heads in the Sand," and actually rec'ing up this "faux pragmatist" bullshit within this community, something (IMHO) much more important occurred within the MSM and the left-leaning side of the blogosphere.
Of course, it was all but totally ignored here....Dare I say it, but some reality actually crept into the MSM's political realm! (More about this in just a moment.)
# # #
First, some background from my diary on September 26th: "'Structural Unemployment' & 'Deleveraging,' My Ass!"
"Structural Unemployment" & "Deleveraging," My Ass!
by bobswern
Daily Kos
Sun Sep 26, 2010 at 07:37:06 AM EST
Over the past couple of years, many have been sucked-in by a lot of bullshit economic pseudo-analysis from GOPers and misdirected Dems parroting totally false, Wall Street-centric memes and baseless "conventional wisdom" about our Great Recession. Gradually, the obfuscated truths are finally coming to the fore.
This morning, Yves Smith picks up where respected economist and NetRoots Nation guest Mike Konczal left off a week ago, explaining that the widely-accepted, Orwellian theme of "structural unemployment" is completely bogus.
(Konczal irrefutably demonstrates that the statistical facts tell us that the jobless downturn--which is significantly and adversely affecting all business sectors, not just construction--was a direct byproduct of Wall Street's stripmining of Main Street's mortgage marketplace, and is/was due to a general lack of demand that is still extremely pervasive throughout our society. However, he demonstrates that there is no "skills mismatch" in the marketplace [i.e.: the basic concept behind the structural unemployment meme]; and that it's just another Wall Street excuse for offshoring jobs and/or cutting pay/hours on Main Street among those who've been able to hold onto their jobs until now.)
Meanwhile (and dovetailing quite directly with Konczal's just-released study), a business lede in Saturday's NY Times also brings forth the reality that the entire "consumer deleveraging" story -- wherein, despite very large, year-over-year increases in poverty in the U.S., since the Great Recession commenced in late 2007, along with three decades of declining middle class wages, we're all now, somehow, miraculously paying down our credit card debt -- was a complete fabrication, too! (The banks have just acknowledged that virtually all of the modest, supposed downturn in utilized consumer credit is directly, and virtually exclusively, attributable to Wall Street chargeoffs of consumers' accounts. In other words, we're officially hearing, for the first time from Wall Street, that the public's really not paying down their credit card debt, virtually at all!)
# # #
Also, a backgrounder from the Wiki (with my emphasis in bold): Structural unemployment.
Structural unemployment
Wikipedia (March 2010)
Structural unemployment is a form of unemployment resulting from a mismatch between the sufficiently skilled workers seeking employment and demand in the labour market. Even though the number of vacancies may be equal to, or greater than, the number of the unemployed, the unemployed workers may lack the skills needed for the jobs -- or may not live in the part of the country or world where the jobs are available.
Structural unemployment is a result of the dynamics of the labor market and the fact that these can never be as flexible as, e.g., financial markets.[citation needed] Workers are "left behind" due to costs of training and moving (e.g., the cost of selling one's house in a depressed local economy), plus inefficiencies in the labor markets, such as discrimination or monopoly power.
Structural unemployment is hard to separate empirically from frictional unemployment, except to say that it lasts longer. As with frictional unemployment, simple demand-side stimulus will not work to easily abolish this type of unemployment.
Structural unemployment may also be encouraged to rise by persistent cyclical unemployment: if an economy suffers from long-lasting low aggregate demand, it means that many of the unemployed become disheartened[citation needed], while their skills (including job-searching skills) become "rusty" and obsolete. Problems with debt may lead to homelessness and a fall into the vicious circle of poverty. This means that they may not fit the job vacancies that are created when the economy recovers. Some economists see this scenario as occurring under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1970s and 1980s.[citation needed] The implication is that sustained high demand may lower structural unemployment. This theory of persistence in structural unemployment has been referred to as an example of path dependence or "hysteresis."
Much technological unemployment (e.g. due to the replacement of workers by fewer workers who use machines) might be counted as structural unemployment. Alternatively, technological unemployment might refer to the way in which steady increases in labor productivity mean that fewer workers are needed to produce the same level of output every year. The fact that aggregate demand can be raised to deal with this problem suggests that this problem is instead one of cyclical unemployment. As indicated by Okun's Law, the demand side must grow sufficiently quickly to absorb not only the growing labor force but also the workers made redundant by increased labor productivity. Otherwise, we see a jobless recovery such as those seen in the United States in the early 1990s, in the early 2000s and in the two year period after the 2008 economic meltdown...
...
...Structural unemployment is considered[1] to be one of the "permanent" types of unemployment, where improvement is possible only in the long run.
# # #
On Sunday, Paul Krugman posted this on his blog...
Lacking All Conviction
Paul Krugman
New York Times Blog
November 28, 2010, 5:05 pm
Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story -- apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.
What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration's economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.
More generally, I can't think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.
Krugman continues on to point out that : "...someone who has Obama's ear must think otherwise." He concludes: "Obama must gravitate instinctively to people who give him bad economic advice..." And, he notes that these advisors "...don't share the values he was elected to promote."
Later in the afternoon, on Monday, there was this...
Defining Structural Unemployment
Paul Krugman
New York Times Blog
November 29, 2010, 3:08 pm
Jargon has its uses, in economics as in many other fields. It's hard work, and also time- and space-consuming, to translate everything into plain English, all of the time.
But that said, sometimes jargon gets in the way of understanding, especially if the term of art sounds like something else. And that's clearly the case with "structural unemployment."
