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When my flight from Los Angeles touched down in Aspen, Colorado I counted 80 private jets parked at the airport. I had come for the annual Aspen Ideas Festival and what follows is a critique written with some affection for the institution but with the full knowledge that I may never be invited to speak there.

Aspen aspires to be an American Davos–a meeting in the mountains of top government policy makers, important pundits, authors and academics; all interacting with the corporate elite. Thus the enormous private jet fleet. It seemed to this first time attendee that the whole program was built on three suppositions.

1. That the economics of globalization are as inevitable as water flowing downhill on Frying Pan River.
2. That technological innovation is the salvation of society.
3. That American politics are so polarized that nothing can be accomplished at a national level.

These assumptions lead to a kind of philosophy of inevitability. Leadership is reduced to management and so problems really can’t be solved, they can just be managed. The pundits, politicians and managers on the stages of Aspen are there to tell us they know how to manage through crisis. This leaves the audience feeling as if there are no choices left other than the personal choice between eating steak or fish, wearing khakis or Levis, buying a Gulfstream or a Bombardier corporate jet. The notion of the political choice of fundamentally changing our society seems to be in the realm of the Higgs Particle. Does such a choice really exist and if so, how would we know?

On the stage the pundit interviewers were obsequiously polite with the politicians. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times never bothered to ask Larry Summers if he regretted eliminating Glass-Steagel at the behest of Citibank’s Sandy Weill. Charlie Rose sat mute as Mitch Daniels poured forth Romney talking points about how government regulation inevitably inhibits growth and how Obamacare was a tax on all Americans. The Atlantic’s David Bradley never challenged Pervez Musharraf’s assertion that military Coups were necessary to save Pakistan’s fragile and corrupt democracy. Tom Friedman allowed Ehud Barak to ramble on for minutes on why Iran’s joining the nuclear club would be different than any other previous nuclear aspirant, despite convincing evidence to the contrary by Kenneth Waltz in this month’s Foreign Affairs. Read more…

I wrote this In June when Koch was first starting to push his boy Paul Ryan towards Romney
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On a week when President Obama is being accused of being out of touch, its probably important to understand just how radically “out of touch” the Republican Kingmaker Charles Koch really is. It is Koch who has wanted Obama gone from Inauguration Day and unless you understand the nature of the opposition, you will never understand the fight ahead of us.

In the summer of 1974 Koch established the Charles Koch Foundation with the help of Murray Rothbard, a Professor of economics at the New York University campus in Brooklyn. At the time, Koch was Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held firm in the United States. At Rothbard’s suggestion they changed the name of the foundation to The Cato Institute in July of 1976. Rothbard was an early associate of Ayn Rand, hailing her book Atlas Shrugged, as “not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction.” It is in Rand’s hero John Galt that we find the roots of the libertarian belief that a great society is ruled by a class of Nietzschian supermen (the givers), and that most of the society (the takers) free rides on their work. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

Rand’s novel, cited by Charles Koch and many other libertarians as the book that changed their lives, was the basis for a new philosophy, Objectivism, that shunned both religion and the Lockean liberal politics of the Founders for a new view that man’s sole purpose is to pursue his own self-interest. But by 1958, long before he was hired by Koch, Rothbard had begun to go beyond Objectivism into a philosophy that he named “anarcho-capitalism”. Rothbard considered that government was the greatest danger to liberty and the state “was nothing but a gang of thieves writ large.” The solution was to get rid of the state: anarchism. Rothbard wrote, “Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism.” He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and “a compulsory monopoly of force” prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. For Charles Koch this was a philosophy that fit perfectly with his view that the government was the one force impeding the growth of his businesses, many of which were “plagued” by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting the water and air. As to how the society would enforce order without a government the anarcho-capitalists had a solution as well. Competing insurance companies would have private security forces that would protect the property of their customers. Rothbard argued this would lower prices for police services because of private market competition. Just how two competing “Insurance Militias” might resolve a property dispute was never specified.

