Keller and Krugman

 In “Beyond Occupy” Mr. Keller says in India, Anna Hazare and his team show what protest can accomplish.  Prof. Krugman, in “Bombs, Bridges and Jobs,” says the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force.  Here’s Mr. Keller:

Since I was passing throughIndiaon a reporting project, I decided to drop in on Anna Hazare, the anticorruption campaigner whose admirers speak of him as the reincarnation of Gandhi. Kisan Baburao Hazare (“Anna” is a Marathi honorific meaning “older brother”) has been a figure in provincial Indian affairs for decades, but he galvanized attention this year when his threat to fast to the death shamed the government into endorsing reforms. I wondered what Hazare, as an exemplar of a venerable style of civil pressure, made ofOccupy Wall Street.

Back home, the Occupiers have been pandered to (“Love your energy!”); patronized (“Here, I’ve drafted you a list of demands …”); co-opted by unions, celebrities and activists for various causes; demonized by the right; arrested and tear-gassed in some cities; and taken lightly by the likes of me. They have been a combination national mood ring and political Rorschach test. Perhaps by consulting someone who is a serious candidate for the pantheon of protest, I thought, I could sharpen my own understanding of what the Occupy project means.

About the time I put in my request for an interview, Hazare, exhausted by his latest hunger strike and weary of the media melodramas that have bedeviled his team, announced that he had taken an indefinite “vow of silence.” This raised questions in my mind — Was he planning to continue his protest as a mime? — but of course I had little hope of getting answers from him because … well, you see the problem.

So I went to visit his associate, Kiran Bedi, who battled for reforms as India’s first policewoman before joining Hazare. Bedi speaks with the intense energy of a high-voltage circuit. No vow of silence for her. And it turned out the subject of Occupy Wall Street has been very much on the minds of Team Anna.

For those who haven’t been following the story, Hazare, 74, is a small landowner’s son with a seventh-grade education, a middle-class background by Indian standards of the time. He first gained some attention by using his army pension to help turn his ancestral village in Maharashtra into a model of rural development — building schools, organizing a dairy cooperative, fighting caste discrimination and alcoholism. One of his early successes as an organizer was a state law that required a vote on banning alcohol in a village if 25 percent of the women — the suffering wives of the indolent and abusive drunks — demanded it.

In his younger days he was given to vigilante tactics — smashing illegal stills, flogging drunks — but in his 60s he adopted the time-honored Indian pressure tactic of the indefinite fast, which, when it works, succeeds through a combination of public fascination and official shame. The political fast has a rich history in societies likeIndia and Ireland that have some experience of starvation and an acute public sense of honor. I can’t imagine it catching on in America, especially if our national compassion is reflected in the likes of Ron (“Let Them Die on the Hospital Doorstep”) Paul and Herman (“If You’re Not Rich, It’s Your Own Fault”) Cain. But inIndia it is an effective form of coercion. One poll found 87 percent public support for Hazare’s 12-day August fast, and his hunger strikes almost always end in concessions.

Obviously,Indiais not America, but both countries were born in popular protest (against the same empire) and I found it instructive to examine my Occupying countrymen from this vantage point.

Like Occupy Wall Street, Hazare embodies a national frustration with broken democratic institutions. Indeed, India’s government makes our paralyzed Congress look nimble. Like Occupy, Hazare’s grand grievance is the wholesale diversion of wealth from the middle class and poor to the unworthy few — inIndia’s case through payoffs, patronage and thievery, inAmerica’s through tax and regulatory policies that have expanded the gap between the richest few and everyone else.

In many telling respects, however, that’s where the similarities end.

“When we started the movement, it was like Occupy,” Bedi told me. “But we went beyond Occupy.”

For starters, while Occupy Wall Street is consensus-oriented and resolutely leaderless, Hazare is very much the center of attention. There was an anticorruption movement before Hazare, but it was fractious and weak until he supplied a core of moral authority. When he announces his intention to starve himself, he parks himself on an elevated platform in a public place, thousands gather, scores of others announce solidarity hunger strikes, and TV cameras congregate, hanging on his every word. Hazare and his entourage can seem self-important and high-handed, but he is a reminder that leadership matters.

Second, the Occupiers are a composite of idealistic causes, many of them vague. “End the Fed,” some placards demand. “End War.” “Get the money out of politics.” Much of the Occupy movement resides at the dreamy level of John Lennon lyrics. “Imagine no possessions. …”

Hazare, in contrast, is always very explicit about his objectives: fire this corrupt minister, repeal that law bought by a special interest, open public access to official records.

His current mission is the creation of a kind of national anticorruption czar, a powerful independent ombudsman. The measure is advancing, and Team Anna hovers over the Parliament at every step, paying close attention to detail, to make sure nobody pulls the teeth out of it. Instead of a placard, Bedi has a PowerPoint presentation.

Occupy Wall Street is scornful of both parties and generally disdainful of electoral politics. Team Anna (yes, they call themselves that) likewise avoids aligning itself with any party or candidate, but it uses Indian democracy shrewdly, to target obstructionists. Recently Hazare turned a special election for a vacant parliamentary seat into a referendum, urging followers to vote against any party that refused to endorse his anticorruption bill. Hazare has also called for an amendment to the election laws to require that voters always be offered the option of “None of the Above.” When it prevails, parties would have to come up with better candidates.

“What really changes them,” Bedi said of recalcitrant politicians, “is the threat of losing an election.”

The Occupation has at least a strong undercurrent of anticapitalism. Not in India. An attempt to spark an Indian offshoot of Occupy Wall Street — a Facebook campaign branded with pictures of Che Guevara — went pretty much nowhere. Capitalism is one thing most Indians believe in; indeed, as my colleagues in the Delhi bureau have been illustrating in a fascinating series of articles this year, the entire economy is a great capitalist workaround. Hazare’s aim is to stop a political class from usurping the fruits of capitalism.

“We’re not anticapitalism,” Bedi told me. “We’re pro-integrity.”

I understand that it is not the job of a protest to draft legislation, to elect candidates, to agree on a 10-point plan for fixing what ails us. But that does not mean the job of fixing what ails us is any less urgent or admirable. At some point you need the unglamorous business of government, which entails not consensus but hard choices and reasoned compromise. The job of protest is to mobilize a mood — but to mobilize it with purpose.

“Occupy has been, to my mind, an engaging movement, and it’s driving home the message, to the banks, to the Wall Street circles,” Bedi said. “That’s exactly the way Anna did it. But we had a destination. I’m not aware these people — what is their destination? It’s occupy for what?”

I’m prepared to celebrate when the Occupiers — like the lone hunger artist of India — accomplish something more than organizing their own campsite cleanup, demonstrating their tolerance for tear gas, and distracting the conversation a little from the Tea Party. So far, the main achievement of Occupy Wall Street is showing up.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”

Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force — which makes this a good time to see what’s really going on in debates over economic policy.

What’s bringing out the military big spenders is the approaching deadline for the so-called supercommittee to agree on a plan for deficit reduction. If no agreement is reached, this failure is supposed to trigger cuts in the defense budget.

Faced with this prospect, Republicans — who normally insist that the government can’t create jobs, and who have argued that lower, not higher, federal spending is the key to recovery — have rushed to oppose any cuts in military spending. Why? Because, they say, such cuts would destroy jobs.

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

Oh, the hypocrisy! But what makes this particular form of hypocrisy so enduring?

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges?

John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious “preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, “Solyndra! Waste!” Spend money on a weapons system we don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition.

To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.

But there are also darker motives behind weaponized Keynesianism.

For one thing, to admit that public spending on useful projects can create jobs is to admit that such spending can in fact do good, that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem. Fear that voters might reach the same conclusion is, I’d argue, the main reason the right has always seen Keynesian economics as a leftist doctrine, when it’s actually nothing of the sort. However, spending on useless or, even better, destructive projects doesn’t present conservatives with the same problem.

Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.

Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.

So I welcome the sudden upsurge in weaponized Keynesianism, which is revealing the reality behind our political debates. At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda — keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay.

 

The Pasty Little Putz, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

MoDo is off today.  The Pasty Little Putz, in “What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy,” gurgles that soaking the rich can’t fix a broken government.  Apparently he’s still fapping over Mitch Daniels.  Pitiful…  The Moustache of Wisdom has a question:  “Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?”  He says that while the world watched the demise of Qaddafi, some unsettling news from Wall Street helped explain why all those protests are resonating.  Mr. Kristof asks are you “Addicted to Exercise?”  He says brain scans suggest that everything from sugar to sex lights up the brain’s pleasure circuitry similar to the way cocaine does in an addict. And altruism does, too.  Mr. Bruni, in “Pizzas and Pessimism,” says the disconnect between the seriousness of our angst and the silliness of our politics defies belief.  Here’s The Putz;

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has generated more large fortunes and more stress for the middle class. While the rich have grown extraordinarily rich, median wages have barely increased, the costs of health care and higher education have jumped, and socioeconomic mobility has lagged behind that of other developed nations. Americans have never begrudged the wealthy their success, as long as they had a chance to rise higher than their parents, and perhaps get rich themselves. But our era of diminished expectations is putting that in doubt.

From the drum circles of Zuccotti Park to the hustings of Barack Obama’s re-election push, a suddenly invigorated liberalism thinks that it has the answer to this angst: a renewed demand for higher taxes on America’s richest 1 percent. And if all you care about is reducing measured income inequality, then the Occupy Wall Streeters and their Democratic admirers have it right. Tax millionaires sufficiently and you’ll end up with a more equal society. The tallest poppies will be trimmed, and some of their income will find its way to someone’s else pocket.

But true social mobility and broadly shared prosperity are not so easily achieved. Remember that those tax dollars, once collected, would not be disbursed with perfect effectiveness to the most deserving members of the American middle class. Instead, they would be used to buy a little more time for our failing public institutions — postponing a reckoning with unsustainable pension commitments, delaying necessary reforms in our entitlement system and propping up an educational sector whose results don’t match the costs.

More spending in these areas won’t necessarily buy us more mobility. The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door.

Our entitlement system, meanwhile, is designed to redistribute wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t go from the idle rich to the working poor; it goes from young to old, working-age savings to retiree consumption, middle-class parents to empty-nest seniors. The Congressional Budget Office’s new report on income inequality points out that growing Medicare costs are part of the reason upper-income retirees receive a larger share of federal spending than they did 30 years ago, while working-age households with children receive “a much smaller and declining share of transfers.” Absent reforms, this mismatch will only grow more pronounced: by the 2030s, Medicare recipients will receive $3 in benefits for every dollar they paid in.

Then there’s the public education system, theoretically the nation’s most important socioeconomic equalizer. Yet even though government spending on K-to-12 education has more than doubled since the 1970s, test scores have flatlined and the United States has fallen behind its developed-world rivals. Meanwhile, federal spending on higher education has been undercut by steadily inflating tuitions, in what increasingly looks like an academic answer to the housing bubble. (If the Occupy Wall Street dream of student loan forgiveness were fulfilled, this cycle would probably just continue.)

