Tag Archive for 'US politics'

It would give people something to talk about on Twitter?

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Politics and USA
. 28 Comments

Years ago, many political scientists in the US used to critique their rather free flowing party system for not offering voters a definite programmatic contest. In post-war normative democratic theory, parties were seen as able to organise and coalesce a range of interests and measures into a competing platforms which would enable citizens to make a rational choice in voting.

Of course, now that one of the two parties has started to act much more like the disciplined parliamentary caucuses found in Westminster democracies, not everyone is so enamoured of this notion.

But it’s interesting to see a bit of momentum building for a Question Time in the US, which would represent a distinctly different relation between the executive and legislature.

I wonder, though, whether many of its proponents have taken the time to watch Australia’s Question Time, or Britain’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Economics, International, Markets and USA
. 71 Comments

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 15 Comments

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. Continue reading ‘Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt’

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat lost: The politics of anti-politics

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Foreign Elections, Politics and USA
. 88 Comments

News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.

Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.

It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.

The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed.

His analysis suggests that the result is born of the sentiment of a plague on the US political classes, bailing out banks with abandon, but doing nothing perceptible for ‘Main Street’, and the straightened economic circumstances many Americans face after the GFC. He also suggests the Republicans will be emboldened to escalate their anti-Obama rhetoric, but that they themselves have nothing effective to offer; short of pandering to anti-government sentiments deeply embedded in American political culture.

In truth, the US party system is incapable of doing anything other than slightly tacking in the direction of popular sentiment; something confounded by the hyperbolic checks and balances, whose frustration of a majority in the Senate is precisely what made this special election so important.

Previous discussion on LP: Here.

Update: Nate Silver on the swing.

The Tobin Tax and the GFC

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Elections, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 3 Comments

In a recent post, I observed that the momentum for systemic reform and coordinated international regulation of the financial sector, pursued through the G20 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, appeared to have stalled. In that context, it was interesting to read an interview in yesterday’s Financial Review with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, where he observed that there was a need for some sort of revenue raising for a fund to draw on for future stabilisation measures.

He didn’t explicitly refer to a Tobin Tax, but I suspect that’s what he had in mind, and it’s something that has popped up higher on the agenda over 2008 and 2009. So it’s worthwhile to point to a comprehensive article by John Langmore in Inside Story on just that measure.

From my point of view, one key advantage of a tax on cross border financial transactions would be its contribution to transparency and thus the ability of states (and others) more easily to grasp what’s occurring in the ’shadow banking’ sector. Whether or not future bank bailouts are politically feasible is another question entirely. I suspect that might be political suicide in the USA, no matter how dire another financial shock.

And, incidentally, when the Democrats inevitably lose Senate seats in November, it will become more or less impossible for anything of any size to pass the US Congress.

After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, International, Policy, Politics and USA
. 26 Comments

A predictable response to the Copenhagen fail has been calls from Australian business for *even more* ‘compensation’ as a condition for continued support of the Rudd government’s ETS. I’ll save the domestic politics of the Copenhagen washup for a later post, but I think it’s also worth reflecting on what underlies the sort of political and policy thinking which leads to bills such as the CPRS.

In my previous post, I reproduced Brian Davey’s piece from Open Democracy, which expressed skepticism about the capacities of the political system to deal with complex phenomena, permeating all sectors of the economy and lifeworld, such as climate change. I agree with the diagnosis, but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions.

There are three similarities between the design of the CPRS and the American Health bill (and for that matter, the US cap and trade bills):

(a) Both started out with an ambit, seeking to find the limits of giveaways and concessions to political and particularly corporate constituencies; rather than from the position of a solution;

(b) Similarly, both come with implicit rhetoric that any action is a good start, and a messy compromise can later be made purer and more effective;

(c) Both seek to accommodate existing interests and shift behaviour only at the margins, rather than constructing a new frame which would require actors to reconfigure behaviours, and create new actors (and destroy or reshape old ones).

In short, this sort of approach to governance is inherently conservative, in that it seeks to match political imperatives to already existing situations, rather than to transform the situation politically. This tends not to work, for reasons which are fairly obvious. Yet, notions like ‘nudge’ and using quasi-markets to achieve social ends are the hallmarks of postmodern progressive policy wonk-dom.

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?’

