What Tools Does Obama Have Left?

cross-posted from Dagblog, with discussion thread here.

I've thrown away the woe-unto-ye-Barack-Obama post that I started after the debt ceiling debacle, because lots of other people have written it, and truth be told I've written it already myself. Let's take for granted that Obama needs to put up more of a fight against the Republicans, and that compromise and sweet reason aren't working. Here's the question: what to do now?

Let's skip "use the bully pulpit!" and "talk to the American people!" We've all heard those, and to be frank I don't see the weekly radio address turning this mess around. I'm interested in the question of what he can actually get done, rather than what message he should send. Let's also rule out "be tougher" and "don't compromise" as too vague; what would "being tough" actually entail? And let's save the argument about how he'll never do the right thing, because he doesn't want to for the next thousand and six discussions about that.

Let's imagine that the ghosts of Lincoln, Kennedy and FDR appear to Barack Obama tonight, tell him it's time to save the Republic, and put a ramrod up his spine. He wakes up tomorrow determined to stop those conservative maniacs and take the country back, just the way people with blogs are always saying he should. My question is this:

When he wakes up tomorrow, all fiery and determined, what specific steps are available to him? What can he do?

He's not going to be able to get anything through the Legislature, with an angry opposition party controlling the House and a bunch of "centrist" Democratic Senators focused on appeasement. No matter how much he wants to, he can't get laws passed, because it turns out that the executive branch is not in charge of legislating.

And he's still going to have the problem of his appointees being locked up in confirmation limbo, with a huge pile of judicial and sub-cabinet-level appointees stuck in the Senate after two and a half years. He can't make that problem go away just by wishing.

So what can the President of the United States do in this ugly position with the powers that the Constitution grants him: the power to make recess appointments, the oversight of the justice department, supervision of the federal bureaucracy (including all of the regulatory agencies), and the power to veto legislation? What can Obama do with the powers specifically invested in him as President, rather than in his unofficial Presidential roles as party leader and bully-pulpiteer?

God Bless the National Debt

cross-posted from Dagblog

Let's get one thing straight: without a national debt, there is no national defense. This has always been true.

We can all sputter righteously about the evils of borrowing and debt, but a United States government that did not borrow would either have to do without any military at all or else make do with a tiny, ill-equipped military with troops who almost never got their pay, which is what we had before the Washington Administration. Access to credit has always been central to effective government operations, and especially to effective military operations. Gimmicks like "debt ceilings" and "balanced budget amendments" not only threaten the effectiveness of basic, everyday governance but make the government completely incapable of responding to an emergency.

Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury Secretary, understood how important it was to finance government operations, because he had served at Valley Forge, where American soldiers went without food, without blankets, and without shoes. Hamilton did not blame the British for that suffering; he blamed the Continental Congress and he was right. (Congress was also to blame, after the Revolution, for refusing to pay the veterans of Valley Forge the pensions they had been promised. Next time you hear a "principled conservative" rhapsodizing over the Articles of Confederation, that's what they're rhapsodizing over.)

Hamilton (and Washington) understood that this was no way to run an army or a country, which is why they supported the Constitution, and why Washington backed Hamilton's program to put the nation on a sound financial footing. That footing required America to pay its debts, but also to contract them; nationalizing the debt, assuming the individual war debts run up by the thirteen states, was a key element in the program. God bless the national debt; it is part of the legacy of the Founders, and we'd be in trouble without it.

Of course, our national debt has grown much larger since FDR's presidency, an increase which is generally associated with New Deal social programs. But the largest New Deal program still kicking, Social Security, has taken in $2.6 trillion dollars more than it's paid out. (Social Security only "contributes to the deficit" to the extent that the trillions that have been taken from it for other purposes will need to be repaid.) But it was also under FDR that the United States went from having a fairly small standing army to having a huge, permanent military establishment. We did not demobilize after World War II as we did after previous wars. Instead, we built a global military bent on maintaining a significant technological edge over the rest of the world. That takes money. More than money, it takes financing. You don't maintain a fleet of superb fighter planes, or train people for Seal Team Six, by waiting for next month's withholding taxes to come in. The Army, Navy, and Air Force that we've had since the Forties are only possible because we undertake public debt.

The public's power to borrow is most important in emergencies, when there are pressing needs that simply can't wait. If we are ever attacked by a foreign power, we need to win the war first and pay for it later, just as we did during the Revolution. You don't wait to repel an invader until you've saved up for ammunition; if you do, it will be the invader collecting next year's taxes anyway. The same goes for responses to terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Cleaning up September 11 could not wait until the next April 15. Hurricane relief can't wait until we've moved other things around in the budget. And when the Mississippi floods, you have to stop the waters while they're rising, not when you've saved enough in this or that government account.