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

The alternative to this liberalism should not, however, be the kind of reverse class warfare currently being championed by the not-Romney candidates in the Republican field, whose flat-tax fantasies would ask working Americans to bear more of the burden for public institutions that have been failing them for years.

Rather, it should be a kind of small-government egalitarianism, which would seek to reform the government before we pour more money into it, along lines that encourage upward mobility and benefit the middle class. This would mean seeking a carefully means-tested welfare state, a less special interest-friendly tax code, and a public sector that worked for taxpayers and parents rather than the other way around.

This was the potential message that had some of us excited about the prospects of either a Mitch Daniels or a Chris Christie candidacy. Given his background and his bank account, Mitt Romney is an unlikely champion for a more egalitarian conservatism. But it wouldn’t be the first time that an American patrician has emerged as a champion of the common man.

Cripes.  He defies description.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Citigroup is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader’s death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup’s flimflam made “Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself.” (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

For decades, scientists have studied areas deep within the brain that seem associated with pleasure and addiction.

Put an electrode in that part of a rat’s brain, and it will become obsessed with stimulating those areas. When rats are allowed to push a lever in exchange for a mild current that produces a “high” in the “pleasure centers,” they will press the lever up to 7,000 times per hour.

These rats forget to eat or drink, and they must be unhooked to prevent self-starvation. Male rats ignore females in heat to get a fix, and nursing mothers ignore their babies.

“Pressing that lever became their entire world,” David J. Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University medical school, writes in his fascinating new book, “The Compass of Pleasure.”

Professor Linden explains how drugs such as cocaine that light up these pleasure centers (there are several interconnected areas) actually rewire the brain to increase cravings. You can look at magnified photos of rat brains and tell which animal was given cocaine and which wasn’t.

Yet it’s not just drugs. Brain scans suggest that everything from sugar to sex lights up the brain’s pleasure circuitry. These all can have neurological consequences that correspond to what we think of as addiction. For example: exercise.

As a pathological runner since my days as a high school cross country athlete in Oregon, that struck a chord. Am I addicted to running?

“Exercise addicts display all of the hallmarks of substance addicts: tolerance, craving, withdrawal and the need to exercise ‘just to feel normal,’ ” Linden writes.

O.K., I confess. I might be an addict.

Exercise seems to trigger the release of chemicals called endorphins and enkephalins (the brain’s version of opium) and endocannabinoids (the brain’s version of marijuana). In the lab, rats can develop an addiction to exercise on a wheel.

Brain researchers are finding many similar patterns. Who knew that orgasms, in men and women alike, light up the pleasure centers much like cocaine? (And who knew that researchers immobilize subjects in a lab, hook them up to a brain scanner, and then instruct them to engage in sexual activity?)

Linden argues that there is such a thing as a genuine biological addiction to sex. The public’s failure to recognize this, he says, means that people often don’t receive treatment.

“Sex addicts are among the least likely to seek help among all sufferers of addiction,” he writes, adding that this is tragic because sex addicts may be more likely than drug addicts to take others down with them.

Brain chemistry research also suggests that gambling and overeating can be addictive behaviors, analogous to narcotics addictions. In particular, foods with sugar or fat seem to trigger cravings that then rewire the brain’s pleasure circuitry to amplify that craving.

One study found that rats fed foods like cheesecake and chocolate showed differences in brain circuitry after just 40 days. The impact was that the pleasure centers of their brains were numbed, so they apparently needed to gobble even more cheesecake to generate the same satisfaction. Whether it’s sugar or heroin, the body steadily ratchets up the quantity necessary to provide the same high.

Does this mean the end of free will?

Of course not. But it’s a reminder that cravings are complex phenomena with strong ties to brain chemistry and genetics. Maybe that’s why President Obama has shown astounding self-discipline in his political career while enduring a long struggle with nicotine.

Moreover, our brains impel us not only toward vices, but also toward virtues. In recent years, researchers have found that generosity isn’t always a sacrifice; instead, it often exhilarates us.

One set of experiments at the University of Oregon involved young women hooked up to brain scanners as they were presented with modest amounts of money. Sometimes the money was then “taxed,” sometimes they were given the chance to donate to charity, and sometimes they were given additional money.

Their pleasure centers lit up when they received money, as one might expect — but also when they gave money away.

There were considerable variations among individuals. About half of the women seemed to derive as much pleasure, based upon their brain patterns, from giving money as from receiving it. The other half enjoyed receiving money more. Not surprisingly, the latter contributed less to charity.

Maybe the research will lead to new tools to fight drug addiction, alcoholism or obesity. Maybe I’ll be able to get a runner’s high without the sweat. But, to me, the most fascinating insight is that for at least half of humans it truly does seem to be as blessed to give as to receive.

On the basis of the latest brain research, as well as practical experience, let’s acknowledge this profound truth: altruism and generosity can be hedonistic pleasures.

Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

Being surprised by something nutty from Herman Cain’s presidential campaign is like balking at an autopsy in a “CSI” episode: certain things go with the territory. Still, you had to pause and peel your jaw off the ground after watching an Internet ad for Cain that prompted considerable conversation last week.

In it Cain’s chief of staff, who comes across mostly as an untidy salt-and-pepper mustache with a rumpled politico attached, delivers the needless reminder that Cain has “run a campaign like nobody’s ever seen.” To prove the point he glowers meaningfully at the camera while sucking manfully on a cigarette. Alligators as border-patrol agents and nicotine for all: that’s the Cain agenda. The candidate appears in close-up at the end of the commercial, flashing a grin that’s two parts demented to one part demonic. Were there a thought bubble attached, it would say, “In my wildest dreams I never thought you people would actually buy this pizza.”

Meanwhile Rick Perry, who would trade his five best pairs of custom-made cowboy boots for just one of Cain’s percentage points in the polls, tried to steal the dubious thunder of the Herminator’s 9-9-9 tax hallucination by announcing an either-or, multiple-choice tax phantasm of his own. It would compel you to hire an accountant to figure out whether you’re best served by the existing code or by a 20 percent flat tax designed to spare you the accountant. If you go the 20 percent route, Perry said, you can file your returns on a postcard. I think he should add a deduction for taxpayers whose postcards promote national pride. I’ll pick one with the Statue of Liberty. You can do Mount Rushmore or the Washington Monument.

In the midst of all this, two attention-commanding sets of numbers were released. One, from the Congressional Budget Office, confirmed an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth in this country, noting that the inflation-adjusted incomes of the most affluent Americans had grown much, much faster over the last three decades than the incomes of the middle class. The other, from a New York Times/CBS News poll, showed that 74 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and 89 percent do not trust that government will do the right thing.

That’s a chilling and extraordinary pessimism, grafted onto a 9.1 percent unemployment rate and projections of a grim economy for some time to come. And it makes the kookiness of the Republican primaries all the more disquieting. As the (later disputed) story goes, Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Cain’s chief of staff smokes while the citizenry smolders.

The disconnect between the seriousness of our angst and the silliness of our politics — between how big our problems are and how hopeless or just plain stuck the people who are supposed to address them seem — defies belief. Right now the system isn’t working, and a recognition of that is one of the ties that bind Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. They don’t identify the same villains or promote the same solutions. But they’re flowers of a shared frustration.

And neither movement is a marginal, renegade phenomenon. A recent Time magazine poll found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Occupy Wall Street, while 27 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party. Even assuming some overlap, that translates into a great many people supportive of movements railing against the status quo. These Americans have lost faith in business as usual and government as usual. Small wonder, then, that the Times/CBS poll showed an approval rating for Congress now at 9 percent. Nine percent. I bet a higher percentage of Americans believe that Elvis and Michael Jackson are still alive and honeymooning on Lake Como after a wedding — to each other — in upstate New York.

REGARD for Congress isn’t likely to rise over the 12 months until the election, given that Republicans and Democrats have largely slipped into campaign mode. For a while, over the summer, President Obama seemed to resist that, and came across as cool-headed and big-minded, his desire to legislate keener than his itch to agitate. But his newly frequent trips outside Washington and newly fiery rhetoric suggest that he has partly given up. In terms of real progress on jobs creation, infrastructure and other matters central to our economic predicament, we could be looking at a solid year of nothingness, and therein lies another of the moment’s disconnects. Our need is urgent, but the possibility that it will be meaningfully addressed is remote.

The Congressional supercommittee charged with whittling down the national debt will hold a public hearing Tuesday. The heart beats faster. Already there are reports of a Democratic insistence on significant new taxes and a Republican opposition to same, which basically brings us back to where Obama and John Boehner left off. We’re looking at an interminable November.

At least we’ll have the Republican presidential candidates to marvel at. And Perry had a marvelous week, in the strict sense of the word. He revived questions about Obama’s birth certificate. He also blamed his wretched debate performances on formats that denied candidates adequate time to “lay out your ideas and concepts.”

Was it your impression that all he needed was a few more acres of oratorical stamping grounds and eloquence would be his? It was my impression that short-form or long-, Perry is to oratory what Weird Al Yankovic is to balladry. Only the humor isn’t intentional.

Elsewhere in the Republican field, Jon Huntsman, the former ambassador to China, told a Chinese-food joke of questionable taste; Michele Bachmann started peddling Bachmann-campaign fleeces in exchange for $75 donations; and the Cain campaign announced that even without promises of commemorative clothing, it had raised $3 million this month. Cain was in a statistical dead heat with Mitt Romney, according to the Times/CBS News poll.

Some observers say that the absurdity of that is indeed a mirror of our distress — that Americans are grasping at simplistic straws. But Cain’s support won’t last or turn out to have been all that meaningful. The poll’s more consequential findings were that 6 in 10 Republican primary voters weren’t paying close attention yet and 8 in 10 said it was too early to decide on a candidate.

What worries me isn’t the Cain surge or the Bachmann boomlet before it, but the likelihood that when Americans do focus, more and more will see nothing hopeful happening and a motley crew of politicians who are merely blowing smoke.

What happens then?

 

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow, in “America’s Exploding Pipe Dream,” says numbers don’t lie. The United States gets low scores in a new report on social justice.  Mr. Nocera tells us “What the Costumes Reveal,” and that a New York “foreclosure mill” law firm celebrates Halloween by mocking those who lose their homes.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

We are slowly — and painfully — being forced to realize that we are no longer the America of our imaginations. Our greatness was not enshrined. Being a world leader is less about destiny than focused determination, and it is there that we have faltered.

We sold ourselves a pipe dream that everyone could get rich and no one would get hurt — a pipe dream that exploded like a pipe bomb when the already-rich grabbed for all the gold; when they used their fortunes to influence government and gain favors and protection; when everyone else was left to scrounge around their ankles in hopes that a few coins would fall.

We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.

Poor policies and poor choices have led to exceedingly poor outcomes. Our societal chickens have come home to roost.

This was underscored in a report released on Thursday by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation of Germany entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and ranked America among the ones at the bottom.

