Tag Archives: America

Periodic Update from Krugman the Indispensable

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Paul Krugman was right about Bush’s tax cuts and the Iraq War. He was right about the 2009 stimulus. He’s been right about Europe’s austerity program. I’m sure he’s right about this too:

“The latest projections [from the Congressional Budget Office] show the combined cost of Social Security and Medicare rising by a bit more than 3 percent of G.D.P. between now and 2035, and that number could easily come down with more effort on the health care front. Now, 3 percent of G.D.P. is a big number, but it’s not an economy-crushing number. The United States could, for example, close that gap entirely through tax increases, with no reduction in benefits at all, and still have one of the lowest overall tax rates in the advanced world.

But haven’t all the great and the good been telling us that Social Security and Medicare as we know them are unsustainable, that they must be totally revamped — and made much less generous? Why yes, they have; they’ve also been telling us that we must slash spending right away or we’ll face a Greek-style fiscal crisis. They were wrong about that, and they’re wrong about the longer run, too.

The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and Medicare, while not great, actually isn’t all that bad. It’s time to stop obsessing about how we’ll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and focus instead on how we’re going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans in the here and now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/krugman-the-geezers-are-all-right.html

Squeaky Right-Wing Wheels and the Noise They Make

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Jon Stewart and his writers do a very good job making fun of right-wing fools and knaves. Stephen Colbert and his writers do an even better job. You’d think that if the people they make fun of ever saw themselves being made fun of, they’d mend their ways. But that doesn’t happen.

There is a popular left-wing website called Daily Kos that features an almost continuous stream of news and commentary, much of which calls attention to the ridiculous behavior of right-wing fools and knaves. There are many positive stories, but I often end up reading the negative ones. So I get to learn a lot about Fox News and Mitch McConnell.

The problem is that I’d rather know a lot less about Fox News, Mitch McConnell and their ilk. They are a blight on our nation. So I’ve stopped watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I’m trying to stop looking at Daily Kos. 

You could argue that it’s my responsibility as an American citizen to stay informed about current events, so it would be better to pay attention to what the right-wing knaves and fools are saying. But what these people and organizations do is mainly generate noise, which distracts us from more important things.

For example, it’s more important to know that the incredibly wealthy Koch Brothers want to buy the Los Angeles Times and turn it into a right-wing propaganda machine than it is to hear the latest stupid remark from Michele Bachmann, sponsor of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. 

A few days ago, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote about Rep. Bachmann’s decision not to run for re-election next year:

In honor of her departure, Michele-watchers around the country rolled out their favorite Bachmann quotes. Mine was her contention that the theory of evolution was disputed by “hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes.”

We may not see her like again. Or, if one shows up, we may decide not to pay attention.

Collins often writes entertaining but depressing columns about the latest Republican offense against justice or rationality. But wouldn’t it be better if she and we paid less attention (not no attention, but less attention) to what right-wing fools and knaves have to say?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/collins-michele-heres-the-bell.html

The Old World and the New, 1492 – 1650 by J. H. Elliott

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The English historian J. H. Elliott is an expert on the history of Spain. His subject in this short book is the effect of the discovery of the New World on Europe, especially the Spanish. Yet he is hesitant to identify causal relationships, tending to identify historical correlations instead, e.g. between the amount of gold and silver taken from the Western Hemisphere to Spain and rising prices in Europe.

The book begins with Columbus discovering North America and ends with the collapse of the Spanish Empire. Between those events, the Spanish viewed the New World as a source of gold and silver and as an opportunity to spread civilization, especially Catholicism. There were  intellectual consequences, but most of the impact was economic and political. Harvesting 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver (plus any that wasn’t officially reported) helped Spain become the most powerful nation in the world.

This development wasn’t lost on the other European powers. In Elliott’s words: “Overseas possessions came to be seen as essential adjuncts of Europe, enhancing the military and economic power of its rival nation-states”.

Considering that Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, was founded in 1607, and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, it isn’t surprising that the English play a small role in this story. What surprised me was how much history was being made in the New World by the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch before the English began to colonize North America.

Not everyone in Europe thought the discovery of the New World was a blessing. There were Spaniards who criticized the treatment of Spain’s new subjects and believed Spain would be better off economically and morally without importing all that precious metal.

The French essayist Montaigne also had something to say: “So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so many infinite millions of harmless people of all sexes, states and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world turned topsy-turvy, ruined and defaced for the traffic of pearls and pepper”.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer

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This is a monumental book. In 900 pages, Professor Fischer tells the story of the four major migrations from Great Britain to colonial America. In chronological sequence, he describes the Puritans from East Anglia who settled in Massachusetts; the cavaliers and their indentured servants from the south of England who settled in Virginia; the Quakers from the north Midlands who came to the Delaware Valley; and the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland and the north of England who came to Appalachia and the inland South.

Fischer describes these four subcultures in great detail, discussing among other things their marriage, child-rearing, culinary, linguistic, religious, architectural and political practices. He explains their ideas of liberty, the clothes they wore, the names they gave their children, and their thoughts on education.

The surprising thing is not how different these groups were, but how their differences remained fairly constant through the years, even to the present day. For example, the Puritans valued public education; the aristocrats who came to Virginia only valued education for themselves, not their servants. The Quakers opposed violence; the settlers who came from the borderlands of England and Scotland to Appalachia considered violence a normal part of life. 

The last part of the book traces American history after the revolution, showing how the Electoral College map has usually reflected the cultural traditions of these founding groups. Given the history of these four British folkways in America, it is no surprise that the North is better educated and less violent than the South. Fischer points out that the South has supported every war America ever fought, regardless of who we were fighting or why.  (2/19/13)

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

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Henry Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom and later a congressman. Henry was brought up as a member of the political, social and intellectual elite. He served as private secretary to his father during the Civil War and later became a journalist, historian and novelist. He lived most of his life in Washington but traveled extensively throughout the world. At the age of 70, he privately circulated a book of memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams. When it was finally published after his death, it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library named it the best non-fiction book of the 20th century.

The book is offered as an account of Henry Adams’s education, but it’s really the story of his life, with some major gaps. For example, he skips forward 20 years at one point, never mentioning his marriage during those years or the fact that his wife committed suicide: “This is a story of education, not of adventure! It is meant to help young men — or such as have intelligence enough to seek help — not to amuse them. What one did — or did not do — with one’s education, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him”.

Adams writes of himself in the third person throughout. He is often sarcastic and cynical about himself and others. I often had trouble understanding him. He discusses various 19th century political controversies and politicians in great detail. He also expounds a view of historical progress as the accumulation of “force”, for example, the forces unleashed by the production of coal and the construction of the railroads. Many of his observations are worth reading, however, and worth reading more than once. He reminds us that human nature and politics haven’t changed much (or at all?) since the 19th century. Here is an example, from chapter 7,”Treason (1860-61)”:

“Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination — haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent morbid excitement, but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close [sic] society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands”.  (12/26/12)