Baking the Cake

 

It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism.   Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy.  And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this.  I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.

To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.”  I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.

We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media.  We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone).  An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.

It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear.  The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes. 

The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege.  The Supreme Court was the first to topple.  The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure.  One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S.  Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely.  Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.

The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology.  Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail. 

The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the consequence, inflation.  This will be borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation, housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures.  Not discussed much is the elephant in the room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be retired with depreciated dollars.  One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war.  It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail.  Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take.  Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.”  Doesn’t this resonate?  We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media.  Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings.  In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence. 

How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West.  Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place.  She makes a persuasive argument:  “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”

Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.

 

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan

The Alternative Reality

It's easy to be cynical in this presidential election year, the rhetoric and posturing of the scripted, agnotological "debates," the Super PAC ads, the robo-calls, the deluge of direct mail, sending out those sound bites to "the undecided."  But what would this election cycle be like if McCain had won in 2008?  Ironically, it would have been the Democrats finger pointing about the economy because we'd probably be in a similar situation, or worse, who knows -- it's impossible to prove an alternative reality, but we can speculate.

The debt Romney carps about was first ramped up by the Treasury Department of the previous administration, not by Obama, with the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008 to stabilize the financial system and it was quite necessary at the time.  Jobs were falling off the cliff before Obama took office. Our financial system was in melt down.  And what would have been a McCain administration response as that crisis just continued to deepen?  Go into an austerity spending mode?  Cut taxes?  No, that would have been impossible.  The time for government to reign in its spending is when the economy is NOT falling off the cliff and even a Republican administration would have had to take similar action (and the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke was an appointee of the Republican administration as well).

Reviewing some of the more distant past, Clinton enacted tax increases in 1994, mostly on high income earners. Eventually, those, as well as a booming economy (note, no loss of jobs due to raising taxes on the upper 1%), turned around President George Bush Sr.'s deficits into surpluses. After three consecutive years of national debt reduction under Clinton, the surplus in 2000 amounted to $230 billion. 

The first fiscal year impacted by George W. Bush's tax cuts was 2002 when the surplus swung to a $159 billion deficit, a $286 billion negative change from the previous year.  True, we were now embroiled in the war on terror, but the administration persisted on raising the stakes with tax cuts.  Bush said while campaigning for a local Alabama congressman. “In order to make sure that our economy grows, in order to make sure the job base is strong, you need to have a congressman who will join me in making sure that tax relief plan we passed is permanent and doesn’t go away.”  Where were the jobs after nine years of this "temporary" but massive tax cut, mostly benefiting the upper 1%?

When Paul O'Neill, Bush's Treasury Secretary, argued against a second round of tax cuts, VP Cheney purportedly said "You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due."   This was Cheney speaking, not some liberal Democrat. O'Neill said in an interview "It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society. And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."  For that view, O'Neill was eventually fired.

Obama clearly underestimated how long it would take to reverse years of deficit spending, not only his administration's (necessary as the private sector was not spending), but his predecessor's as well. (He also didn't anticipate being stonewalled by Congress.)   But if McCain had defeated Obama in 2008, he would have inherited the same mess and today we might have Hillary Clinton running against McCain (or Palin or Romney) making some of the same arguments about fiscal responsibility being spun by Romney. 

As I said, it is hard not to be cynical about this particular election, but I respect Paul O'Neill's admonishment:  "It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society." That is why I support President Obama and hopefully in a second term he would have Congress' cooperation to achieve some fundamental tax reform and make inroads in controlling the growth of entitlements. 

And last night, as I was preparing to post this, a bit of serendipity led me to watch the 1957 classic A Face in the Crowd on Turner Classic Movies. Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, it depicts Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a drifter who is found in a jail by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), who she enlists to sing and talk on a local Arkansas radio station, he ultimately rising to the pinnacle of media demagoguery.  He is nicknamed "Lonesome" Rhodes by Marcia, and she goes on the journey with him from obscurity to fame to fall.  

The relevancy of this film, made more than fifty years ago, to today is striking.  Lonesome is drawn into the political arena, and is brought in to help transform the film's Senator Worthington Fuller into a Presidential candidate.  Lonesome instinctively and sardonically understands the manipulative power of language and media. 

When he first meets the Senator, he advises him to abandon his stiff personality and give himself over to Lonesome's control:  "...Your problem is getting the voters to listen to you. Getting them to like you enough to listen to you. We've got to face it, politics have entered a new stage, television. Instead of long-winded debates, the people want slogans. 'Time for a change' 'The mess in Washington' 'More bang for a buck'. Punch-lines and glamour....We've got to find  a  million buyers for the product 'Worthington Fuller'....Respect? Did you ever hear of anyone buying any product beer, hair rinse, tissue, because they respect it? You've got to be loved, man. Loved....Senator, I'm a professional. I look at the image on that screen same as at a performer on my show. And I have to say...you'll never get over to my audience not to the millions of people who welcome me into their living rooms each week. And if I wouldn't buy him, do you realize what that means? If I wouldn't buy him, the people of this country aren't ready to buy him for that big job on Pennsylvania Avenue....I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion...a force. A force."