I could write (and have written) ad nauseam about our woeful state, but it might be more powerful to see it for yourself. So here are some of the sad data from the report.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”)

MFY Legal Services, which defends homeowners, and Harwood Feffer, a large class-action firm, have filed a class-action suit claiming that Steven J. Baum has consistently failed to file certain papers that are necessary to allow for a state-mandated settlement conference that can lead to a modification. Judge Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn once described Baum’s foreclosure filings as “operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe.” (My source told me that one Baum employee dressed up as Judge Schack at a previous Halloween party.)

I saw the firm operate up close when I wrote several columns about Lilla Roberts, a 73-year-old homeowner who had spent three years in foreclosure hell. Although she had a steady income and was a good candidate for a modification, the Baum firm treated her mercilessly.

When I called a press spokesman for Steven J. Baum to ask about the photographs, he sent me a statement a few hours later. “It has been suggested that some employees dress in … attire that mocks or attempts to belittle the plight of those who have lost their homes,” the statement read. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” It described this column as “another attempt by The New York Times to attack our firm and our work.”

I encourage you to look at the photographs with this column on the Web. Then judge for yourself the veracity of Steven J. Baum’s denial.

 

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo wants you to work for him.  In “The Life Report” he has a question:  Readers over 70, have you taken stock of your life so far? Well, please write it down and tell us what you’ve learned so it can be shared with younger generations.  Bobo’s assuming that younger generations read his crap…  Prof. Krugman, in “The Path Not Taken,” says there were alternatives to the economic doctrine that championed bank bailouts and mass suffering from the public. Look at Iceland.  Here’s Bobo:

If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories — career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge — and give yourself a grade in each area.

If you send these life reports to me at dabrooks@nytimes.com, I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

I ask for this gift for two reasons.

First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete picture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.

The closest things I’ve been able to find to Life Reports of this sort are the essays some colleges ask their alumni to write for their 25th and 50th reunions. For example, I just stumbled across a collection of short autobiographies that the Yale class of 1942 wrote for their 50th reunion. Some of the lives are inspiring, and some are ones you’d want to avoid.

The most common lament in this collection is from people who worked at the same company all their lives and now realize how boring they must seem. These people passively let their lives happen to them. One man described his long, uneventful career at an insurance company and concluded, “Wish my self-profile was more exciting, but it’s a little late now.”

Others regret the risk not taken. One rancher wrote, “The pastoral country and its people of New South Wales and Tasmania are similar to Arizona of fifty years ago, that I recall so fondly. I deeply regret not moving to Australia when I was married there 25 years ago.”

Others wish they had had more intellectual curiosity, or that they weren’t so lazy, or that they had not gotten married so young. Some are strangely passive even in the case of their own character flaws. One chemistry professor wrote, “I am stubborn, cold, selfish, and resentful of being corrected or opposed. I also wish that a course in parenting had been required of all of us at Yale.”

Looking back, many were amazed by the role that chance played in their lives. Others point to the pivotal moment that changed their lives. One man was nationally humiliated when he lost to Charles Van Doren in a television quiz show (Van Doren was cheating). Another had a daughter who developed schizophrenia at 16. Another made his fortune in a moment, inventing a mechanical birdcall. “The way it is shaping up now it will be The Audubon Birdcall that is my legacy, and not much else,” he wrote.

The most exciting essays were written by the energetic, restless people, who took their lives off in new directions midcourse. One man, who was white, trained an all-black unit during World War II, was a director of the pharmaceutical company that developed The Pill, and then served as a judge at an international court at The Hague. “Career-wise, it was a rocky road,” another wrote, “but if diversity is the spice of life, then mine resembled hot Indian curry.” Nobody regretted the life changes they made, even when they failed.

Some felt summoned to do one thing. Their essays ring with passion and conviction. “I have been put on earth to be a painter,” one artist wrote. A scientist writes, “I can think of no career more rewarding and no pursuit more noble.”

After an unexciting business career, one man found total fulfillment teaching others how to build custom fishing rods. Another found it volunteering for the International Crane Foundation, preserving bird habitats.

The men all mention serving in the war, but none go into detail about their war experiences. Many were struck by tragedy: blindness, the suicide of a child, a profound professional catastrophe.

They strike me as less intellectually adventurous than the Yale students of today. They were alarmed by the shift in values they had witnessed during their lifetime. But most were immensely grateful to live in the era that they did. An amazing number cherished their marriages of 43 years or more. And, for almost all, family and friends mattered most.

And they left these essays, offering lessons for the rest of us. I’m hoping you’ll do that, too.

Here’s Prof. Krugman, writing from Reykjavik:

Financial markets are cheering the deal that emerged from Brussels early Thursday morning. Indeed, relative to what could have happened — an acrimonious failure to agree on anything — the fact that European leaders agreed on something, however vague the details and however inadequate it may prove, is a positive development.

But it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

Some economists weren’t convinced. One caustic critic referred to claims about the expansionary effects of austerity as amounting to belief in the “confidence fairy.” O.K., that was me.

But the doctrine has, nonetheless, been extremely influential. Expansionary austerity, in particular, has been championed both by Republicans in Congress and by the European Central Bank, which last year urged all European governments — not just those in fiscal distress — to engage in “fiscal consolidation.”

And when David Cameron became Britain’s prime minster last year, he immediately embarked on a program of spending cuts in the belief that this would actually boost the economy — a decision that was greeted with fawning praise by many American pundits.

Now, however, the results are in, and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

Maybe the most telling thing is what now passes for a success story. A few months ago various pundits began hailing the achievements of Latvia, which in the aftermath of a terrible recession, nonetheless, managed to reduce its budget deficit and convince markets that it was fiscally sound. That was, indeed, impressive, but it came at the cost of 16 percent unemployment and an economy that, while finally growing, is still 18 percent smaller than it was before the crisis.

So bailing out the banks while punishing workers is not, in fact, a recipe for prosperity. But was there any alternative? Well, that’s why I’m in Iceland, attending a conference about the country that did something different.

If you’ve been reading accounts of the financial crisis, or watching film treatments like the excellent “Inside Job,” you know that Iceland was supposed to be the ultimate economic disaster story: its runaway bankers saddled the country with huge debts and seemed to leave the nation in a hopeless position.

But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.

So how’s it going? Iceland hasn’t avoided major economic damage or a significant drop in living standards. But it has managed to limit both the rise in unemployment and the suffering of the most vulnerable; the social safety net has survived intact, as has the basic decency of its society. “Things could have been a lot worse” may not be the most stirring of slogans, but when everyone expected utter disaster, it amounts to a policy triumph.

And there’s a lesson here for the rest of us: The suffering that so many of our citizens are facing is unnecessary. If this is a time of incredible pain and a much harsher society, that was a choice. It didn’t and doesn’t have to be this way.

 

Kristof, solo

Ms. Collins is off today.  In “Crony Capitalism Comes Home” Mr. Kristof says Occupy Wall Street has found traction because the U.S. is now guilty of what it’s accused others of practicing: crony capitalism.  Here he is:

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.

But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.

When I lived in Asia and covered the financial crisis there in the late 1990s, American government officials spoke scathingly about “crony capitalism” in the region. As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution.

The American critique of the Asian crisis was correct. The countries involved were nominally capitalist but needed major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.

Something similar is true today of the United States.

So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today.

Capitalism is so successful an economic system partly because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy. It’s the possibility of failure that creates the opportunity for triumph. Yet many of America’s major banks are too big to fail, so they can privatize profits while socializing risk.

The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?

It’s not just rabble-rousers at Occupy Wall Street who are seeking to put America’s capitalists on a more capitalist footing.

“Structural change is necessary,” Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in an important speech last month that discussed many of these themes. He called for more curbs on big banks, possibly including trimming their size, and he warned that otherwise we’re on a path of “increasingly frequent, complex and dangerous financial breakdowns.”

Likewise, Mohamed El-Erian, another pillar of the financial world who is the chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s largest money managers, is sympathetic to aspects of the Occupy movement. He told me that the economic system needs to move toward “inclusive capitalism” and embrace broad-based job creation while curbing excessive inequality.

“You cannot be a good house in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood,” he told me. “The credibility and the fair functioning of the neighborhood matter a great deal. Without that, the integrity of the capitalist system will weaken further.”

Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, adds that some inequality is necessary to create incentives in a capitalist economy but that “too much inequality can harm the efficient operation of the economy.” In particular, he says, excessive inequality can have two perverse consequences: first, the very wealthy lobby for favors, contracts and bailouts that distort markets; and, second, growing inequality undermines the ability of the poorest to invest in their own education.

“These factors mean that high inequality can generate further high inequality and eventually poor economic growth,” Professor Katz said.

Does that ring a bell?

So, yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.

 

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is the latest to give us her version of dish about the new Jobs biography.  In “Limits of Magical Thinking” she says that Steve Jobs created what Shakespeare called “the brightest heaven of invention.” But his life sounded like the darkest hell of volatility.  Am I the only one who doesn’t give a crap about Jobs’ private life?  Apparently…  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Barack Kissinger Obama,” ‘splains why President Obama has been more successful at implementing George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policy than his own foreign policy.  Here’s MoDo:

Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare.

He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality in his.

There’s an arresting picture of Jobs staring out, challenging us to blink, on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Steve Jobs.” The writer begins the book by comparing the moody lord of Silicon Valley to Shakespeare’s Henry V — a “callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king.”

Certainly, Jobs created what Shakespeare called “the brightest heaven of invention.” But his life sounded like the darkest hell of volatility.

An Apple C.E.O. who jousted with Jobs wondered if he had a mild bipolarity.

“Sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed,” Isaacson writes. There were Rasputin-like seductions followed by raging tirades. Everyone was either a hero or bozo.

As Jobs’s famous ad campaign for Apple said, “Here’s to the crazy ones. … They push the human race forward.”

The monstre sacré fancied himself an “enlightened being,” but he was capable of frightening coldness, even with his oldest collaborators and family. Yet he often sobbed uncontrollably.

Isaacson told me that Jobs yearned to be a saint; but one of the colleagues he ousted from Apple mordantly noted that the petulant and aesthetic Jobs would have made an excellent King of France.

His extremes left everyone around him with vertigo.

He embraced Zen minimalism and anti-materialism. First, he lived in an unfurnished mansion, then a house so modest that Bill Gates, on a visit, was astonished that the whole Jobs family could fit in it. And Jobs scorned security, often leaving his back door unlocked.

Yet his genius was designing alluring products that would create a country of technology addicts. He demanded laser-like focus from employees to create an A.D.D. world.

He was abandoned by parents who conceived him out of wedlock at 23, and he then abandoned a daughter for many years that he conceived out of wedlock at 23.

Chrisann Brennan, the mother of Jobs’s oldest child, Lisa, told Isaacson that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass.” He very belatedly acknowledged Lisa and their relationship was built, Isaacson says, on “layers of resentment.”

