Bobo has a question: “Where Are the Liberals?” He drools that all circumstances point to a golden age for liberalism. But the left is maxed out. His opening line: “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” Well, you piece of crap, maybe if idiots like you actually COVERED liberals, for example the protests leading up to the clusterphuck that was the Iraq war, you might be able to find some. Asshole. Mr. Cohen, in “America Abroad,” says smarter U.S. power could still confound the “declinists.” Mr. Nocera, in “BP Makes Amends,” says in settling claims over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a compensation fund has been much more efficient than the tort system. Mr. Bruni says “Please Hold the Cheese,” and that the Republicans’ double-debate weekend offered a vivid illustration of why Americans are so cynical about politicians. Here’s that disgrace Bobo:
Why aren’t there more liberals in America?
It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.
It’s not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we’re still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.
It’s not because liberalism’s opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.
Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.
The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.
A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.
Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.
This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.
Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.
Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.
Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.
You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.
Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?
In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.
Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.
Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.
If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.
Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.
If Democrats can’t restore Americans’ trust in government, it really doesn’t matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.
Bobo obviously has accepted the fact that HIS party can’t restore America’s trust in government. Schmuck. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Perhaps the most successful U.S. chief executive of the past decade is stepping down this month. Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. has presided over a remarkable transformation of the technology giant, extracting it from the personal computer business and shifting it toward services and software to power a “Smarter Planet.”
In a fascinating interview with my colleague Steve Lohr, Palmisano said the first of the four questions in his guiding business framework was, “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?” At root, business is still about getting money out of your pocket into mine. By being unsentimental in making I.B.M. unique, Palmisano ensured a lot of money flowed the company’s way.
Profits followed. The stock price surged. Warren Buffett, who knows which way the wind blows, recently acquired a stake of more than 5 percent. I.B.M. has been re-imagined, not least in the way it has shifted from being a U.S. multinational to a global corporation powered by rapid expansion in growth markets like India and China.
The question arises: If an American colossus like I.B.M. can be turned around, can America itself? Are the “declinists” on the United States, focused on hard power and America’s falling share of global output, missing something? Before I get to that, let’s take a closer look at I.B.M.’s shifting focus and its implications.
As Lohr has reported, I.B.M. no longer breaks out its global payroll by region. But last time it did, in 2008, it reported that its worldwide employment grew by 21 percent to 386,558, while the U.S. head count fell 11 percent to 120,589. It seems unlikely this trend has halted. By some estimates, huge growth in India has brought the number of I.B.M. employees there to over 100,000, perhaps equivalent to the current number in the United States.
I.B.M. is not alone. U.S.-based global corporations added 683,000 workers in China during the 1999-2009 decade, a 172 percent increase, and 392,000 workers in India, a 542 percent increase. In all they added 1.5 million workers to payrolls in the Asia and Pacific region, while cutting 864,600 workers at home, according to figures from the Commerce Department.
American isolationism has become an oxymoron. As these figures show, it’s a non-option.
On one level this shift poses problems for the United States: Cash-rich companies are creating jobs elsewhere rather than at home. On another, however, the global American corporation expands U.S. power in ways that are hard to quantify but significant. They tend to propagate cultures of openness, connectedness and transparency.
“A General Electric or a Goldman or a Twitter tries to work in each country in culturally appropriate ways, but at their base these companies hold an American set of values. And that is what influence is,” Xenia Dormandy, a senior fellow at Chatham House, told me. “Power viewed in state terms alone, or even primarily, is a false premise these days.”
The conspicuous failure of American hard power — in Iraq and Afghanistan — has tended to obscure the way American soft power has flourished over the past decade. For a while soft power was undercut because the U.S. reputation was tarnished, but the Arab awakening has demonstrated how powerful American-driven social media are in opening up closed societies. Facebook and Twitter have been conspicuous. But when I.B.M. invests massively in Africa — which it has identified as the next major emerging growth market — it is also investing in an openness that advances U.S. interests.
When I was at Harvard recently, Joseph Nye, the professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government, made an interesting point. He noted that a rising China has 1.3 billion citizens. But America at its best has 7 billion in that it draws on the world’s talents, as its corporations and colleges demonstrate. Nye in general is skeptical of the “declinists.”