--SNIP--
So where's the evidence of a structural rise in unemployment in America? Wage growth is slowing; core inflation is falling; clearly, we're not hitting an inflationary wall right now. Maybe the wall is closer than it seems -- but then you look for evidence of skills in short supply, regions without enough workers, and so on, and it isn't there.
As far as I can tell, the only economists who believe that we're suffering largely from a rise in structural unemployment are those who are ideologically committed to the view that the demand side of the economy doesn't matter -- and so by definition, in their universe, any large rise in unemployment must be structural.
But you have to ask, why do these people have a voice in the Obama administration?
# # #
In Sunday's mid-afternoon post, Krugman was referencing Mark Thoma's widely-noted commentary regarding Richard Wolffe's LA Times commentary from Sunday. First, here's Thoma: "The Administration's 'Communication Problem.'"
The Administration's "Communication Problem"
Mark Thoma
Professor of Economics
University of Oregon
Sunday, November 28, 2010
I find it incredible and disturbing that on the eve of the recent election in which Democrats got trounced, the administration was still trying to figure out if the unemployment problem is structural or cyclical.
Even if you attribute a large fraction of the unemployment to structural factors, there is still plenty of cyclical unemployment left over to target with policy. For example, the SF Fed estimates that only about 1.25% of the rise in the unemployment rate is due to structural factors. The rest of the rise to nearly 10% is due to cyclical problems. Even if you attribute half of the rise in unemployment to structural factors, that still leaves between 2% and 3% of the rise in unemployment to cyclical problems. Since neither monetary or fiscal policy is likely to be large or aggressive enough to fully solve the cyclical problem, there's no need to have the debate. That is, any reasonable fiscal policy that the administration might have pushed for would not fully solve the cyclical unemployment problem, so there was no real need to debate this issue, particularly on the eve of the election. No matter how you slice it, the numbers indicate that we have a substantial cyclical problem, and the administration needs to try to do something about it.
--SNIP--
The administration needed to be out there pushing for employment policies, doing everything it could to signal to people that it was on their side, not the side of corporations and big banks. That requires that you figure out that you have a cyclical unemployment problem before the election is all but over, and that you begin pushing for solutions in public forums. That push needs to start at the very top with Obama, and it needs to be reinforced every single day by other administration officials. One mention by Obama in a Saturday address to the nation doesn't get the job done.
I understand that Congress may not have supported additional policy to try to stimulate employment, but the fight would have been worth it no matter the outcome, and with the administration actually leading rather than accepting defeat before the game has been played, the outcome may not have been as preordained as the administration seems to believe...
Bold type is diarist's emphasis.
Here's Richard Wolffe's LA Times commentary, from Sunday, as noted by Krugman and Thoma, above...
Obama could learn from Bush, by Richard Wolffe, Commentary, LA Times: The day before his party's shellacking in this month's elections, President Obama sat down with his economic team to examine the single most important issue for voters across the country: jobs.
But the question on the agenda was not how to accelerate the recovery or target job creation... The president had called the meeting to grapple with what he and his propeller-head economists have been debating for some time: the wonkish question of whether today's high unemployment rate is structural or cyclical. ...
Two years into this presidency, and many months into a sluggish recovery, may be a little late to try to agree on the root cause of today's high unemployment.
--SNIP--
...a new economic team will not resolve the communications problems... In fact, the president has been frustrated by his communications strategy for most of the last year. ... Obama told me six months ago that poor communications had hampered his ability to execute his policies, and that was after several months of internal reviews...
(I strongly urge you to read Wolffe's entire piece. There's a lot more substance to it than what I blockquoted here.)
Thoma points out that the problems still exist, today; nothing has changed (aside from "a brief flash" of commentary by the White House regarding an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy). "The administration is still allowing the other side to take control of policy debates."
# # #
Summing it all up, I was wondering why all these (I'll leave the links out, thankyouverymuch) supposedly-allegiant outbursts of so-called Democratic Party loyalty were occurring at the same time within this community, between Sunday night and this past evening; and then I was reminded, by none other than former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, of the week's calendar within our bought-and-paid-for legislative branch...
National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week
Robert Reich
RobertReich.org
Monday, November 29, 2010
Welcome to National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week.
Today (Monday), Congress takes up a measure delaying by one month a scheduled 23% cut in federal reimbursements to doctors...
....
Tuesday, the President meets with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to begin working out a compromise for extending the Bush tax cuts...
...
Meanwhile, unless Congress agrees to extend unemployment benefits by Tuesday, 800,000 long-term unemployed will start running out...
...
Finally, on Wednesday, the President's deficit commission will issue a report on how to reduce the nation's long-term deficit...
...
...National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week may be carried over into next week, too.
As Reich notes, the likelihood of ANY of these matters working out in any fashion that's acceptable to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party are not good. (And, I'm being very kind by stating even that.)
# # #
So, it's no wonder that we're seeing a massive uptick in the corporate and centrist rants within this community now.
The shit's still hitting the fan, and if we look too closely at this sorry state of affairs and dare to criticize the pathetic mess we're in, we're now being told that this is--in some grossly twisted, conflated and obscenely Orwellian way--an act of disloyalty to the President and the Democratic Party?
Fuck that!
IMHO, those types of posts being rec'd up by this community are nothing short of treason writ large for every self-respecting Democrat that has any sense of U.S. history.
And, like the sad stories (noted above) about discussions at the White House, earlier this month, Democrats everywhere better get a fucking clue. And, fast. Or, the only place our children and grandchildren will learn anything about Democratic Party beliefs in 20th Century America -- and the Democratic Party, at all, at least as some of us remember it -- will be in their history books, too.