He could be hard on women. Two exes scrawled mean messages on his walls. As soon as he learned that his beautiful, willowy, blonde girlfriend, Laurene Powell, was pregnant in 1991, he began musing that he might still be in love with the previous beautiful, willowy, blonde girlfriend, Tina Redse.

“He surprised a wide swath of friends and even acquaintances by asking them what he should do,” Isaacson writes. “ ‘Who was prettier,’ he would ask, ‘Tina or Laurene?’ ” And “who should he marry?”

Isaacson notes that Jobs could be distant at times with the two daughters he had with Laurene (though not the son). When one daughter dreamed of going to the Oscars with him, he blew her off.

Andy Hertzfeld, a friend and former Apple engineer, lent Lisa $20,000 when she thought her father was not going to pay her Harvard tuition. Jobs paid it back to his friend, but Lisa did not invite him to her Harvard graduation.

“The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” Hertzfeld said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth.”

He almost always wore black turtlenecks and jeans. (Early on, he scorned deodorant and went barefoot and had a disturbing habit of soaking his feet in the office toilet.)

Yet he sometimes tried to ply his exquisite taste to remake the women in his life.

When he was dating the much older Joan Baez — enthralled by her relationship with his idol, Bob Dylan — he drove her to a Ralph Lauren store in the Stanford mall to show her a red dress that would be “perfect” for her. But one of the world’s richest men merely showed her the dress, even after she told him she “couldn’t really afford it,” while he bought shirts.

When he met his sister, Mona Simpson, a struggling novelist, as an adult, he berated her for not wearing clothes that were “fetching enough” and then sent her a box of Issey Miyake pantsuits “in flattering colors,” she said.

He was a control freak, yet when he learned he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that would respond to surgery, he ignored his wife, doctors and friends and put the surgery off for nine months, trying to heal himself with wacky fruit diets, hydrotherapy, a psychic and expressing his negative feelings. (As though he had to be encouraged.)

Addicted to fasting because he felt it produced euphoria and ecstasy, he refused to eat when he needed protein to fight his cancer.

The Da Vinci of Apple could be self-aware. “I know that living with me,” he told Isaacson as he was dying, “was not a bowl of cherries.”

I wonder whose panty drawer MoDo will sniff around in next…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Who would have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W. Bush’s foreign policy than Bush was, but he is less adept at implementing his own. The reasons, though, are obvious.

In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.

No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.

So let’s be clear: Up to now, as a commander in chief in the war on terrorism, Obama and his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the “adults” they replaced. It isn’t even close, which is why the G.O.P.’s elders have such a hard time admitting it.

But while Obama has been deft at implementing Bush’s antiterrorism policy, he has been less successful with his own foreign policy. His Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been a mess. His hopes of engaging Iran foundered on the rocks of, well, Iran. He’s made little effort to pull together a multilateral coalition to buttress the Arab Awakening, in places like Egypt, to handle the postrevolution challenges. His ill-considered decision to double down on Afghanistan could prove fatal. He is in a war of words with Pakistan. His global climate policy is an invisible embarrassment. And the coolly calculating Chinese and Russians, while occasionally throwing him a bone, pursue their interests with scant regard to Obama’s preferences. Why is that?

Here I come to defend Obama not to condemn him.

True, he was naïve about how much his star power, or that of his secretary of state, would get others to swoon in behind us. But Obama’s frustrations in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement are rooted in a much broader structural problem — one that also explains why we have not produced a history-changing secretary of state since the cold war titans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.

The reason: the world has gotten messier and America has lost leverage. When Kissinger was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with an overwhelming majority, Golda Meir.

To make history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two parts.

We don’t even bother anymore to negotiate with the flimsy civilian government in Pakistan. We just go right to its military, which only wants to perpetuate the conflict with India — and exploit Afghanistan as a chip in that war — to justify the Pakistani Army’s endless consumption of so many state resources.

Making history through diplomacy “depends on making deals with other governments,” says Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert (and co-author with me on “That Used to Be Us”). “But now, to make such deals, we actually have to build the governments we want to negotiate with — and we can’t do that.” Indeed, in so many hot spots today, we have to do nation-building before we can do diplomacy. So many states propped up by the cold war are failing.

And where states are stronger — like Russia, China and Iran — we have less leverage because leverage is ultimately a function of economic strength. And while many of America’s companies are still strong, our government is mired in debt. When a nation is in debt as deep as we are — with severe defense cuts inevitable — its bark is always bigger than its bite.

The best way for us to gain leverage on Russia and Iran would be with an energy policy that reduced the price and significance of oil. The only way to gain more leverage on China is if we increase our savings and graduation rates — and export more and consume less. That isn’t in the cards.

So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.

Oh, so NOW Tommy wants us to take care of the home front…

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

In “The Fighter Fallacy” Bobo is busy explaining that President Obama’s current campaign strategy totally misreads the country.  As an added special bonus he’s picked up The Moustache of Wisdom’s “Grand Bargain” drum and bangs on that for a bit.  Mr. Cohen is in London.  In “The Beauty of Institutions,” says that the European Union was not created to deliver Europeans to postmodern bliss but to prevent another hell. He says it’s doing just that.  Mr. Nocera addresses “The Biographer’s Dilemma,” and says in his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson had difficulty getting the critical and historical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure.  Mr. Bruni, in “Have Glock, Will Travel,” says a proposed bill gaining the support of hypocritical Republicans would force states to honor the permissive gun-control regulations from the South and West.  Here’s Bobo:

The elemental question in American politics is: Do voters trust their government? During the middle of the 20th century, more than 70 percent of Americans said that they trusted government to do the right thing most of the time.

During the 1970s, that fell. By the Iraq war, only 25 percent trusted government. Now, amid the economic slowdown, public trust has hit an all-time low. According to a CNN/ORC International poll, only 15 percent of Americans asked said that they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.

This is a problem for Democrats. But Democrats can win elections in this climate if they defuse the Big Government/Small Government ideological debate. With his Third Way approach, Bill Clinton established that he was not a Big Government liberal. Once he crossed that threshold, he could get voters to think about his individual policies, which were actually quite popular. Clinton made a national election feel like a state election (state and local governments are still trusted and voters are less ideological when voting for those offices).

Barack Obama also crossed the ideological threshold in 2008, running as a postpartisan unifier. But the government activism of his first two years reawakened the Big Government/Small Government frame. Independents and moderate conservatives recoiled.

The Pew Research Center asks voters to place themselves and the two parties on a left-right ideological continuum. In 2006, independent voters said they felt they were twice as close to the Democrats as they were to the too-conservative Republicans. Today, they say they feel twice as close to the Republicans.

On issue after issue, the electorate has shifted rightward as independents have moved closer to the G.O.P. According to a Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans who were asked said they primarily blamed government for the economic slowdown, whereas only 30 percent said they blamed the financial institutions. According to a Congressional Connections poll, 55 percent of adults said they believed government regulation has been a “major factor” in the current economic slowdown.

The Occupy Wall Street placards advocate income redistribution, but data from the General Social Survey shows that support for redistribution has plummeted during the recession, with the sharpest declines coming among people earning between $7 and $9 an hour.

After the shellacking in the 2010 midterms, President Obama tried to cut deals and win back independent voters. But Republicans weren’t willing to meet him halfway — or even 10 percent of the way. Liberals scalded Obama for being spineless, while the sour stagnation locked everything in place. Obama’s latest job approval rating among independents is only 36 percent, according to Gallup.

So Obama faced a choice. Double down on conciliator mode or become a fighter. Think of the latter as the Bibi Netanyahu strategy: since I have no negotiating partner I’m going to come out swinging in a way that pleases my base.

If Obama were a Republican, he could win with this sort of strategy: Repeat your party’s most orthodox positions and then rip your opponent to shreds. Republicans can win a contest between an orthodox Republican and an orthodox Democrat because they have the trust in government issue on their side.

Democrats do not have that luxury. The party of government cannot win an orthodox vs. orthodox campaign when 15 percent of Americans trust government. It certainly can’t do it presiding over 9 percent unemployment. It’s suicide.

Yet this is the course the Obama campaign has chosen. He’s campaigning these days as the populist fighter, the scourge of the privileged class.

Obama, who sounded so fresh in 2008, now sometimes sounds a bit like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. Obama, who inspired the country, now threatens to run a campaign that is viciously negative. Obama, who is still widely admired because he is reasonable and calm, is in danger of squandering his best asset by pretending to be someone he is not. Obama, a natural unifier and conciliator, seems on the verge of running as a divisive populist while accusing Mitt Romney, his possible opponent, of being inauthentic.

It’s misguided. It raises the ideological temperature and arouses the Big Government/Small Government debate. It repels independents, who don’t like the finance majors who went to Wall Street but trust the history majors who went to Washington even less.

Obama would be wiser to champion a Grand Bargain strategy. Use the Congressional deficit supercommittee to embrace the sort of new social contract we’ve been circling around for the past few years: simpler taxes, reformed entitlements, more money for human capital, growth and innovation.

Don’t just whisper Grand Bargain in back rooms with John Boehner. Make it explicit. Take it to the country. Lower the ideological atmosphere and get everybody thinking concretely about the real choices facing the nation.

If you don’t trust voters to be serious, they won’t trust you.

This is rich.  Bobo, whose party has vomited up Herman Cain as a “presidential” “candidate,” scolding about trusting voters to be serious.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Jean Monnet, the postwar architect of European unity, once wrote: “Nothing is possible without men, but nothing is lasting without institutions.” When humankind fails, the best institutions save it from the brink. The forging of the European Union is up there with the U.S. Constitution as an act of creative genius.

Loving an entity is hard, given the intangibility of the thing, but I love the bland Brussels institutions that gave my generation a peace denied its forbears — all those young men engraved in stone and granite on melancholy town squares across Europe. It’s a measure of the success of the European Union that peace is now taken for granted by its half billion inhabitants. Nobody pauses at the memorials. These days I find myself wanting to shout: “Remember!”

That’s a tall order when people glide from France to Germany and onto Poland, across the killing fields of old, without pause for a border, and the Basque separatists of ETA have just laid down their weapons in Europe’s last armed confrontation. Yet I detect a dawning sense of the gravity of Europe’s crisis — its political rather than financial peril — in the parallels being drawn between dying for Danzig in 1939 and paying for Athens in 2011.

These are dangerous times. Helmut Schmidt, who as a German is hardwired to the nature of cataclysm and at 92 knows what sacrifice brought a borderless Europe, declared as much the other day, lambasting “anyone who considers his own nation more important than common Europe.” There are plenty of such people these days, driven by frustration or boredom or pettiness to the refuge of the tribe.

The euro’s creation was an irrevocable political decision. The currency, however, had the misfortune to be birthed just as the idealism that fired Europe’s integration sagged. The federalist implications of a common currency met the fissuring rancor of complacent Europeans. They had been lulled by the end of the Cold War, irked by European bureaucracy and wearied by the E.U. expansion to post-Communist states. The bad history uppermost in the minds of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl had faded. If ever a crisis was foretold, it’s the euro crisis.

