Skip to content

The Gilded Age, a coda

Monday, May 28, 2018

I said I’d written my last post on this subject, but that was yesterday, and I just came across this.

A week ago I subscribed to Foreign Affairs, since I got a deal for $20.00 a year. The most recent issue asks the question: Can Democracy be Saved? Here’s the opening paragraph from the first article, by Walter Russell Mead, entitled The Big Shift:

As Americans struggle to make sense of a series of uncomfortable economic changes and disturbing political developments, a worrying picture emerges: of ineffective politicians, frequent scandals, racial backsliding, polarized and irresponsible news media, populists spouting quack economic remedies, growing suspicion of elites and experts, frightening outbreaks of violence, major job losses, high-profile terrorist attacks, anti-immigrant agitation, declining social mobility, giant corporations dominating the economy, rising inequality, and the appearance of a new class of super-empowered billionaires in finance and technology-heavy industries.

That, of course, is a description of American life in the 35 years after the Civil War. The years between the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, and that of President William McKinley, in 1901, were among the least inspiring in the history of U.S. politics. As Reconstruction proved unsuccessful and a series of devastating depressions and panics roiled the economy, Washington failed miserably to rise to the challenges of the day. 

He goes on to make the case that maybe we can survive this time around, as we ultimately somewhat overcame (after wrecking the lives of millions of people in the process) the disasters of the Gilded Age. Bear in mind that it took us a hundred years to even make a start on living up to the promise of equality embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments. Anyway, worth reading. We should learn from history, even though it seems almost a certainty that the best outcome we can hope for is that we are doomed to repeat it.

Filed in History | | Comments (0)

Defining our terms

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Maggie Haberman is getting a bit of blowback in the twittersphere for her failure to call a lie a lie. You can pick up on the conversation here:

http://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1000755597283905537

Her point, if you can call it that, is that if Trump chooses to believe something he spews, it is not necessarily a lie. It seems to me that we can agree on a common sense definition: A lie is a statement of fact that is known to be untrue by the speaker or is uttered with reckless disregard for the truth. If I have no evidentiary foundation for a fact that I assert as true, then I am lying, even if I fervently believe that the fact asserted should be true, or so far as I am concerned it is true, because it is convenient for me to believe it.

If, for instance, I were to say that the crowd at my swearing in ceremony when I became a lawyer was the biggest such crowd in history, I would be lying, even though, having never seen any such crowds before or since, I could argue that, for all I knew, my statement was true. Nonetheless, by the above definition, it would be a lie, and rightly so. Haberman argues that Trump should get a pass if he utters a statement that he may believe, without a shred of evidence, to be true, or that he should get such a pass if he simply can’t tell truth from fiction. In other words, if you’re a pathological liar, you aren’t necessarily lying, you’re just being pathological.

It hardly needs saying that this sort of logic is of the sort that preserves the media tilt toward the right, for, as someone else pointed out, Haberman was not shy about calling Clinton a liar in circumstances far less compelling than those in which she gives Trump a pass.

Filed in Language, Lies and Lying Liars | | Comments (0)

A final lesson from the Gilded Age

Sunday, May 27, 2018

One more lesson from the Gilded Age, and, since I’ve now finished Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands, this will be the last. 

This is not so much a parallel to our own age, but a warning of what we may have to come, assuming we survive the present state of affairs.

Toward the end of the Gilded Age, the previous “liberal consensus” (remember, back then a liberal was equivalent to today’s right winger) began to break down. The idea that each man (women didn’t count, remember) controlled his own destiny, and that his success or failure was practically a matter of choice on his part, could no longer be defended in an age of rapidly increasing inequality and unequal bargaining power resulting from increasing industrialization and monopolistic control of important sectors of the economy. Legislatures started passing laws to regulate the behavior of corporations. For instance, laws were passed mandating the number of hours a person could work in a day and outlawing child labor, just to name a few.

But while the legislatures were coming around, these laws ran into another branch of government, still dominated by those old fashioned liberals. The courts used the 14th Amendment, which had been designed to protect the rights of human beings, particularly freed slaves, to invalidate laws of this sort on the grounds that they deprived either the corporation or the individuals involved of property rights. It need hardly be said that at the same time they refused to use the Amendment for its intended purpose. There was little, if any, rational foundation for the court’s actions, which were often based on concepts of “natural law” and “substantive due process”, which had no basis in the constitution at all. It’s fair to say that while the national consensus turned progressive (i.e., today’s liberal) the courts frustrated that consensus until well into the nineteen thirties.

We can see the beginnings of the same thing now. The Supreme court’s decisions a few years ago overturning Second Amendment precedent and the Citizen’s Uniteddecision are two examples, as is the recent decision ruling that workers can be forced into individual arbitration, not to mention the upcoming decisionin the Januscase, that will effectively destroy public sector unions everywhere they have not already been destroyed. Should the Democrats regain control of the presidency and Congress, and should they finally come to their senses and realize that half measures designed to attract “moderate” Republican support gain them neither “moderate” Republican support nor public support, any efforts they make to enact progressive legislation will no doubt be frustrated by the courts using ever more intellectually dishonest rationales. The courts are political institutions, and they have now been well stocked with doctrinaire Randians who see it as their solemn duty to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Bear in mind that the only remedy for judicial lawlessness is impeachment (not going to happen) and constitutional amendments (also not going to happen).