If politicians feel that the government debt has grown too high, they should consider raising revenues to pay for the programs they've voted for, rather than playing shenanigans with arbitrary "debt ceilings." (The debt ceiling doesn't prevent Congress from putting the government into debt; it just prevents the Treasury from issuing the bonds that keep the country running. It's like sending your kids to the market for a hundred dollars of groceries, handing them forty dollars, and forbidding them to let the store put the rest on account.) What the "debt ceiling" does is prevent the government from responding appropriately to emergencies when it's too close to whatever the artificial magical number is. What would we have done if, God forbid, there had been an earthquake and tsunami in California last month, when the Treasury had officially "exceeded its borrowing authority" and Congress was dithering around? Making it illegal to borrow for present needs, no matter the severity of those needs, is reckless and irrational.

And what would a federal balanced budget amendment do, except render the federal government permanently unable to respond to any event that hadn't been explicitly written into the budget eighteen months in advance? Surely, no one can believe that a "balanced" annual budget would not have every possible penny of the year's revenue spent in advance. The political process would demand that all of the year's revenue be spent, either directly or in tax rebates; if it would really take a Constitutional amendment to keep lawmakers from spending more than that, we should always expect that they will spend every cent that they are able. And how then would a "Budget-Balancing" United States respond to an unexpected military threat, or natural disasters, or any other crisis? How would it be able to respond even to a sudden economic downturn, which would unexpectedly lower the government's incoming tax revenue and throw the budget out of balance in the middle of the year. Imagine, for example, that the country underwent a massive financial crisis followed by a long economic slump while we had two separate armies fighting overseas. I know you can picture it if you try.

If the Republicans had passed a balanced-budget amendment back in 2005, when they had the White House and both Houses of Congress, our nation would likely have gone bankrupt in 2008, unable to deal with the banking crisis or to pay and supply our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are lucky that no such suicidally absurd provision appears in our Constitution. And we are lucky that Alexander Hamilton long ago set us on a wiser and sounder path.

God bless the national debt, I say. I am grateful for its role in keeping our country healthy, safe, and sound. And may the credit of the United States extend without blemish for a thousand years.

Capitalism for Customers

At the moment I'm in Prague for a conference. It's my first time back in almost two decades, since just after the Wall fell and the Czechs broke up with the Slovaks. I used to walk around this place with old Czechoslovak bills, still in circulation, which had been stamped in one corner with a "C" (or an "S") to indicate whether these were now Czech or Slovak crowns.

When I was last here, I was occasionally amused by the flamboyantly gruff and rude service you sometimes encountered here, which I took to be largely about the previous decades of dysfunctional command economy. I remember showing up at movie theater on a deserted street one night, with no other customers in sight and only a handful inside, only to have the old woman behind the counter refuse to serve us until she had very very deliberately (indeed, increasingly slowly and deliberately) finished tacking up some flyer inside the ticket booth. My education had provided me with a handy explanation beforehand: in a non-market economy, where there's no profit, there's no reason to try to be more profitable, and no reason to please the customer. If they want a movie ticket, they can wait, and show you a little respect.

I expected that two decades would make the Czech Republic more like the United States in this regard, with certain minimal standards of polite and reasonably efficient service when you're dealing with businesses. But over the last ten years, I've noticed that American customer service more and more often resembles the way Czech used to be about six days after they stopped being Communists. Perhaps I'm simply older and crankier, and more used to deference, but that seems not to be it, and I've had some downright surreal interactions when I was with someone else who could confirm that I was a) treated remarkably rudely by someone I was giving money and b) carefully polite myself. Over the last few months especially, I've had several experiences in the States that went beyond post-Communist Czech all the way to full blown Kafka.

In theory, customer service in a capitalist economy should be good, since everything is driven by the desire for profit. Customer service should be especially good in a consumer-based service economy, because that's where most of the profit is. Yet, as the United States has increasingly become that kind of consumer economy, and simultaneously become more and more of a capitalist's paradise, customer service seems to be much worse than it was in, say, the 1980s. How could this be?

The answer, I think, is that service jobs are worse in the States than they were twenty-five years ago: lower-paying, more demanding, less likely to carry benefits. And those jobs are no longer so much a stepping stone to better jobs as they are a whole sector of the economy. Service is bad because the people performing the service are paid badly and treated badly, and there's no profit motive to make them keep the customer satisfied, because they're not going to make any of that profit, even indirectly. A Communist-era waiter or ticket seller or bus driver had no economic reason to be efficient or friendly, because no matter how well they did their job it wasn't going to benefit them; nobody was making any money off this. An American working in a low-end service job today is in the same boat, or a worse one: someone is making money off their work, but doing it well doesn't get them anywhere. Doing a job well doesn't lead to a better job; there's just an endless series of crappy jobs. And the profit it all for investors: we've had decades now of hearing how overpaid workers cut into profits. If that's your mindset, you can't expect workers to be motivated by pay or profit. They don't get any.