But the danger is broader. European frustration with remote, seemingly unaccountable institutions has spread into a wider anger against the impunity of the powerful and the richness of the ever richer. Growing numbers of people feel that the levers of globalization’s compounding advantages are manipulated by the privileged few. From Manhattan to Milan, the Occupy movement is saying “Enough Already!”

No, European leaders retort, we need more — more budget-cutting, more sacrifice to set our houses in order after the debt-driven binge of this century’s first decade. Just as the euro had to row against an unraveling tide, so the austerity prescribed to save the currency now has to row against a tide of skepticism.

Jean Arthuis, a French senator, gave this recent assessment of the state of the West: “Globalization led us, through outsourcing, to give up our productive substance and opt for the comfort of consumption, while other states became the producers of what we consumed on credit: on our side sovereign debts, on the other sovereign wealth funds.”

Many Europeans and Americans experience that shift day to day as lost jobs, the disappearance of the credit that cushioned relative decline, growing disparities between rich and poor, a feeling of powerlessness, too many bills to pay, a gathering sense of injustice, and growing anger toward hapless politicians outstripped by markets they cannot control.

“Capitalism is crisis,” says a big banner of the Occupy movement at St. Paul’s in London. Indeed it is. As Joseph Schumpeter noted, “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.” The trick is to convince people that crisis is creative more than it is destructive — and that’s not happening right now.

The European Union was created for such a moment. It was meant to guarantee the impossibility of the worst — not to deliver Europeans to postmodern bliss but to save them from the hell that began almost a century ago in 1914 and did not really stop until the Continent lay in ruins in 1945.

Now, thankfully, the big bazookas are financial. Roll them out, whatever the subsequent cost in inflation. Irrevocable means just that: The euro cannot be turned back. There is no soft euro exit imaginable, only mayhem and danger.

Recapitalize the banks. Bulk up on the rescue fund. Turn bankers’ Greek haircuts into buzz cuts. Do whatever it takes. Germany, ushered from ruin by the European Union, must lead the safeguarding of the euro or risk the loss of the stability that it prizes above anything.

The best institutions are also self-correcting mechanisms. They work like the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. They turn crisis into opportunity. In time the euro’s defense will demand a federative leap forward. That will be good for Europeans even though they cannot see it now.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

I was halfway through Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs when I suddenly went searching through my bookshelf for the book he wrote about Benjamin Franklin. I had read the latter biography when it came out in 2003, and I remembered it fondly. I was trying to figure out why “Steve Jobs,” despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold.

It didn’t take long to find the answer. “Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us,” wrote Isaacson early in Chapter One in “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.” Oh, for such a sentence in “Steve Jobs!” Oh, for such an insight.

Let me acknowledge that the task facing Isaacson was daunting. He began his research in early 2009, knowing that Jobs had cancer and that his time remaining on this earth was likely to be brief. Although many books have been written about Jobs, Isaacson was the first writer the Apple co-founder had ever cooperated with. (Indeed, it was Jobs who approached Isaacson about writing his biography.) They spoke more than 40 times, about all aspects of Jobs’s life — including his personal life, which he had always guarded fiercely.

Combine that with the enormity of Jobs’s accomplishments — from starting the personal computer industry in his garage to creating a half-dozen of the most iconic consumer products ever invented — and it’s practically a miracle that Isaacson’s book was published as quickly as it was. (The official publication date was Monday.)

Its 627 pages is, indeed, chock full of revelations, from Jobs’s difficult relationship with a daughter he fathered in his early 20s — and then abandoned for years — to the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, whom he adored. We go behind the scenes during the boardroom battle that forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985 — as well as the one that brought him back a decade later.

“Steve Jobs” offers so many examples of his awful behavior — incorrigible bullying, belittling and lying — that you’re soon numb to them. Isaacson gives us the back story of all of Jobs’s creations, from the Apple II to the iPad. His descriptions of the more recent products — iPod to iPhone to iPad — have a flat, rushed quality, as if the author was racing to finish before his subject died. Chances are, he was.

That there is such a hunger for information about this most private of men is undeniable; that’s why the book went to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers list practically the moment Jobs died. But facts alone — even previously unknown facts — do not, by themselves, make for great biographies. What is required for that is genuine insight. And that is where “Steve Jobs” falls down.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the bond that developed between subject and writer made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure. He didn’t just interview Jobs; he watched him die. There is a moving scene near the end of the book, with an emaciated Jobs, lying in bed, leafing through photographs with Isaacson, reminiscing. How can one possibly get critical distance about your subject when such moments are part of your experience of him?

“I think there will be a lot in your book that I won’t like,” Jobs tells Isaacson during that conversation, two months before he died. Isaacson agrees, but I don’t. Jobs’s bad behavior is something he never denied. He rationalized it as his way out of getting the most out of people — and Isaacson largely accepts this rationalization. An alternative notion — that Jobs was an emotional child his whole life — is something the readers have to come to themselves, by reading between the lines.

When you think about it, it is rare for a truly great biography to be written about someone who is living; in my lifetime, the only one I can think of is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses. When the subjects are alive — and Jobs was still alive when this book was finished — biographers always feel them looking over their shoulders, and pushing back. Jobs does that often with Isaacson, rejecting, for instance, the idea that his own abandonment by his natural parents had a major effect on him. Invariably, at such moments, Isaacson backs off and gives Jobs the last word.

There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack — the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject’s life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world. Steve Jobs has been dead for three weeks. We’re not even close to that understanding.

In “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson has recounted a life — a big, sprawling, amazing life. It is a serious accomplishment. What remains for future biographers is to make sense of that life.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Between the struggle to fold a sport jacket so it doesn’t wrinkle, the 45-minute wait on a security line if I’m flying, the price of gas if I’m driving and the worry either way that I left the coffee maker on, I thought I was pretty well versed in the inconveniences and stresses of domestic travel.

Hardly! Things could be much, much worse, namely if I were a gun owner with a permit to carry a concealed firearm in my home state and an itch to do so in any other state I visited as well.

As matters now stand, I’d have to defer to the laws of those states, which vary widely. In some, my permit from back home would suffice, even if getting it required little more than proper adult identification, proof of residency and a smile. The smile might even have been negotiable. A scowl and a clean felony record and I was good to go.

Other states are sticklers, recognizing only their own concealed-carry permits and granting or withholding those based on such killjoy criteria as whether someone has a violent misdemeanor conviction, a history of alcohol abuse or any actual training in weapon safety. Some free country, ours.

Thank heaven for the National Rifle Association, its sights ever fixed on the forces that try to separate Americans from the deadly firearms they like to keep snug at their sides.

The N.R.A. is pushing a bill, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011, that would eliminate the gun-toting traveler’s woes. Should it become law, any state that grants concealed-carry permits, no matter how strict the conditions, would be forced to honor a visitor’s concealed-carry permit from another state, no matter how lax that state’s standards.

Chris W. Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, recently wrote that the current situation “presents a nightmare for interstate travel, as many Americans are forced to check their Second Amendment rights, and their fundamental right to self-defense, at the state line.”

Nightmare? I think that term better applies to the N.R.A., though it’s not the first word that springs to mind when I mull its current effort.

Contradiction, hypocrisy: those words rush in ahead. The bill thus far has more than 200 Republican co-sponsors in the House, many of them conservatives who otherwise complain about attempts by an overbearing federal government to trample on states’ rights in the realms of health care, tort reform, education — you name it. But to promote concealed guns, they’re encouraging big, bad Washington to trample to its heart’s content.

Imagine how apoplectic they’d be if, on certain other matters, Washington forced their states to yield to others’ values the way this bill, H.R. 822, would compel New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut to honor more permissive gun-control regulations from the South and West. As it happens these three Northeastern states all perform same-sex marriages, which more conservative states do not have to recognize.

It’s not fair to talk only about Republicans. H.R. 822 has dozens of Democratic co-sponsors as well, and when Democrats controlled Congress for the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, they made no major progress on gun control. Reluctant to cross the N.R.A., they let it slide.

In 2009, when Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, was about to enter a tough re-election battle in Nevada, he actually voted in favor of legislation highly similar to H.R. 822. It was defeated. That same year President Obama signed a law permitting concealed guns in national parks.

The story on the state level has been just as sad over the last few years. Wisconsin recently approved concealed-carry legislation, leaving Illinois the only state in which civilians can’t carry concealed firearms. Several states have enacted laws spelling out that concealed weapons can in many circumstances be carried into bars.

One was Tennessee, where a state lawmaker who sponsored the legislation, Curry Todd, sometimes carries a loaded .38-caliber gun. I know this because it was beside him when Nashville cops pulled him over two weeks ago for drunken driving. They also charged him with carrying a firearm in public while intoxicated. At least that’s still illegal.

New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and several other states don’t have reciprocity arrangements that allow someone like Todd to pay an armed courtesy call. That’s because New York officials can deny concealed-carry permits on a case-by-case basis, whereas many other states — South Dakota, for example — don’t put much stock in such scrutiny.

H.R. 822, now in the House Judiciary Committee, makes a mockery of our diverse values and strategies for public safety. If it were enacted, off to New York the South Dakotan tourist could go, 9-millimeter Glock in tow.

That’s not liberty. More like lunacy.

No shit…

Krugman, solo

In “The Hole in Europe’s Bucket” Prof. Krugman says it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed as one rescue plan after another falls flat and a vicious circle takes hold.  Here he is:

If it weren’t so tragic, the current European crisis would be funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way. For as one rescue plan after another falls flat, Europe’s Very Serious People — who are, if such a thing is possible, even more pompous and self-regarding than their American counterparts — just keep looking more and more ridiculous.

I’ll get to the tragedy in a minute. First, let’s talk about the pratfalls, which have lately had me humming the old children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.”

For those not familiar with the song, it concerns a lazy farmer who complains about said hole and is told by his wife to fix it. Each action she suggests, however, turns out to require a prior action, and, eventually, she tells him to draw some water from the well. “But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”

What does this have to do with Europe? Well, at this point, Greece, where the crisis began, is no more than a grim sideshow. The clear and present danger comes instead from a sort of bank run on Italy, the euro area’s third-largest economy. Investors, fearing a possible default, are demanding high interest rates on Italian debt. And these high interest rates, by raising the burden of debt service, make default more likely.

It’s a vicious circle, with fears of default threatening to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To save the euro, this threat must be contained. But how? The answer has to involve creating a fund that can, if necessary, lend Italy (and Spain, which is also under threat) enough money that it doesn’t need to borrow at those high rates. Such a fund probably wouldn’t have to be used, since its mere existence should put an end to the cycle of fear. But the potential for really large-scale lending, certainly more than a trillion euros’ worth, has to be there.