I agree. That’s not because another American century is dawning — it’s not; nor because the power shift to Asia is illusory; nor because U.S. problems of paralyzed government, high deficits and inadequate schools are negligible. No, it’s because the defeat of American hard power has been overdrawn and the magnetism of American soft power underestimated. And we are going into a world where, as Nye has written, “War remains possible, but it is much less acceptable now than it was a century or even a half-century ago.”
The United States is adaptable. The mistakes of the past decade are being corrected through more effective counterterrorism, withdrawal from the major wars, and a slimmed down military budget. Some event, or political lurch, could blow these moves off course, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that consumer confidence is improving as America overcomes its great post-9/11 disorientation.
Palmisano’s third guiding question was, “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?” That looks like a way of saying no nation is going to welcome a big-footing America. And he urged America to educate itself into the 21st-century, a course hard to follow when trillions are going to far-flung wars.
Smarter U.S. power could still confound the “declinists.”
Now here’s Mr. Nocera:
Today, I’m going to say some nice things about BP and some not so nice things about the lawyers who are suing BP. Please don’t spill your coffee.
As horrific as the Deepwater Horizon accident was in April 2010 — killing 11 rig employees, while pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — BP has performed quite admirably in its aftermath. It has spared no expense in cleaning up the oil. It has set aside $1 billion to restore the environment and coastal ecosystem. It underwrote an advertising campaign to lure tourists back to the Gulf Coast. Today, less than two years after the spill, the beaches are sparkling, most fishermen are working and many of the hotels are full.
At the urging of President Obama, BP also agreed to set up a $20 billion fund to compensate anyone who could show that they’d been economically harmed by the accident. Ken Feinberg, the former administrator of the Sept. 11 victim compensation fund, was put in charge of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, as it was named. Feinberg has since paid out $6.3 billion to nearly 200,000 claimants. Daniel Becnel, a lawyer who has settled thousands of claims, says that his clients often receive more money from Feinberg than they would have if they had gone to court. “You couldn’t have done a better job than Feinberg did,” says Becnel.
To put it another way, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility has been a remarkably effective alternative to the cumbersome way damages are usually meted out after a corporate accident: through the tort system. Compare it, for instance, with the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, which took nearly two decades of court battles for the plaintiffs to finally get around $1.3 billion.
Indeed, the whole point of the Gulf Coast fund is to keep cases out of court; in return for compensation, the claimants have to agree not to sue for further damages. There is much that is right with this approach. Victims don’t have to wait years — or decades — to get their money. The uncertainty of litigation is eliminated. The victims get monetary damages, just as they would if they won a court case, but without the expense of a lawsuit. They also pay less in legal fees. And if they don’t like what is being offered, well, they can still sue. It is, as they say, a win-win.
Except, it turns out, for a certain group of plaintiffs’ lawyers who, despite the relative ease of using the claims facility, is insisting on pursuing litigation against BP. They say they have more than 100,000 cases, though none are for big money, like the injured workers’ cases; Feinberg has even settled most of those. For months, these lawyers have been preparing for a “liability trial,” currently set for late February.
However that trial turns out, it’s largely pointless: BP has already conceded liability, which it has backed with $20 billion. The lawyers’ motive can’t be to get more money than that; it’s far more than any court would ever award. Punitive damages can’t be the reason either: federal law prevents most of the claimants from getting punitive damages. No, there is only one reason this litigation is taking place. The lawyers want the kind of big fees that only come with big lawsuits. Yet Feinberg’s approach is proving so popular with claimants that many of their cases are evaporating.
So here’s what they did. They went to the federal judge handling the BP litigation and asked him to establish a “reserve” that would be made up of 6 percent of any future claims settled by Feinberg. (They also want 4 percent from any damages Alabama and Louisiana get.) The judge, Carl Barbier — a former plaintiffs’ lawyer himself — agreed to do so without even holding a hearing. Eventually, some or all of that reserve would be used to pay the lawyers. That’s right: They are trying to grab fees from clients they’ve never represented. Amazing. (Judge Barbier recently backed away a bit from his ruling and is allowing both sides to file briefs that are due on Thursday.)
When I asked how they could possibly justify this fee grab, I was told that their lawsuit was the main reason Feinberg was willing to be so generous with BP’s money. But Tony Buzbee, another lawyer who has settled many claims through the fund, blew a gasket when I told him that. “They have not done one thing so far that has benefited my clients,” he said. “My clients have chosen not to be a part of their litigation. Why in the world should they have to pay them?”