The Czechs are better at customer service now, some of the time. (The rest of the time, well, they're still a Slavic culture and dealing with tourists is a pain in the ass.) But things aren't looking up for us in the States.

Happy Fourth of July (Boston Iced Tea Edition)

cross-posted from Dagblog

I'm enjoying the Glorious Fourth from my front porch, with Old Glory flying and a whole fridgeful of red and blue berries just waiting for some patriotic whipped cream to make them a virtuous Yankee dessert. Later today, my Red Sox will be taking on the British Commonwealth's only big-league baseball team, Toronto. I hope they do the Sons of Liberty proud.

In honor of the day, a recipe and a bit of historical trivia. First, the recipe:

Boston Harbor Iced Tea
1. Brew Darjeeling tea and ice it.
2. Rim drinking glasses with sea salt.
3. Pour iced tea into glasses. Sweeten each glass with two spoonfuls of molasses at the bottom.
4. Scoff at the British East India Company.


A bit of trivia, then. Although we talk about the Boston Tea Party as a revolt against taxes, that was only part of the problem. It was actually a revolt against a government-sponsored monopoly. In fact, the British cut the tax on tea.

There had been a tax on tea in the colonies for years. And the colonists did object to it, but not nearly as much as the Stamp Act, which taxed every paper document in the colonies. The Stamp Act led to a bitter series of protests, reprisals and confrontations between the colonists and parliament. At the end, Parliament essentially backed down but left the tax on tea in effect, just to save face. The colonists didn't like it, but sometimes you have to compromise. The Americans were willing to let Parliament walk away from the table with something. And then, of course, to drink black-market tea rather than pay the tax.

Then Parliament decided to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the British East India Company an exclusive monopoly on importing tea to America. (Modern conservatives claim the government should not break up monopolies, but 18th-century Britain created monopolies by fiat.) To sweeten the deal, Parliament lowered the tea tax. But Parliament's goal was to help a powerful, well-connected corporation make more money.

So, in an ongoing slow-burn confrontation over who had the right to levy taxes, you have Parliament going back to undo a compromise. And you had them doing that in order to favor a gigantic, politically-connected business concern over consumers and smaller merchants. (They actually made it illegal for any of the Americans to sell tea, and anyone who bought it had to pay the monopolists' price, not the market's.) Reminds me of something, but I can't say what. Happy Fourth, everybody!

The Last White Gangster

cross-posted from Dagblog

The FBI has caught Whitey Bulger, after a mere sixteen years. The arrest made national news because of the FBI's well-earned embarrassment and because of the mythology around Bulger. As a crime boss, Bulger was not nationally significant. He was a formidable gang leader with firm control over one slice of Boston's organized crime, but it was only a slice. He was the scariest gang leader in Boston, but not necessarily the biggest or richest. You'll hear a lot in the papers about what a criminal genius he is, and he really is smarter than any hoodlum should get, but what it's really about is this: Jimmy Bulger is the Last Great White Gangster.

Bulger is the last Irish-American mob leader who's likely to control even a slice of the underworld in a major American city. He is ethnically similar to many of the journalists and editors covering him, and they obviously love writing about him. He's the last gangster who looks like Jimmy Cagney, so even very good coverage of him gets tinged with sympathy and sentimentality that Bulger has never come close to deserving. It's a nostalgia trip. Reporters call Bulger "colorful," but it's only because he's so very pale.

Some of the Bulger myth is based on fact. He corrupted cops and FBI agents, who helped him murder and helped him escape. His brother was President of the Massachusetts State Senate for eighteen years, with Jimmy a notorious criminal the whole time. He is the primary model for Nicholson's character in The Departed, although even that bleak movie pulled its punches about Bulger's depravity and Boston's corruption. He did inform on the Boston Mafia, enabling the FBI to tape one of the Mafia's hokey (but, surprisingly, real) initiation ceremonies. And some people in South Boston, where Whitey did his crimes, did and do talk about him as a Robin Hood figure. But all of that was possible because Bulger was, well, Whitey. The open political connections, the wrongheaded sympathy from cops and deluded loyalty from the neighborhood all come down to ethnic solidarity and Boston's shameful history of race relations. Race isn't the whole story. It's only forty or sixty percent. But it's the forty-to-sixty percent that the media will leave out, and the part that explains all the rest.