And here’s the problem: All the various proposals for creating such a fund ultimately require backing from major European governments, whose promises to investors must be credible for the plan to work. Yet Italy is one of those major governments; it can’t achieve a rescue by lending money to itself. And France, the euro area’s second-biggest economy, has been looking shaky lately, raising fears that creation of a large rescue fund, by in effect adding to French debt, could simply have the effect of adding France to the list of crisis countries. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.

You see what I mean about the situation being funny in a gallows-humor fashion? What makes the story really painful is the fact that none of this had to happen.

Think about countries like Britain, Japan and the United States, which have large debts and deficits yet remain able to borrow at low interest rates. What’s their secret? The answer, in large part, is that they retain their own currencies, and investors know that in a pinch they could finance their deficits by printing more of those currencies. If the European Central Bank were to similarly stand behind European debts, the crisis would ease dramatically.

Wouldn’t that cause inflation? Probably not: whatever the likes of Ron Paul may believe, money creation isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy. Furthermore, Europe actually needs modestly higher overall inflation: too low an overall inflation rate would condemn southern Europe to years of grinding deflation, virtually guaranteeing both continued high unemployment and a string of defaults.

But such action, we keep being told, is off the table. The statutes under which the central bank was established supposedly prohibit this kind of thing, although one suspects that clever lawyers could find a way to make it happen. The broader problem, however, is that the whole euro system was designed to fight the last economic war. It’s a Maginot Line built to prevent a replay of the 1970s, which is worse than useless when the real danger is a replay of the 1930s.

And this turn of events is, as I said, tragic.

The story of postwar Europe is deeply inspiring. Out of the ruins of war, Europeans built a system of peace and democracy, constructing along the way societies that, while imperfect — what society isn’t? — are arguably the most decent in human history.

Yet that achievement is under threat because the European elite, in its arrogance, locked the Continent into a monetary system that recreated the rigidities of the gold standard, and — like the gold standard in the 1930s — has turned into a deadly trap.

Now maybe European leaders will come up with a truly credible rescue plan. I hope so, but I don’t expect it.

The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be better off if it collapses sooner rather than later.

 

Douthat, Dowd, Friedman, Bruni and Kristof

The Pasty Little Putz tells us all about “The Inevitible Nominee.”  He gurgles that for all his many weaknesses, Mitt Romney can’t be beaten by his Republican challengers.  I’ll be sure to bookmark this…  MoDo has a question in “The Saudi Ambassador of Sangfroid:”  After the Saudi ambassador urged cutting off the head of the snake, did the snake strike back?  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “One Country, Two Revolutions,” says that While Wall Street is being rattled, Silicon Valley is being superempowered as the I.T. revolution takes a leap forward.  I think maybe Tommy should consult the dictionary and look up “revolution.”  Mr. Bruni, in “Hollywood on Wall Street,” tsk-tsks that celebrities lend only confusion to a protest movement that already has challenges aplenty in the coherence department.  Mr. Kristof, in “The Man Who Stayed Behind,” says when Sudan’s Nuba Mountains erupted in warfare this summer and aid workers were evacuated, a young American refused to leave. He tells us his story.  Here’s The Pasty Little Putz:

For the next three months, the political press will engage in an extended masquerade, designed to persuade credulous readers and excitable viewers that the Republican presidential nomination is actually up for grabs.

Last week the big story was Herman Cain’s rise to the top of the polls, and then Rick Perry’s combativeness at the Las Vegas debate. Next week, perhaps, it will be Newt Gingrich’s surprising resilience or Ron Paul’s potential strength in the early caucuses or the appeal of Perry’s flat-tax plan. Then there will come a debate in which Mitt Romney looks shabby instead of smooth, a poll that shows one of his rivals surging, a moment when all his many weaknesses are on every pundit’s lips.

Please do not listen to any of them. Ignore the Politico daily briefings, the Rasmussen tracking polls, the angst from conservative activists over Romney’s past deviations and present-day dishonesties. Please ignore me as well, should campaign fever inspire a column about the Santorum surge or the Huntsman scenario. Because barring an unprecedented suspension of the laws of American politics, Mitt Romney has this thing wrapped up.

Note that I am not saying that he will win every primary or caucus. He could easily lose Iowa to somebody, and if he loses Iowa, he will probably lose some Southern primaries as well, giving political reporters grist for the horse race narrative they crave.

But Romney’s path to the nomination is more wide open than for any nonincumbent in decades. He should win New Hampshire and Nevada, Florida and Michigan. He should dominate the Rust Belt, the Northeast and the Mountain West. And if need be, he can seal the nomination late, with wins in the New York and California primaries.

For now, though, none of his rivals look capable of even pushing the race that far. They don’t have the money or the organizational muscle, but more important they aren’t clearing the first hurdle that every presidential candidate faces. After months of campaigning, it is nearly impossible to imagine any of them as a major party’s nominee, much less in the White House.

The exception was supposed to be Perry, whose résumé and donor base both look at least somewhat presidential. But after watching him stagger through the debates, his tongue tied and his poll numbers cratering, it’s clear that a Republican Party that nominated the Texas governor for president would be deliberately cutting its own throat. And this is something that national political parties almost never do.

People like to cite counterexamples: The Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, after all, and the Democrats nominated George McGovern. But Goldwater and McGovern, for all their weaknesses, were far more credible nominees than a Perry, a Herman Cain, a Michele Bachmann, a Newt Gingrich. They were too extreme to win the general election, but they were not political novices or washed-up self-promoters, and they had a mix of eloquence and experience that’s largely absent from the current Republican field. (Watch clips of Goldwater being interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr. on “Firing Line,” and then try to imagine how Perry would fare in the same format.)

Everyone has an incentive to play down these realities and play up Romney’s vulnerabilities instead. The press needs the illusion of a hard-fought campaign to keep its audience from straying. Democrats enjoy the spectacle of right-wing infighting, and benefit politically from it as well. And Republicans don’t want to admit that America’s conservative party is destined to nominate a politician who embodies the very tendencies that the conservative movement came into being to resist: technocracy, ideological flexibility, Northeastern moderation.

It is a rather extraordinary turn of events. But when you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This rule holds for presidential contests as well as for whodunits: Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible, and so he will be the nominee.

What’s more, Republicans have only themselves to blame for his inevitability. Romney owes his current position to two failures: the Bush era’s serial disasters, which left the Republican establishment without a strong bench of viable national politicians, and the Tea Party’s mix of zeal and naïveté, which has elevated cranks and frauds and future television personalities to the party’s presidential stage.

To date, neither the establishment nor the populists have come to terms with the failures of the last age of Republican dominance. And despite occasional flashes of creativity, neither has groped its way to a credible vision of what the next conservative era should look like.

What they have to offer instead is a largely opportunistic critique of a flailing liberal president. So it’s fitting that America’s most opportunistic politician is destined to be the standard-bearer for their cause.

Here’s MoDo:

There were women who lost their heads over Adel al-Jubeir, back when the Saudi ambassador was a charming playboy. I had the opposite experience. He saved me from losing my head.

In 2002, I was walking around a luxury mall in Riyadh with Jubeir, a cosmopolitan graduate of the University of North Texas and Georgetown University, when the robed, bearded religious police bore down on us, pointing at me and scolding in Arabic.

“They say they can see the outline of your body,” Jubeir translated. It took a surprisingly long time, given his stature as a top adviser to the future King Abdullah, but he talked the mutawwa out of beheading or lashing me, or whatever pound of flesh they wanted to exact because they saw an inch of flesh.

Given that his father was a diplomat too — one of the first Saudis to have a college degree — maybe the 49-year-old’s equanimity is in his genes. He is far more understated than his flamboyant predecessor, Prince Bandar, who was so plugged into the Bush dynasty he was known as “Bandar Bush.”

Jubeir stayed cool even when American officials informed him several months ago about the latest stunning chapter in the Saudi Arabia-versus-Iran Great Game for supremacy in the Middle East: an outlandish plot by an Iranian-American used-car dealer in Texas who said his cousin was a senior member of the Iranian Quds Force.

The car dealer wanted to recruit someone from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million to kill Jubeir with a car bomb or at a Washington restaurant — no matter the collateral damage. But the bungler hired a paid D.E.A. informant posing as a cartel hit man instead.

As evidence mounted of money transfers and taped conversations, Jubeir accepted that, as President Obama said, the plot was “paid by and directed by individuals in the Iranian government.” Iran denies that, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Fareed Zakaria: “Do we really need to kill the ambassador of a brotherly country?”

“It went from ‘I can’t believe this,’ ” the ambassador said with a dry smile, “to ‘Man, these guys really know how to ruin a man’s day.’ ”

He had to force himself to live a normal existence for months, not telling family or staff, until a criminal complaint was unveiled and the Texas car dealer was before a judge.

Gathering his shaken staff in the embassy, he said: “Nothing befalls us except that which God has written for us. If anything, it should reinforce our resolve. Otherwise the bad guys win.”

He got a standing ovation.

His family was “shocked” and his frightened twin 9-year-old daughters called his office to grill him. He reassured them that there was “a bad guy but no danger.” Still, they pressed: “O.K., when are you coming home?”‘

Over lunch at the embassy in his first interview since then, he told me in his whispery voice that he was surprised the plotters had assumed he’d be hanging at modish restaurants. These days, the slender, smartly tailored ambassador is more of a nester, spending time with the twins and his 9-month-old son.

“I work so much, I enjoy sitting at home doing nothing,” said the diplomat with the rough commute — 12-hour flights to Riyadh several times a month.

I asked if he thought he was targeted because of his tough position on Iran, underscored in a 2008 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoting him reiterating that King Abdullah wanted the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.”

“You should ask the perpetrators, not me,” he said wryly. “We do what we have to do, and we can’t let issues like this deter us.”

For many centuries, the protection of emissaries has been a cardinal principle enshrined in relations between nations, even ones at war. If you kill envoys whose messages you don’t like, you end up with the law of the jungle.

The plot against Jubeir was so bizarre that it spawned a bouquet of conspiracy theories. But many believe that if the plotters had recruited a criminal who was not a U.S. informant, it could have succeeded and people might have assumed that it was Al Qaeda seeking revenge for the killing of Osama.

It shows how little we know about Iran that there are two opposing theories about the motive: One, that Iranians engaged in an act of desperation because they’re weak. Two, that Iranians engaged in an act of bravado because we’re weak. At first, Iran charged the U.S. with fabricating the plot in order to distract from our economic woes.

Skeptics assert that Iran, ever more ideological and obsessed with restoring the glory of the Persian Empire, has been emboldened by getting away with murder, literally, for three decades. They suggest that America has let it off lightly on everything from the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing to Iran’s meddling in Iraq, sending weapons and operatives to kill our soldiers.

Some worry that America spends too much time hoping that Iran will become more reasonable when, in reality, it’s trying to get nuclear weapons so it can become less reasonable.

News of the plot, denounced by the kingdom as “sinful and abhorrent,” has made Saudi Arabia more sympathetic in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of way. At a recent fete here, Jubeir was thronged by politicians, diplomats and journalists, all asking how he was bearing up.