Obama Fail

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture, Politics and USA
. 64 Comments

Writing in the always fabulous London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a very interesting argument on why Barack Obama has been something of a disappointment. Though Bromwich’s political commitments are fairly well known – at least to readers of HuffPo – his critique isn’t particularly ideological. Rather, Bromwich, a Professor of Literature at Yale, encapsulates Obama’s political failings rather more astutely than a lot of professional observers of political strategy. The whole argument is worth reading, but the kernel of it is the observation that Obama consistently underestimates the forces ranged against him, and that he becomes mired again and again in role confusion – inspirer-in-chief tends to trump politician in a predictable pattern.

It may be that this is actually inherent in the American system of government – it’s a very difficult balancing act for one figure to be simultaneously symbolic head of the nation and executive of the political state. It’s pretty clear, too, how the particularity of Obama’s identity can be mobilised by the Fox News noise machine to disrupt the first identification, leading the President to spend far too much time rising above politics rather than practising it. It’s always going to be more difficult for a president of the centre-left to straddle this divide, but as Bromwich suggests, it’s rather puzzling that a man as intelligent as Obama goes on making the same mistake again and again.

Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:

In fact, the question has arisen of whether Barack Obama’s particular—one might say idiosyncratic—governing style is right for these times.

A flood of climate change litigation?

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Law and USA
. 11 Comments

It’s quite possible, and indeed, I think quite progressive, to criticise the American political system for resolving too many divisive issues through the courts. That’s another story, I guess, but it certainly is the case that many political shifts have been aided and abetted by litigation in the US; one only has to name Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade. On a slightly different plane, much environmental legislation in the US and regulation had its origins in class action lawsuits pursued in the 60s and 70s, often under the auspices of public interest groups. That’s how Ralph Nader became famous.

So it’s really quite intriguing to consider the possible implications of a Fifth Circuit court decision giving Hurricane Katrina victims standing to sue corporations for damages. Such a development might well concentrate legislative and corporate minds.

“The Tyranny of the Now”

Published
by
Kim
11 months, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Economics, Media, Sociology and USA
. 7 Comments

With Kevin Rudd in Washington meeting Barack Obama, and the new Geithner Plan seemingly hostage to the insta-reaction of the markets, punditocracy and economists alike, it’s worth pausing to cast an eye over an argument by Ian Leslie in The Guardian:

In an attempt to capture the experience of living in the age of mass media, the cultural critic Frederic Jameson talked of being trapped in a “perpetual present”. Bombarded with endless information, images from the past and dreams of the future, we live each day as if it’s our first and our last.

Jameson’s diagnosis may be hyperbolic, but those who followed 2008 election will have at least an inkling of what he was getting at. During the primaries and the general election, it was difficult to discern the underlying state of the race from the media coverage, because all that seemed to matter was WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

Almost every day, a new story would tear through the media ecosphere, gathering velocity and heat as it went, dominating the chatter on the web and on TV and radio. Hillary didn’t tip a waitress! Obama said something about lipstick on a pig! SARAH FRICKIN’ PALIN! Within hours of any “incident”, headlines blared, pundits pronounced, bloggers unloaded, campaigns sniped and counter-sniped. Each media node would feed off every other node, creating what scientists call “positive feedback”, the most familiar example of which is what you get when you move a live microphone too close the speaker: an ear-splitting noise.

Leslie argues that, actually, not much happened in the US general election campaign. I think that’s right – there are probably only a few events which could be pinpointed that actually shifted the dynamics and momentum of the thing. Leslie concentrates on the “media ecosphere”. But I wonder if what we’re seeing here is not also “fast capitalism” – the speeding up of the circulation of money, the value cycle, and the short termism that drives both share markets (often very short term indeed – as with short selling) and all the craziness that led to the bust of the boom. Maybe this phenomenon is the underlying cause of the crisis. Since Leslie invokes Fredric Jameson, one might well surmise or propose that the contemporary mediasphere reflects the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. If that’s the case, what is to be done? Take a deep breath and a longer view? That’s in essence the Keynesian road. But is it enough?

The Obama inauguration: some interesting links

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Climate change, Economics, Foreign policy, International, Markets, Middle East, Palestine, Politics, The Web, USA and War
. 8 Comments

There’s probably literally millions of reactions to Barack Obama’s inauguration on the intertubes today, so I wanted to try to highlight some more specific articles and posts which raise some interesting issues which might otherwise get lost in the crowd. [The text is here.]