Read more…

I’ve been thinking about this fiscal cliff all the pundits are warning us against. Since the election of Ronald Reagan the country has made two profoundly damaging mistakes. It has continually raised the Defense Budget, thereby robbing our education system and basic infrastructure (roads, bridges, broadband, etc) of the needed funding and dragging us down to second world status in those areas. The second mistake was to cut taxes on the top five percent. As Nick Hanauer’s astonishing Ted Talk (which was censored by TED until the outrage grew too loud) shows, this move to cut taxes on the 1% by both Reagan and Bush II was destructive beyond belief to our country.

So now if Congress DOES NOTHING in the next six months, both those disastrous mistakes will be fixed in ONE DAY, January 1, 2013. On that day the Bush Tax Cuts will disappear for good, and the Sequester (along with previously agreed upon cuts) will take at least $1 trillion out of the Defense Budget in the next ten years.

Why are Progressives and Libertarians not cheering for this to happen? It would quickly solve the deficit problem as Ezra Klein points out in this chart. Letting the Tax cuts expire and the Sequester go through is called the Extended Baseline Scenario in this Chart.

The Chart on the lower right, is what Mitt Romney and the Republican’s want. Now I am aware that the Keynesian effect of taking a lot of government spending (on planes and missiles) out of the economy might cause a recession and that’s probably why Bill Clinton said the stupid thing about the tax cuts this week. Quite honestly, a couple of quarters of flat growth to address the two biggest mistakes of the Conservative era and put our fiscal house in order, would be worth it.

As readers of this blog know, I have somewhat of a following among the libertarian right.  I don’t really understand it except that there is a deep part of me that distrusts centralization, whether in academic bureaucracies, corporate headquarters or in government institutions. So I guess I was not surprised when a couple of people wrote me this week and asked me to say something about the death of Andrew Breitbart. I know my liberal friends are going to be angry with this post, but so be it.

I had met Andrew for the first time two months ago over dinner in a Santa Monica steakhouse. I had come at the invitation of a conservative friend who wanted me to see that Breitbart was not the demon that I had depicted him as, during the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. When I left the restaurant after a large meal and multiple bottles of red wine I had a couple of impressions that stayed with me. First was that Andrew was a somewhat charming provocateur, much in the spirit of Abby Hoffman. Like Hoffman, I was never sure Breitbart really believed half the shit that came out of his mouth, but his main purpose seemed to be a social irritant.

The second impression from the dinner was that Andrew was sick at heart about the prospects of beating Obama in 2012. He called the current Republican field “pygmies” and I actually believe he felt that Sarah Palin would have been a far better candidate. I laughed at that. He truly despised Obama, and in some weird way I think he felt that the election of 2008 had been the culmination of an era of political correctness, which he considered to be the main source of evil in the modern world. Just why Barack became the focus of his anger, I couldn’t fathom, but I came to see this loathing as something that was not connected to a rational process, but rather something more from his “reptilian brain”. This kind of anger is not kind to your heart.

So how ironic that the day of Andrew’s passing that Rush Limbaugh, a far less charming angry man of the right, chose once again to dive into the deep pool of misogyny that has defined his career since he first used the term “Feminazi”.  Limbaugh’s assertion about Susan Fluke being a “prostitute and a slut” are so unhinged that one can only believe he is back on the “hillbilly heroin” (OxyContin) again. So Limbaugh may be just a drug-addled “entertainer”, but what is Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich’s excuse for that same attitude— believing we have been on the road to damnation as a country since the pill was introduced and Rock and Roll eclipsed Frank Sinatra? In my book, Outlaw Blues, I quote Sinatra in 1956 saying that Rock was filled with “sly, lewd and dirty lyrics”, performed by “cretinous goons”. Of course Frank was pissed off at Elvis, but why is Rick Santorum still angry about the sexual revolution fifty years later?

In some weird way I hope that Rick Santorum does become the standard bearer for the Republican Party. I have said from the beginning of this campaign that I would really like a showdown between President Obama and a Tea Party Conservative. If Romney wins the nomination, he will weasel back to the center so fast it will make your head spin. The fact that Romney is unwilling to denounce Limbaugh proves what a spineless toad he is.