To Marcia he says :"This whole country's just like my flock of sheep!....Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me."

An actor on Rhodes' show asks him about Senator Fuller: "You really sell that stiff as a man among men?" Lonesome Rhodes replies: "Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got 'em like this... You know what the public's like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they'll flap their flippers."

'Nuff said before next Monday's "debate" after which the "undecided" can flap their flippers.

Milestone and Miscellany

After my last post, Google informed me that was Lacunae Musing’s 300^th entry, a milestone of sorts.  When I began this blog almost five years ago, I had no idea where it might lead or, even, whether it would merely be a passing dalliance.   I had discounted writing about investments, something I know enough about to be dangerous, or about publishing, which, when I retired, I knew a lot about, but by the time I began to write in this space, the publishing world had changed dramatically.  Nor did I want to espouse only political views, although I’ve posted my share on the topic.  No, I wanted to write something that simply expresses my interests (as well as my views) and experiences (including some family history) and, perhaps, along the way make a small contribution on the WWW. The one thing I wanted to avoid is turning it into a job; I have no hidden agenda, no source of income from this effort.  There is only the satisfaction from writing, and having a “written trail” – a form of accountability, an intellectual balance sheet that is auditable.

As far as blogs go, mine is but a minor star in a minor universe.  Comparing this blog’s statistics to those of my blogging “hero” – to me the “father” of the investment blog—Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture -- shows the stark differences between a blog written by an erudite professional such as Ritholtz, and an unfocused personal blog.  It is like comparing the New York Times to a mimeographed newsletter (does the mimeograph still exist?).  Google tells me that I’ve had 25,000 page views now. Ritholtz’s blog has had 5,000 times more (and well deserved)!

Of course, I don’t view this as a competition, but it puts my humble contribution in perspective. Going back to Google’s statistics, the most viewed pages of my blog were mostly about trips we’ve taken, people presumably landing on those pages as they are contemplating (or have taken) similar ones. (In October when we will return from visiting Norway, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland and I’ll look forward to posting a write up with plentiful photographs.).  Just for the record, here are the five most read pages:

Marina MaidenVoyage

Feb 10, 2011; 1101 Page Views

Watson/HAL, ComeHere

Feb 17, 2011; 796 Page Views

Aegean Adventure

Oct 10, 2009; 710 Page Views

Summer Endeavors

Aug 8, 2011; 512 Page Views

Widow MakerRedux

Apr 21, 2011;  418 Page Views

Late in the game I began to add labels to the entries as the eclectic nature of the blog needed some sort of thread to tie everything together.  Unfortunately, as much of this work was done retrospectively, it isn’t a true index because of inconsistencies.  But it does give a handle on the contents with more than 350 labels.

I haven’t incorporated the popular “comments” feature in the blog as I just did not want to deal with reader’s comments publicly.  That felt like work to me.  My email address for the blog is in my profile (lacunaemusing@gmail.com), and I’ve received and responded to comments that way.  It certainly cuts down on casual comments when someone has to not only write an email, but identify him/herself as well.

The political season is heating up and I’m so disgusted with Super Pac advertising, and the unbearable rhetoric from both sides of the aisle that I doubt whether I will be as engaged in these blog pages as I was during the last presidential (and historical) election cycle.  To make my personal views clear, I think President Obama, given he is a mere mortal, has done about the best he could given the economic mess he was handed and the political roadblocks thrown at him.  But his campaign rhetoric has also worked against him, promising too much.  Also, I’ve criticized some of his priorities in these pages, so it is not as if I am a raving liberal.  I like to think of myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal and one might say that the two are not compatible; I think intelligent compromise can transcend many of the disagreements that are aired like dirty laundry in the media.  Of course, there are also the lunatic fringes and there is no compromise possible with them.

In fact, I recently learned, there is actually a word to describe this endless obfuscation of the truth -- Agnotology: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth.

And to whom do I give a hat tip for this morsel of incredible insight? -- Barry Ritholtz! (Who, in turn gives full attribution to the word’s creator, Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor.)  Ritholtz uses the term as but one element in his recent entry Defective Government By Design   asking the rhetorical question, “Is it democracy or plutocracy when less than 200 people drive election spending in a nation of 300 million?”

This entry is about the rise of corporate power and the Super Pac -- implications that are onerous for democracy.  I’ve written about it before, but if you land on this entry and want to know more, go to the foregoing Big Picture link.

Agnotology.  You hear and see its practice every day......say the lie often enough, and in as many forms as possible and voila, it suddenly becomes “the truth”.  In fact, innuendo works as well or even better than saying the lie straight out.

Here’s an example, the Daily News’ agnotological headline, “How many more must die, Mr. President?” – as if the horrific tragedy in Colorado is somehow the President’s fault.  If Obama had a magic wand, he would probably outlaw assault weapons, but he has a Congress to deal with, the NRA, and, of course, State’s rights.  It was theSupreme Court of Colorado which upheld a state law that allows residents to carry concealed weapons, even in schools!  But a glance at the NY Daily News headline plants an agnotological subliminal message.

That is the brave new political campaign world for 2012, different than it was in 2008, although that one too was quite ugly.  I will be relying on Fact Check.org to winnow truth from agnotological fiction.