Of course, this is subject to a number of contingencies. Ruth Bader Ginsburg may live another couple of years, and she may be replaced by a progressive judge. That still leaves us with a 5-4 minority, but there is always the possibility that in one way or another, one of the horrible five will retire or be imprisoned, and the Democrats will be in a position to force a pick through (and will have the gumption to do so, in the face of hypocritical Republican claims that the filibuster is sacrosanct). That will still leave us with a judiciary somewhat progressive at the very top, but thoroughly rotten at all other levels. And that’s the best case scenario. All a modern court would have to do is revive some of the ridiculous legal precedents of the Gilded Age, and any attempt made by modern day progressives to end the plutocracy/kleptocracy under which we now live will be frustrated for years to come.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, History, Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, May 25, 2018

Carol King and James Taylor

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Something fishy here

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A few days ago I drafted a post, but I ultimately decided not to post it, due to the fact that the point I was trying to assert, that Elliot Broidy had been handsomely paid for taking the fall for Trump’s affair with yet another Playboy bunny, which affair had led to an abortion. Here’s what I wrote then:

Here’s one that may end up in the impeachable file. The AP has a storydocumenting that there is more than a whiff, let us say there’s a stench, suggesting something is amiss with the way the genius makes policy. It is, in a few words, up for sale.

In this particular case, a couple of fellows, Elliot Broidy and George Nader, were probably acting as unregistered foreign lobbyists as they tried to influence American policy toward various countries in the Middle East. In the most blatant case, they tried to push an anti-Qatar policy on behalf of Saudi Arabia, which involved money in the general direction of the genius.

Nader is now cooperating with Mueller, which can’t make Broidy happy. >

But there’s another thing about this that makes one wonder. As we already knew, and as the AP notes:

Broidy, it turned out, was also a Cohen client. He’d had an affair with Playboy Playmate Shera Bechard, who got pregnant and later had an abortion. Broidy agreed to pay her $1.6 million to help her out, so long as she never spoke about it.

“I acknowledge I had a consensual relationship with a Playboy Playmate,” Broidy said in a statement the day the news broke. He apologized to his wife and resigned from the RNC. There is no indication Broidy is under investigation by Mueller’s team.

There has been some speculation that Ms. Bechard really had the affair with the genius, and that Broidy agreed to take the fall. I’m not ready to sign on to that theory entirely, but this story makes it seem more probable. Broidy is making tons of money off of his relationship with Trump and a little thing like confessing to paying for an abortion wouldn’t stand in the way of keeping that money flowing.

Things move fast, and over the last couple of days, the evidence has mounted. (The internet has been down at my humble abode the last few days, so this follow up is somewhat delayed).

Consider these pieces of evidence: the bunny herself is sticking to her NDA, but she seems to be dropping hints and, as demonstrated here, the events related to this situation line up rather suspiciously. Bearing in mind that when it comes to the genius, he should be considered guilty until proven innocent (the truth of this maxim has been demonstrated too often to leave it open to question), I am more inclined than I was just a few days ago to buy into the theory that Broidy took the fall for Trump, and was so handsomely paid that even Broidy’s wife surely won’t complain, as she was probably in on the con from the start.

Filed in The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

More echoes of the Gilded Age

Thursday, May 24, 2018

I continue to plow through Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. Here’s yet another way in which that age paralleled our own.

First, it goes without saying that income inequality was as much of a problem then as it is now. At the time, as now, American productive capacity exceeded consumption. Americans did not consume as much as they could produce because so many of them were impoverished, a direct result of inequality.

But, lets put that aside for the moment. In 1892 the wise men running the country took it as an article of faith that the country must stay on the gold standard. This kept the supply of money low, which had multiple catastrophic consequences, leading directly to a major depression in 1892, the worst depression until that in the 30’s. But none of this shook the faith of the wise men of finance. It mattered not what experience showed, the stuck with gold with religious fervor.

The gold standard is now a thing of the past, remembered fondly only by kooks like Ron Paul. But in our own age, we have the shibboleth of the balanced budget and fiscal austerity during bad times. We are now seeing fascism once again show its ugly face in Europe (as I predicted some time ago here), most recently in its home town of Italy, as a reaction to austerity there. It has two faces here, one when it comes to benefitting the masses, when austerity is absolutely required, and one when it comes to benefitting the rich, in which case, not so much. 