Some Saudi commentators demanded immediate measures against Iran. Asked about it, Jubeir said, “You have to be deliberate.” The Saudis have asked the U.N. to make sure “the perpetrators are accountable,” he said.

As I left, I asked the ambassador about the painting in his office of Arab tribesmen riding horses and camels.

“It’s artistic license,” he noted with amusement. “Camels don’t ride with horses. They ride separately. Horses go faster and camels go longer.”

Sounds like MoDo has a schoolgirl crush…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I take no pleasure in seeing anyone lose a job, but I can’t say that the recent headlines showing that America’s biggest banks have been losing money on their trading operations, and are having to radically shrink as a result, are entirely bad news for the country. Over the last decade, America’s banking sector got pumped up by steroids — in the form of cheap credit and leverage — every bit as much as Major League Baseball’s home run hitters. And if one result of the downsizing of Wall Street is that more of America’s best and brightest math and physics students decide to go into science and real engineering rather than financial engineering, the country will be a whole lot better off.

Why? Because, to paraphrase the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Wall Street, which was originally designed to finance “creative destruction” (the creation of new industries and products to replace old ones), fell into the habit in the last decade of financing too much “destructive creation” (inventing leveraged financial products with no more societal value than betting on whether Lindy’s sold more cheesecake than strudel). When those products blew up, they almost took the whole economy with them.

I was on Wall Street two weeks ago, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley this past week. What a contrast! While Wall Street is being rattled by a social revolution, Silicon Valley is being by transformed by another technology revolution — one that is taking the world from connected to hyperconnected and individuals from empowered to superempowered. It is the biggest leap forward in the I.T. revolution since the mainframe computer was replaced by desktops and the Web. It is going to change everything about how companies and societies operate.

The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.

The October issue of Fast Company has an article about the designer Scott Wilson, who thought of grafting the body of an iPod Nano onto colorful wristbands, turning them into watchlike devices that could wake you up and play your music. He had no money, though, to bring his concept to market, so he turned to Kickstarter, the Web-based funding platform for independent creative projects. He posted his idea on Nov. 16, 2010, reported Fast Company, and “within a month, 13,500 people from 50 countries had ponied up nearly $1 million.” Apple soon picked up the product for its stores. Said Alexis Ringwald, 28, who recently founded an education start-up, her second Silicon Valley venture: “I have many friends — they introduce themselves as ‘reformed’ Wall St. bankers and lawyers — who have abandoned conventional careers and are now launching start-ups.”

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed — everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges — from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.

A is for alignment. “There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,” said Benioff. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.” And L is for the leadership that does that. Leadership in a SOCIAL world has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it with a vision from above into a final product.

The great thing about the new I.T. revolution, says Jeff Weiner, the C.E.O. of LinkedIn, is that “it makes it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone anywhere to be an entrepreneur” and to have access to all the best infrastructure of innovation. “And despite all of our challenges,” he adds, “it is happening here in America.”

Like I said, the news isn’t all bad.

I’d love to know what Tommy smokes.  Banks losing money and having to downsize?  Cite, please, Tommy, other than a vague mention of “recent headlines.”  Even The Putz can manage that from time to time…  Here’s cranky Mr. Bruni:

What enormous comfort it must give the Occupy Wall Street protesters to know that celebrities feel their pain.

Roseanne Barr, for example. The comedian bleeds for them. Or, rather, would have others bleed; inspired by the protests, she recommended the guillotine for the greediest bankers.

Such a subtle creature, she, and so oppressed to boot! Back in the 1990s, for the final seasons of her sitcom “Roseanne,” she made at least $20 million a year.

She was not the 99 percent.

The rap mogul Russell Simmons and the rapper Kanye West meandered over to Occupy Wall Street’s cradle, Zuccotti Park. By all accounts West was wearing more bling, though Simmons has bigger bucks: his net worth has been estimated as being between $100 million and $340 million. West’s is below that, and he made only $16 million or so last year.

They are not even the 99.5 percent.

And while that doesn’t disqualify them or Barr or other entertainers from sympathizing with Occupy Wall Street, it does give their public gestures of solidarity a discordant, sometimes specious ring. It also confuses the identity of a protest movement that already has challenges aplenty in the coherence department.

The movement’s “we are the 99 percent” motto expresses ire over not only the unaccountability of huge financial institutions but also income inequality in America and the concentration of so much wealth and privilege in so few hands. Every time a wealthy messenger gloms on, that aspect of the message gets muddled and possibly compromised.

And the glomming has begun. With a slowly growing number of actors and musicians paying well-chronicled visits to Zuccotti Park, the movement is in danger of becoming a sticky fly strip for entertainers who like to flaunt their self-styled populism: a gadfly strip.

Susan Sarandon has been. Michael Moore has been. While both may have been propelled there by genuine anger, they have so much of it, are so famous for it and spread it so widely that their appearances can do the opposite of elevating a demonstration, making it seem merely fashionable and giving naysayers an easier way to roll their eyes.

Entertainers are members of the well-connected economic elite against which Occupy Wall Street ostensibly rages, whether or not they want to see themselves that way. True, they’re not bundling mortgages, and they often have their extravagantly beating hearts in the right place. Many donate generously to charity. Many do remarkable good.

But they nonetheless make oodles of money for themselves and for major corporations with lavishly compensated executives: the corporations that bankroll and distribute their television shows, movies, record albums and concert tours; the corporations that peddle the clothing, electronics and ever-so-important cosmetics and styling products that entertainers are paid so handsomely to model and endorse.

In some cases entertainers even make money for the banking industry itself. This issue came up last week when Alec Baldwin dropped by Zuccotti Park.

Critics noted that he appears in television commercials for Capital One, a banking behemoth. While he responded that he gives his fee away, he’s still promoting the company, and there remain other facets of his work and life that render him, like other stars, a very odd fit for a movement concerned with the sway of big companies and the distribution of wealth.

He has homes in both the Hamptons and Manhattan, a fact widely noted in news reports about a New York City tax inquiry into which is his primary residence. He claims the Hamptons.

His television show, “30 Rock,” is shown on NBC, which is part of NBC Universal, whose president and chief executive officer, Steve Burke, had a total compensation package worth $34.7 million last year, according to a recent survey of executive salaries in The Hollywood Reporter.

That same survey put the compensation of Brian Roberts, the chief executive officer of Comcast, which owns a controlling stake in NBC Universal, at $31.1 million. Philippe Dauman, the chief executive officer of Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, outpaced both of them. According to the company’s filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, he had a compensation package last year that totaled nearly $85 million, more than double his 2009 amount. Like Wall Street bankers, entertainment industry executives haven’t exactly suffered in this economy.

Celebrities help line those executives’ pockets, even if that’s not their goal, and then take the extra step of supporting other affluent corporations as pitchmen and pitchwomen. Some of them are seemingly aware enough of how mercenary this can seem that they favor endorsements outside American markets, especially in Asia, where their primary fan base won’t notice. At least Sarandon is doing her most recent endorsement work, for the clothing retailer Uniqlo, right here, on billboards in Manhattan and in a full-page ad in last week’s New Yorker magazine. I’m betting she chose Uniqlo, admirably, because it’s not Prada and its magazine ads push something other than glamour. The merino sweater she models in one ad costs $39.90. 

But Uniqlo is part of a multibillion-dollar Japanese corporation, and the vast majority of its clothing is made in China. How does that serve the jobs-hungry young Americans in Occupy Wall Street’s fold?

There are many mixed signals in the celebrity assist to Occupy Wall Street, along with a reminder that we too seldom hold stars to account for their own greed.

SOME have reportedly accepted payments in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to show up and even perform at the private parties of superrich despots. The musicians Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Usher and Beyoncé (a pitchwoman over time for L’Oréal, Armani, Nintendo, Pepsi) sang for members of the Qaddafi family. Will they be warbling at the funeral? Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme attended the 35th-birthday bash for the Chechen tyrant Ramzan Kadyrov. This was not the outgrowth of a long, deep friendship.

Let’s hope these entertainers steer clear of Zuccotti Park, but you never know. Performers do love their political pronouncements, even though they view the world from a vantage point as skewed and cloistered in its way as a Fortune 500 chief executive’s. There are many causes that want for notice and can benefit mightily from celebrity interventions.

Occupy Wall Street isn’t one of them, at least not at this point. It’s running strong, with ample news media attention. Entertainers who raise its banner may get some self-promotion and ego inflation from the effort, but they do the protest questionable good. And protesters would be wise to keep all that glitters — including the gold chain that was on Kanye West’s neck — at arm’s length.

Go have another one of those 12-course $245 tasting menu dinners…  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

In the last few months, as you and I have been fretting about the economy or moaning about the weather, Ryan Boyette has been living in a mud-wall hut and dodging bombs in his underwear.

Some humanitarian catastrophes — Congo, Somalia, Sudan — linger because the killing unfolds without witnesses. So Ryan, a 30-year-old from Florida, has made the perilous decision to bear witness to atrocities in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, secretly staying behind when other foreigners were evacuated.

I met Ryan a few years ago in Sudan, and even then he was a compelling figure who spoke the local languages of Otoro and Sudanese Arabic. An evangelical Christian deeply motivated by his faith, Ryan moved to the Nuba Mountains in 2003 and worked for Samaritan’s Purse, an aid group led by the Rev. Franklin Graham.

Early this year, Ryan married a local woman, Jazira, a health worker — and 6,000 joyous Nubans celebrated at the wedding, along with Ryan’s parents, who flew in from Florida.

It was clear that war was brewing in the Nuba Mountains. The region had sided with South Sudan in the country’s long civil war, but now South Sudan was separating while the Nuba Mountains would remain in the north. The people — mostly Muslim but with a large Christian minority — supported a local rebel army left over from the civil war.

In June, fighting erupted. The Sudanese government moved in to destroy the rebel army and depopulate areas that supported it. Aid organizations pulled out their workers. Ryan decided that he could not flee, so when Samaritan’s Purse ordered him to evacuate, he resigned and stayed behind.

“A lot of people tried to convince me to leave,” Ryan remembers. “But this is where my wife is from, this is where I’ve lived for eight years. It’s hard to get on a plane and say, ‘Bye, I hope to see you when this ends.’ ”

Ryan organized a network of 15 people to gather information and take photos and videos, documenting atrocities. He used a solar-powered laptop and a satellite phone to transmit them to the West, typically to the Enough Project, a Washington-based anti-genocide organization. He also supplied eyewitness interviews that helped the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative find evidence of atrocities, including eight mass graves, on satellite images. And he helped journalists understand what was going on.

“He’s irreplaceable,” said Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project. “There’s no substitute for someone on the ground.”

Ryan tried to keep his presence in the region a secret, at least from the Sudanese government, for fear that it might seek to eliminate a witness. Once, a bombing seemed to target his hut, but he heard the plane approaching and ran out in his skivvies and took cover; the bombs missed, and he was unhurt.