The biggest break that the Bulgers ever got was the court order that desegregated the Boston schools by mandating busing in 1974. Back then Whitey was working for a gangster named Howie Winter and his brother Billy was South Boston's state senator. When busing happened, Southie flew into a frothing rage. It took the neighborhood at least twenty-five years to get over it. And while people (including William Bulger) will tell you with a straight face that all the anger wasn't about race (it was really about local control and neighborhood schools and yadda yadda yadda), that's just whitewash. People screamed racial slurs in the streets. They wrote them on public walls. Black people, including kids and unlucky bystanders, got intimidated and physically attacked. (Other Irish-American neighborhoods were also angry, but South Boston and Charleston were the worst, and Southie was ground zero.) Was every last single opponent of busing a dyed-in-the-wool racist? No. But plenty of them voiced the most toxic racism you can imagine, loudly and proudly. Twenty years later, you could still hear some people from those neighborhoods saying vile, hateful things in a matter-of-fact tone. And the fury wasn't even about the quality of white kids' education: South Boston High was a lousy school, at the bottom of the state rankings. What the angry mobs wanted was to make sure their kids went to a failing and dysfunctional school with other white kids.

Billy Bulger became a leader of the anti-busing movement, and it made him. Four years later he was President of the State Senate. Whitey was fighting busing, too, in his own way: the pro-busing Mayor of Boston actually worried at one point that Bulger might have him killed so the anti-busing Deputy Mayor could take his place. If you think of William Bulger as a segregationist Southern governor and his brother as Grand Dragon of the local KKK, you have the basic picture. And the deference they've received from Boston's press and politicians should be seen through that lens; they were the devils that liberals had to deal with, and too many locals had sympathy for.

Cops, including federal cops, liked Jimmy Bulger because he was an Irish neighborhood guy just like many of them were. (His FBI handler was a guy named Connolly who'd grown up in the same Southie housing project.) And the busing crisis turned that garden-variety ethnic bond into something deeper and more tribal as places like Southie and Charleston grew more defensive and aggrieved. Some of those cops felt that their ethnic group was losing ground in the city, and they weren't in any special hurry to see Boston Irish losing power in the underworld. In fact, the FBI was happy to help Whitey expand by undermining Italian mobsters. Whitey got stronger in the 1980s as the Mafia got weaker. The Last White Gangster basically got endangered-species protection.

People were willing to tolerate, even to celebrate, the Bulger brothers because they were a bulwark of Irish political influence that was otherwise in danger of eroding. At least they were Irish, and you couldn't be sure the next guys would be. William Bulger ran an old-school political patronage machine; if you backed him, he could help this or that nephew find a public job. Whitey was an old-school ethnic racketeer. He might have robbed South Boston blind and helped keep it poor, but at least the neighborhood got exploited by one of the tribe.

The "Robin Hood" myth about Whitey is partly the usual dysfunctional ghetto Stockholm Syndrome bullshit, and partly about the belief that Whitey kept African-Americans at bay. People will actually say that Whitey "kept drugs out of the neighborhood." That's not just a lie but a self-delusion. Whitey Bulger kept drugs out of Southie the way that Santa Claus keeps toys out of the living room on Christmas morning: he didn't deliver the packages himself, but everyone who did was acting in his name. The "keeping drugs out of the neighborhood" story demands (or allows) whoever believes it not to notice that Southie was totally full of drugs.

But if you read "keeping out drugs" as "keeping out blacks," it makes a lot of sense. That was the thing about Southie: the kids were on drugs, but all the drug dealers were white. Some people in Southie and Charlestown were willing to fight bitterly for the right to have their own all-white drug traffic and all-white extortion rackets and failing all-white schools where white kids could get a rotten education among their own kind. South Boston's love for Whitey Bulger is about the desire to be abused and exploited by a fellow member of the tribe; you can only have a Last White Gangster if you have a Last White Ghetto for him to rule over.

The Bulger brothers are masters of South Boston's greatest art: playing the victim. Whitey has the balls to complain that the FBI confiscated the $800,000 in his apartment and ask for a court-ordered lawyer. Billy Bulger complains that he was forced to resign as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003 just because his brother had been a federal fugitive for nine years and Billy admitted having contacted him during that time. (Give Mitt Romney his due for making that happen.) That's the same Billy Bulger who used to complain that anti-busing protestors were being unfairly painted as racists just because they stood around screaming "Nigger!" at teenagers. Whitey's girlfriend, Catherine Grieg, excused his explosive temper by telling the neighbors that he had Alzheimer's, and serious media outlets gullibly repeated that. In fact, Whitey is just a terrible person. If his violent anger is a symptom of Alzheimer's, then Alzheimer's set in while he was in the womb. The Bulger brothers' Southie, the Southie they exploited and preserved, was just the same way: loudly declaring victimhood at the hands of any outsider handy, while reserving the right to do all the actual victimizing themselves. But don't let the martyr act fool you: neither South Boston nor Jimmy Bulger are victims. They're simply hoods.