But not Rick. With him as the candidate it will be “a choice not an echo” and in my view will be a total repeat of Goldwater’s 1964 drubbing. The country will come to the realization that we are not a hard right society and that the Tea Party is a minority cult. And then maybe, with some real breathing room after an epic victory, the Democrats might reexamine some of the ideas of subsidiarity and decentralization that might realign some of the anti-war libertarians and the true liberals in a new progressivism.

Which brings me back to Breitbart. He wanted a choice election too, but not the choice of “pygmies” like Romney, Santorum or Gingrich. Although he liked Limbaugh, he despised Glenn Beck. Over the course of the dinner I kept saying that I was a classic Liberal. I believed in liberty and equality of opportunity. And he kept saying that he believed in those things too, but that “liberalism” had been demeaned by the Left. If we had had time, we might have come to some meeting ground. But it was not to be.

I can hardly wait until Saturday Night Live’s take on The Donald’s endorsement of Mitt Romney yesterday. The SNL writers may have a hard time topping the real event for belly laughs. Mrs. Romney looked like she was about to undergo a root canal and when the four minute endorsement was finished, Donald put Mitt’s hand in such a death grip (so all of the photographers could get the picture) that here was a clear wince of pain on the Mittster’s face.

A day after Romney had declared that “I’m not concerned about the very poor”, he trots out with the biggest blowhard faux-billionaire in America, whose signature phrase is “you’re fired”. Even the conservative press was wincing. Somehow the campaign of the Republican’s is wandering off into irrelevancy.

This morning the unemployment rate dropped to 8.3%, dealing a severe blow to the whole Republican narrative that the economy is crashing under Obama.

This is the progress in job growth since Obama was inaugurated. There is no way you can spin this that “things are getting worse. You add in the dramatic turnaround in the stock market, which affects every 401 K and Obama has a good story to tell on recovery.

What’s more interesting is that Romney now wants to fight the battle with Obama over foreign policy.

It did not take long for Mitt Romney to pounce on Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that American troops could end their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013, 18 months sooner than expected. Within hours, Mr. Romney lambasted it as “naïve” and “misguided.”

Could Mitt be so clueless as to understand that arguing to stay in Afghanistan is a total loser argument, even within his own party? Has he ever listened to Ron Paul’s biggest applause lines in the debates? If the Republicans can’t fight on national security and the economy is clearly on the mend, what is their message? Well the highly unpopular House Republicans have a solution–“Keep you head down and say nothing”.

“Most of us expect the major decisions aren’t going to be made this year,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former chairman of the House Republican campaign committee. “It’s a very political year. The big thing for us is to not be part of the conversation instead of trying to inject ourselves into it.”

As I said, this is too funny not to savor every moment.

I had dinner last night with one of the most important conservative media voices in America and some of his friends. I had gone to the dinner expecting some fireworks, but was totally caught off guard by his charm and what he had to say.

First, he was disgusted by “the pygmies” in the Republican Presidential Race. As much as he dislikes Obama, there was not a one of the current Republican candidates that he could be enthusiastic about.

Second, we found ourselves in agreement that the issue of Crony Capitalism is perhaps the most pernicious threat to our Republic. Crony Capitalism distorts everything from Crop subsidies flowing to agribusiness to our inability to cancel useless Pentagon weapon systems. And the disease effects both political parties.

As the evening progressed I kept trying to move us beyond the Left-Right dialectic we are trapped in and to suggest that we might find some common ground in the liberal principles that are the basis for our Republic:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Now the word “liberal” is seen as poisonous to conservatives, but it’s origins in John Locke’s Natural Rights theory were the basis for our revolution. Read more…

Two years ago Citizens United financed a documentary by Newt & Callista Gingrich called America at Risk. It was the typical Gingrich over the top Global War on Islam screed and par for the course for the production company most famous for the Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate funds into the 2012 election cycle.