After the first few weeks, the killings on the ground abated. But the government has continued the bombings.

“It’s terrifying when they bomb,” Ryan told me. “You don’t feel safe at any time of day or night.”

The bombs typically miss and have killed fewer than 200 people, he says, but they prevent people from farming their fields. Several hundred thousand people have been driven from their homes in the surrounding state of South Kordofan, Ryan says, and a famine may be looming.

“It’s not a good time to have kids,” Ryan quoted Jazira as telling him. “If we have kids, they’ll just starve.”

Frustrated by the lack of attention for the Nubans’ plight, Ryan decided to return to the United States this month and tell his story. He couldn’t get a visa for Jazira in time — obtaining an American visa for a spouse is a long and complex process — so she is in a refugee camp for 15,000 Nubans in South Sudan, struggling to address health needs there. Meanwhile, in Washington, Ryan has testified before Congress and met with White House officials.

Soon, he’ll go back, rejoining Jazira and sneaking back with her into the Nuba Mountains. It’ll be more dangerous than ever now that he has gone public, but he is determined to give voice to the voiceless — and Nubans will do everything to protect him.

In a world where leaders often pretend not to notice mass atrocities, for fear that they might be called upon to do something, I find Ryan an inspiration. His eyewitness accounts make it more difficult for the world to neglect a humanitarian crisis in the Nuba Mountains — even if he does need to brush up on his tech skills.

I asked Ryan if he planned to use Twitter.

“Twitter?” he asked. “I’ve been in the bush for nine years, so I don’t know how to use it.” But he’s planning to learn.

I’ll confess to a bit of a creepy feeling when I hear that this dude is connected to anything involving Franklin Graham, who’s noted for making repeated anti-Islamic remarks.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Occupy-apalooza Strikes a Chord” Mr. Blow says if Occupy Wall Street were a rock band, then Nirvana would come closest to representing its passion and angst.  Mr. Nocera says “The Ugliness Started With Bork,” and that politics turned poisonous 24 years ago when Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court failed.  Ms. Collins, in “Humming to Higher Ed,” says it’s that season again! No, not Halloween or fall foliage. But the season for college visits.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Thursday night I spoke to a young woman in Brooklyn who was having dinner and planning the next day. Between a morning boot camp workout at the local Y.M.C.A. and an evening meeting with friends for drinks, she was planning her first trek to Zuccotti Park to take part in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“Why?” I asked. “What specifically are you protesting?” I was curious. I hoped that she’d respond with some variation of the umbrella arguments about income inequality, the evils of corporate greed and corruption or removing corporate money from politics.

She didn’t. “I don’t know. It’s just cool,” she said. She went on to tell me about how she felt that this was a movement of people with whom she felt some kinship, banding together and making history, and that she wanted to be a part of that in the same way that people from previous generations were part of the civil rights, women’s liberation and antiwar movements.

She hinted at inequality but never quite got there. Yet she was passionately convinced that she must get involved. That is part of the magic and mystery of these protests: a near magnetic attraction drawing in both the hard core and the hangers-on alike.

While there are some people with very specific goals taking part in the protests and supporting them, there are many others who come with no particular, refined mission or message other than a desire to show solidarity, to rise up and be seen and heard and to display their disaffection for the status quo.

And that may well be message enough for many.

If the Occupy Wall Street protests were a band, I’d say the closest corollary would probably be the legendary ’90s grunge band Nirvana — both meaningful and murky, tapping into a national angst and hopelessness, providing a much-needed catharsis and gaining a broad and devoted following while quickly becoming the voice of a generation.

Needless to say, that doesn’t cover everyone. The protests have a Lollapalooza-like eccentricity and diversity to the crowds. Some come to revel in the moment. Others come to rage against the machine. But they are all drawn together by the excitement of animating a muscle that many thought had atrophied: demonstration and disobedience in the name of equality.

This has energized two groups who are notoriously apathetic and lacking in civic engagement — the young and the poor — and has done so outside the existing architectures of power and politics.

This excitement has attracted the attention of progressive politicians, pundits and celebrities, many of whom are making pilgrimages to the protests to lend support while reinforcing their own street cred and pondering how to best harness the energy on display.

After all, civic energy is a precious commodity in an election season. You can almost see some leaders and luminaries drooling at the thought of using the protests to their political advantage.

But there has been an even stronger reaction by some on the right, who, out of fear, are seeking to pre-emptively stain and marginalize the protesters.

Herman Cain has called them “jealous.” Bill O’Reilly has suggested that they are “crackheads.” Glenn Beck — I guess in an attempt to be king of the hill of hysteria — has gone so far as to call them killers: “Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you’re wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.”

The irony is that all these people are at the top of the food chain in an economic ecosystem that many protesters seem to view as fundamentally flawed and in need of radical realignment if not wholesale deconstruction.

So the protesters have defied efforts to be led or labeled by either side. This independent positioning may be serving them well.

Early national polls taken about the movement have found that although many Americans aren’t clear about the protesters’ goals, they support them.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted last weekend found that nearly two-thirds of people who were asked didn’t know enough about the goals of the Occupy Wall Street protests to say if they approved of them or not.

Yet a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, also conducted last weekend, asked if people agreed with the goals of the protests from what they “know about the demonstrations.” Fifty-nine percent said that they agreed.

That may well be because even if there isn’t a single, clear message of the protests that people identify with, it seems as if they do agree with many of the disparate ideas being put forward. A Time Magazine/Abt SRBI poll conducted last week found that among those familiar with the protests, 86 percent of respondents believed that “Wall Street and lobbyists have too much influence in Washington”; 79 percent believed that “the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. is too large”; 71 percent believed that “executives of financial institutions responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008 should be prosecuted”; and 68 percent believed that “the rich should pay more in taxes.”

Closer to the epicenter, the mission is clearer and public support even stronger. A Quinnipiac poll of New York City voters released this week found that nearly three-quarters said that they understood the protesters’ views at least fairly well, two-thirds said that they agreed with those views, nearly 9 in 10 said that it was O.K. “that they are protesting” and nearly three-quarters said that as long as the protesters obey the laws that they should be able to remain as long as they wish.

The Occupy Wall Street protests may or may not grow into a political force pursuing a specific legislative agenda through normal systems, but there can be little doubt at this point that the protests have struck a chord with a large swath of Americans.

If nothing else, the movement has established itself as a cultural phenomenon with surprising staying power, and as someone who wasn’t sure that it would catch hold, I must echo the young woman in the restaurant: that’s just cool.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

On Oct. 23, 1987 — 24 years ago on Sunday — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate. All but two Democrats voted “nay.”

The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.

Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.

Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)

I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the “systematic demonization” of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb “to bork,” which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn’t a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust — the line from Bork to today’s ugly politics is a straight one.

It is, to be sure, completely understandable that the Democrats wanted to keep Bork off the court. Lewis Powell, the great moderate, was stepping down, which would be leaving the court evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned — starting with Roe v. Wade.

But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.

The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing “Robert Bork’s America” as a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give “women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.”

Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness — and the essential unfairness — of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, “Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability.” It didn’t matter. He had to be portrayed “as an extreme ideological activist.” The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means.

Today, of course, the court has a conservative majority, and liberal victories are, indeed, being overturned. Interestingly, Bolick says Bork’s beliefs would have made him a restraining force. Theodore Olson, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush, also pointed out that after Bork, nominees would scarcely acknowledge that they had rich and nuanced judicial philosophies for fear of giving ammunition to the other side. Those philosophies would be unveiled only after they were on the court.

Mostly, though, the point remains this: The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.

Interesting that he could write that entire thing and never once bring up The Saturday Night Massacre…  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The season is upon us. Squirrels are collecting their winter nuts, the geese are flying off in formation, the hummingbirds headed south — and how the heck do they do that, anyway? Also, the high school seniors are beginning their long college visitation treks, which appear to take longer and require even more effort than that hummingbird thing.

There are more than 2,000 four-year institutions of higher learning alone in the United States. How are you supposed to make a selection?

I was always a proponent of the idea that it didn’t really matter much where you went to school. This was based in part on the fact that I chose my own alma mater, Marquette, because it was the only university that sent a recruiter to my high school. The recruiter told us that Marquette was only for people who were ready to be treated like adults, and imagine my surprise on the first day when I discovered that the women couldn’t leave the dorms in slacks unless they were going bowling.

But that was a long time ago, before picking a college was a science. Now coming up with a list of top choices is easy because you can log onto any number of find-your-college sites, put in your academic interests, your financial considerations, your geographical preferences and so on. Pretty soon you will get a batch of schools that meet your criteria.

Just for the heck of it, I went to the College Board site, tried to pretend I was 18 again, plugged in my data and discovered that I was meant to go to the University of Minnesota and nowhere else.

I should have been a Gopher.

But forget my path untaken. We’ve got a new crop of parents and kids out on the road, searching for the perfect road to intellectual growth. Or maybe not. There’s a well-known study called “Academically Adrift” that followed 3,000 students on 29 campuses and determined that after two years, 45 percent showed no significant gain in learning — and even after four years, 36 percent showed little change.

This is particularly frightening because the young men and women entering college have already spent their entire senior year of high school doing nothing but fretting over what college they’re going to get into. I would rather not think that many of the most expensively educated brains in the country are already formed by their 17th birthday.

Wait, there’s more: Besides learning less, today’s students are borrowing more. This year, the total amount of outstanding student loans will pass the $1 trillion threshold for the first time. The Federal Reserve has reported that Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards.

While this all looks pretty depressing, I think it’s important to consider the bright side. When it comes to spending money they don’t have, Americans today apparently prefer to invest in History 101 and Conversational French rather than clothes, vacations and new kitchen appliances.

However, Richard Arun, the co-author of “Academically Adrift,” is not looking on the bright side at all. Particularly about the fact that his study found “that 36 percent of the students are studying five or fewer hours a week and get a 3.16 grade average.”

Some 18-year-olds may be heartened by the idea that they can go to a good school, do almost nothing and still come home with a B. But Arun says this isn’t going to cut it in the global economy. He compared the performance of the students he studied with a recent report on academic effort in European countries and discovered that when it comes to time spent on class work and homework, “only the Slovak Republic would come after us in academic time.”

I don’t think I can put a positive spin on beating the Slovak Republic.

Since Arun says the kids who never studied were more likely, two years out of college, to be living at home with their parents, it’s clear that all mothers and fathers have a major interest in making sure their offspring are doing more reading than their competition in Bratislava.

Maybe the goal of the great college search should not be the most prestigious school, or even the school the prospective freshman falls in love with on the campus tour. Maybe everybody should be looking for the college that is most likely to maximize the amount of work the kids put in once they’re out on their own.

If they ever are. “Parents’ concern should not end once they send the kid off in September,” said Arun, who believes it’s important to stay on the case, making sure your children are picking challenging courses and putting in major book time.

Once again, a parent’s work is never done. So much easier if you’d been raising hummingbirds.