Give the folks in the Gilded Age credit for one thing; their opinions were based on what was then considered to be sound economic theory, whereas the entire notion of austerity, as it has been practiced here and in Europe, is embraced by a portion of economists so tiny that it has to be considered a fringe belief. It serves only to maintain high levels of inequality, but it is not good, and never has been, for the economy as a whole. Another point of satisfaction in the Gilded Age: the plutocrat’s insistence on the gold standard took down more plutocrats then than insistence on austerity has done in our own Gilded Age.

Filed in History | | Comments (0)

An eternal question

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Why do the cable news networks (and I’m not talking about Fox, where it’s a given) constantly give airtime to the most insane members of Congress? Even when the interviewer pushes back, the mere fact that they put these people on television validates their mendacity. There are sane members of Congress. There are probably even Republicans that are sane, though I admit they’d be hard to find. Joe Courtney is sane. I would estimate he’s been on television one time for every thousand times the idiot at the link, Peter King, has polluted the airwaves. 

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

The Democratic Convention-a survivor’s reflections

Sunday, May 20, 2018

I now know why I wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about being a delegate to the state convention this year. It was some instinct, some nagging recollection from conventions past, and some premonition about the long slog this one, with all those contested nominations, was likely to be.

I’m not complaining about the outcome. Not everyone I voted for prevailed, but, then again, I didn’t feel strongly about some of those I supported and I wasn’t strongly opposed to any of their opponents, with the exception of Joe Ganim, whose primary win, were it to happen, would be an unmitigated disaster. But I don’t think we need worry about that.

It’s just that there has to be a better way to run a convention. Lon Seidman’s electronic voting system worked fine, after an initial bug was ironed out, but the efficiencies gained by that process were more than offset by the inefficiencies introduced or retained. After the votes were processed, time was set aside for people to change their votes. I suppose the thinking was that if a given candidate was oh-so-close to the 50% mark, a few changes might put him or her over the edge, and save the need for a second ballot. Well, if you think about it for a few seconds, you will quickly realize that the chance of that happening is fairly microscopic. In the one instance where it might have worked-when Clare Kindall dropped out and signaled her support for William Tong- the vote change period was almost over, and the changes that occurred were few and not all went to Tong. The process would actually have been faster had they simply used the initial results, no changes allowed, and swiftly gone to a second ballot, stopping only to let folks like Clare let their intentions be known. I suppose the opportunity to change votes is in the rules because politicians can’t cope with a system that doesn’t have a built in opportunity for arm twisting.

In brief, the process was interminable, exemplified by the fact that Ned’s victory party, slated to start at 5:00 PM, didn’t get started until around 8:30, at the earliest, by which time I was, blessedly, on my way home, having done my duty and stuck around until the last vote, if not the last speech. I suspect Shawn Wooden spoke to a near empty hall.

I would like to pause to salute William Tong, though I didn’t vote for him. His acceptance speech was refreshingly brief, a happy change from the long platitude filled speeches (and what else could one expect?) of those that had gone before. Perhaps he realized that people were becoming exhausted, so he kept his platitude filled speech short. I wouldn’t be surprised if his brief speech convinced many of his opponent’s supporters that he really was the best choice.

All this being said, I think we will end up, after the primaries, with a pretty good slate. We here in Connecticut have an uphill battle, given Malloy’s unpopularity, but I really think the candidates we have give us a decent shot. The Republicans will be running against Malloy, and we’ll no doubt, be running against Trump, who I sincerely hope will come here to Connecticut to campaign for the Republican slate. Let’s just hope the blue wave (caveat: I’m still confident the national Democrats can erect a dike to prevent it causing any damage to the Republicans) will deposit some Democratic winners on Connecticut’s shores.

Filed in Rants | | Comments (0)

The Times reaches for its Thesaurus

Sunday, May 20, 2018

It’s been noted repeatedly across the internets that whenever a white male engages in a mass shooting (and it’s almost always a white male), the American media almost always gives him a partial excuse because he is a “loner”, implying some form of mental illness. We don’t see that sort of mental illness excuse advanced for killers of other hues.

Anyway, let it be noted that the New York Times has eschewed the “loner” tag. Taking advantage of the nearest Thesaurus, the Times is now using introvert.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, May 18, 2018

This is posted a bit early, it not actually being Friday night at the moment, because I’ll be in Hartford later casting my vote for Chris Murphy at the convention. 

I will freely admit that I am woefully ignorant about current music, though what I’ve heard doesn’t impress, but on occasion I’ve followed up on the giants of the past. Some of them have lost that creative spark, and some haven’t.

I recently got David Byrne’s new album, American Utopia. Putting aside the oxymoronic title, I think it’s really good, on a par with some of the best of the Talking Heads. I think the CD versions of these songs are sonically better, but his performances are fun to watch.

First up, I Dance Like This, which, I guess, makes at least passing reference to the trials and tribulations of geezerdom. He always danced oddly, but if you want to call what he’s doing on this video dancing, then that’s great, because I’ve got a 50th high school reunion coming up, and if this is dancing, we are probably all going to be up for it.

 

Next, Every Day is a Miracle. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OQt_0j3ZT28
Filed in Music | | Comments (0)