So what a delicious irony that Newt’s campaign has been brought to earth by the very force of Citizens United and the Super Pacs it spawned which are dumping endless negative ads on Gingrich.

The involvement of such groups can be especially damaging for candidates like Mr. Gingrich who have not raised enough money to be able to counter negative attacks with an advertising blitz of their own. Nor does Mr. Gingrich have a well-financed super PAC working on his behalf.

“The problem is the super PACs come in and spend $1 million a week blasting a candidate,” said Tim Albrecht, a senior aide to Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, a Republican. “And Newt has not been able to put an apparatus like that together.”

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

When did it start?

When did America’s mass consensual hallucination begin? When did the boundaries between truth and fiction dissolve?

Consider the evidence.

I awoke this morning to read that a candidate for the Presidency (Newt Gingrich) believes we should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and Iran because he fears they are about to launch a nuclear missle to be “detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, (which) would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out. “Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States. Most scientists regard this as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic even if these two pygmy powers had such a rocket, and yet this man could seriously be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. This is like Ron Hubbard running for President on the Scientology ticket. Read more…

I’m ready to wager that when the campaign of 2012 is all over, President Obama’s speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas will be seen as the turning point that led to his victory in November 2012. Readers of this blog know that I have long cited Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Movement (outlined in his own speech at Osawatomie 101 years ago) as one of the high water marks in American politics. The great historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the progressive reform movement “was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine.” That of course is the effort that we must undertake today.

My first request is that you read the whole speech. It is one of the finest examples of progressive political oratory in my lifetime. It is part history lesson and part economics seminar. Read more…

I think things are beginning to turn towards the Democrats. Even though Newt Gingrich is dismissive of the Occupy Movement, it has already changed the political conversation for 2012.

But politically, Democrats believe that they have already won this latest skirmish in the message wars. And some exasperated Republicans acknowledge that they are losing the exchange; party leaders have worked this week to bring the rank and file in line behind the tax cut.

Democrats have concluded from the payroll tax debate that Republicans are vulnerable over their opposition to any new taxes on the wealthy in a way they were not when Democrats proposed such taxes for deficit reduction. So they have reprised an old message — that Democrats fight for the middle class, Republicans for the rich — and are likely to sound it through 2012, in hopes of blunting the headwinds they face as unemployment remains high.

“Tonight, Senate Republicans chose to raise taxes on nearly 160 million hard-working Americans because they refused to ask a few hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the first Senate vote.

You add to this the possibility that the first big wave of Baby Boomer retirements and an improving employment picture might drop the unemployment rate below the 8% level by next summer. We have talked here about the fact that America is no longer a hard goods export economy. This may ironically be an advantage in the next couple of years as Europe struggles and China sees it’s largest export market pull back its purchases. Even more reason for us to concentrate on the American Redoubt.

Which leaves us with the question of Obama’s opponent. Clearly Cain is in free-fall and should be out of the race by Monday. He was a construct of the Koch Brothers and Fox News—a proxy to debunk the notion that the Tea party was a bunch of racist know-nothings. Anthea Butler gave him the “Lawn Jockey of the Year Award”, but now that Cain has served his purpose, Rupert and the Koch’s will drop him like a hot potato.

That seems to leave us with Gingrich and Romney. Some of my die hard Republican friends hold out the hope that these two will fight to a draw over the coming months, with neither of them having enough delegates to lock up the convention on the first ballot. This fantasy then leads to an old fashioned brokered convention where Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels emerges from a brokered convention. Shades of Mark Hanna and the Gilded Age of the Republican Oligarchs. How fitting for these times. Personally I think this is pure fantasy. As the recent Ron Paul Ad shows, Gingrich is such a hypocrite, he could not survive a Presidential Race. However, Conservatives are so wary of Romney that they may overlook Gingrich’s truckload of baggage. What Josh Marshall calls “the Murdoch Primary” is clearly being won by Gingrich, now that they have thrown Cain under the bus. There is a good case to be made that Gingrich could win both Iowa and South Carolina, thereby blunting Romney’s inevitability pitch.

All this must bring a smile to the President.