It’s a good question. The Gulf Coast Claims Facility has the potential to serve as a model for handling future industrial accidents. It has proved that it can compensate victims quickly and fairly without the ordeal and cost of litigation. But, for that to happen, it’s not just companies that have to put aside their greed. So do the lawyers.
Now here’s Mr. Bruni:
A charge of “pious baloney” from the king of sanctimonious salami: that was the taste of Debate Weekend, during which Newt Gingrich of all people called out Mitt Romney for larded self-aggrandizement. Takes one lunchmeat to know another.
Gingrich was responding to Romney’s continued claims of having elected to spend minimal time in politics. Romney spent minimal time in politics because he wasn’t elected: not to the United States Senate in 1994, when he challenged Ted Kennedy, and not to the presidency in 2008, when he lost the Republican nomination to John McCain.
In the second of the weekend’s two debates, he actually claimed that he had counted on a Kennedy victory but wanted to give the liberal lion a good scare.
“I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” boasted Romney, minting a new definition of success. It isn’t whether you win or lose. It’s whether you eat into your opponent’s real-estate portfolio.
Gingrich had his own moments of odd grandstanding. One came in the weekend’s first debate, when he explained his opposition to same-sex weddings. The “sacrament of marriage,” he said, mustn’t be cheapened. He himself has paid that sacrament greater tribute than any of his current rivals, availing himself of it three times. Inexplicably, he left that part out.
The Republicans faced off twice in 12 hours, the political equivalent of a “Law & Order” marathon, minus the climactic justice. No one was carted off to the big house, only because hypocrisy isn’t criminal. Like the previous 1,286 debates, the latest two brought some clarity to the race for the party’s presidential nomination, and had moments of wild diversion to boot.
But they also provided a sadly vivid illustration of why Americans are so cynical about their politics and politicians, whose most striking quality may be the velocity with which they run away from who they really are and what they’ve really said and done.
Santorum, perhaps belatedly worried that his contempt for gay men and lesbians might not play as well in New Hampshire as in Iowa, professed on Sunday that he would love a homosexual son no less than a heterosexual one.
I have to assume he means a pitying, pray-for-your-tortured-soul kind of love, which in any case wouldn’t compensate for all he’s done to make sure that such a son — or anyone else growing up gay — is indeed tortured. Over time Santorum has brought up bestiality, incest and polygamy as reference points in discussing homosexuality; voiced support for sodomy statutes that criminalize homosexual intimacy; and said that a child would be better served by a father in prison than by, say, two mothers without so much as a parking ticket.
His record doesn’t square in the least with his pledge on Sunday to make sure “every person in America, gay or straight, is treated with respect and dignity.” But nothing melts a presidential aspirant’s frigid heart like the need to broaden his base.
Romney used the most recent debates to rail anew against “Obamacare,” which he audaciously goes out of his way to bring up. His response to similarities between it and the health care reform he championed in Massachusetts is to ratchet up his outrage, apparently on the theory that emotion fogs fact. No one intones “Obamacare” as venomously as he.
He just won’t own up — not to his long-held political ambitions, though they make him no different from most rivals, and not even to his wealth, which also isn’t unheard of in politics.
After Sunday’s debate, he told New Hampshire voters that he, too, had known the dread of a pink slip. On Monday, he talked of having begun his consulting career “at the entry level.” If this Everyman act is some strategic pushback against fresh scrutiny of his enrichment at Bain Capital, it isn’t working. It only makes him look phony.
Most troubling was his attack on Jon Huntsman for working in the Obama administration as opposed to agitating for its overthrow. Huntsman signed on at the start, before Obama had shown what kind of leader he would be, and that’s an inherently awful decision only if a president or anyone else from an opposing party is supposed to be denied cooperation automatically and deprived all benefit of the doubt.
Besides which, can’t a person exert more influence on the inside than out? And must he agree with a country’s leader on all matters to take on a specific assignment? Huntsman correctly pointed out that by that reasoning, his two sons in the United States Navy should hasten ashore. President Obama, after all, is their commander in chief.
Romney got along fine with the Democrats who dominated the Massachusetts Legislature when he was governor. Deservedly, he brags about that. Then he turns partisan hellcat, hissing at any appeasement. I find that hard to digest. It’s just plain hammy.
Well, Mittens will do anything or say anything to claw his way to the nomination. He’d kill his grandmother in Macy’s window at high noon if that would guarantee him election.