Two of the more pressing questions since the election in November have been how Obama will respond to the global financial crisis and from what political position he will seek to govern. Both, in a way, have been answered, but hardly definitively. It’s worth observing in passing – and the point is a crucial one for us here in Australia – that the selective invocation of the mantra “there’s only one President at a time” means that we know very little about what the new administration’s stance on global financial regulatory issues and the governance architecture of the world economy will be. Such decisions as are taken – and paths not taken – will probably be of more lasting moment than how effectively and quickly his fiscal stimulus works to turn around America’s domestic economy. But, in that regard, the addition of tax cuts to the infrastructure investment proposed in his domestic package (to corral in some congressional Republican support, or so it’s being framed) reflects a debate about the composition of any stimulus which is important, and to some degree being played out, in our own context as well. Here, I was intrigued to see Andrew Leonard at Salon’s How The World Works blog suggest that a passage in the Inaugural address shows Obama has come down on the Keynesian side of the argument. (And to see Leonard compare Obama’s eloquence with Keynes’, to the former’s detriment.)

Continue reading ‘The Obama inauguration: some interesting links’

Open Obama Inauguration thread

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Afghanistan, Blogging, Economics, Film, TV, Video etc, Foreign policy, International, Iraq, Media, Middle East, Nationalism, Politics, The Web and USA
. 93 Comments

If you’re staying up to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration as 44th President of the United States of America, Crikey has a good guide to coverage and commentary on tv, live streaming, live blogging and twitter. Locally, Hoyden About Town is hosting a livechat. Their website also links to YouTube and audio of notable past inaugural addresses. Here’s FDR:

At The Guardian, Ned Temko looks at past inaugurals, and writing in New Matilda, Aron Paul observes:

Obama’s inauguration may well promise republican and democratic renewal. Paradoxically, however, this year’s is the most monarchic and imperial inauguration ritual that America has ever witnessed.

Continue reading ‘Open Obama Inauguration thread’

Obama.change II

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Activism, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 17 Comments

Some of the issues I was discussing in my recent post about Barack Obama’s web based strategy and its potential for both further political hay making and for keeping an electoral coalition together are neatly encapsulated in this article from The Boston Globe. Worth a read.

Obama.change

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Blogging, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 33 Comments

You can pick almost any American liberal blog at random for signs that Barack Obama is already disappointing “the base” – that is, if the netroots actually constitute or represent his base. I’m still a tad surprised by this phenomenon – I guess in the partisan heat of the election campaign, no one took Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric seriously. It was pretty obvious, I thought, that he meant what he said. It may also be that large swathes of the American liberal blogosphere are stuck in permanent negativity mode. After all, the thing didn’t exist in any meaningful form last time there was a Democratic President, and it’s always harder to write a political blog when your mob is in power.

But this probably predictable development is not the most interesting aspect of the interactivity Obama’s campaign encouraged. I’ve previously commented that Obama has a potentially powerful political weapon to wield with the ability to mobilise supporters he’s identified online from the primaries onwards. But there’s a flip side to this sort of openness, and Henry Farrell has a cracker of a post at Crooked Timber on it. Farrell riffs off the huge volume of comments left on Change.Gov:

This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives – and the ‘open’ architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this.

There are two other points here I think are salient. Continue reading ‘Obama.change’

Putting US politics in perspective

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 2 months ago
in Economics, Media, Politics and USA
. 37 Comments

A couple of items which provide some food for thought:

Firstly -

Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.

Image source here.

Secondly – Arianna Huffington:

Judging by where the media are focusing their attention, you’d think the Blago/Burris/Reid and Kennedy/Paterson/Cuomo soap operas are the biggest issues facing the nation — and that little thing about the potential collapse of the world’s largest economy is just a sideshow.

Why have the media shown such relatively little interest in the utter lack of transparency about the bailout?

2009: The year ahead

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Government, Health, Howardia, Industrial Relations, International, Markets, Media, Policy, Poverty, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 18 Comments

As is traditional in Australia, the first day of the new year saw the release of cabinet records from thirty years ago at state and federal level. Incidentally, the underwhelming nature of what was revealed should put a big question mark over whether this level of concealment is really necessary given a greater preference for open government. But, nevertheless, the theme of the day was something like “the more things change…” and intriguingly the press pack appear to have been put onto that scent by one John Winston Howard, who I’d have thought wouldn’t want anyone to remember he was Treasurer three decades ago. But to claim that the conjuncture of circumstances we now enter is anything but weakly analogous to those which pertained in 1978 is wrong.

Prediction at the minute level is a fool’s game, though it’s one a lot of people like to indulge in. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that 2009 will be an interesting year. Many patterns which were becoming evident in 2008 – a year of transition politically and economically – will crystallise into a more definable shape this year.

Perhaps most important is the election of Barack Obama.

Continue reading ‘2009: The year ahead’