Election day 2018

A cloudy, rainy, colorful fall morning; the dogwood in my back yard is a rich dark magenta, and beyond it in other yards are trees that are bright yellow, green, orange.  I should be writing poetry in celebration of fall.

But I find it hard to see all of that beauty today.  The world is presenting distractions that are difficult to ignore: today is election day in America.

This is the most nerve-wracking election I can remember.  Yes, 2016 was upsetting, but the day before that election we were all but certain that we would survive the week with the long arc of our history still bending toward justice.  No one expected Donald Trump to win.  No one predicted the last two years of incompetence, meanness, numb bigotry, lies and official race-based loathing from our President, from our Congress and from our Justice Department.  No one predicted that acidic hallucinations from the lunatic fringe would swallow the Republican party whole, and since the Republicans control all branches of our government, would swallow the country whole.  Today we will find out if this is really what the country wants.  If it is, then it will continue: it will, in fact, be inflamed by an electoral validation, and get much worse.   If the voting today shows that this has been a big mistake then we might, someday, be able to correct it.

I don’t know what to predict.  I think the polls are likely to have wider errors than they have in the past in part because our political affiliations have so divided us.  Families are torn apart by them, and so many people have incentive---if they care about family, or friends, or relationships in any part of their lives---to hide their real views.  There are, I’m sure, secretive Trump voters, Trump Democrats, who hide their choices from pollsters in order to hid them from their friends.  But there are also Republicans who oppose Trump and all of his antics, and they may hide that fact from pollsters who ask.  So the polls are a guide, still, but may be far from the mark. 

Which group of secret voters is bigger?  I don’t know.  I think and hope that the Democrats will have a very good day today, and I’m joined in that hope by a very wide range of very conservative former Republican writers.  I know that because they’ve said so clearly and openly.  Their goal is to retrieve the possibility of a real conservative party in the United States.  They have that goal because the Republican party is no longer conservative in any definable sense, and as conservatives they no longer have any political home.  I’m thinking of people like Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Max Boot and Joe Scarborough, all of whom are strongly conservative, and all of whom have written in the Washington Post about their hope that the Democrats do well today so that an honest and actual conservative party can emerge, somehow, and do well in the future.    

I share their hope.  I’m a progressive, and have always been, but I do think we progressives need a viable conservative party to contest against.  It helps us remember what we think, and why, and it keeps us honest. 

So honest conservatives and honest progressives have a common cause today, it seems.  This election has done that: it pits reality, honesty, and good purpose against corrosive fantasy and brutal meanness. 

We’ll see.  We’ll see.  I’ll spend the day reading, and pacing, and looking out the windows without really seeing anything there., waiting for results that won’t begin to be available until the polls close. 

It’s a pretty, rainy fall morning, on what looks like a very long day.  Late tonight we will see what kind of weather tomorrow will bring.

The long road to President Pence, and the long road after

MSNBC has been agog over the steady flood of revelations, day by day, about Donald Trump, about his behavior, his possible obstruction of justice, the possibility that he is enriching himself by his policies in office, the possibility that he or his staff colluded or conferred with Russia in the subversion of an American election, and all the rest.  Lawrence O’Donnell told those currently employed by the White House that it was time for them to “lawyer up”, in the (probably justified) belief that many of them will be caught in the legal shredder as the Trump presidency disintegrates.

 Yes.  Maybe.  Probably, in fact, at this point.  But I want to caution against excessive giddiness among progressives about ending the Trump presidency, either by impeachment, which seems more than warranted, or by simply declaring him mentally incapable of doing the job, which seems to be clearly true: neither path is easy, and the result wouldn’t be the great relief it sounds like it should be. 

Yes, we are now in the grips of a child president, utterly selfish, arrogant, dumb, bullying, blind to ethics, numbly ignorant of history, and of civics, and of the details of any issue whatever.  He is both a delusional fanatic and completely out of his depth.  But removal by impeachment requires a majority of the House to impeach, and two thirds of the Senate to convict.  Removal by declaration of unfitness to serve is easier in the very short run: the Vice President and a majority of the “principal officers of the executive departments” can write to the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate declaring the President to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, and it’s (very temporarily) done.  But what are the odds that we can get 8 Cabinet Secretaries to sign such a document?  And that’s not the hardest part: once it’s signed and delivered, the President can simply write to these same two people, the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate, and declare that he is able to discharge his duties, and he is back in power as President again.   After that Congress is required to determine the issue.  Finding the President to be unable to discharge his duties after all of that   requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, and both houses are still in the grip of Trump’s party.  So: removal by impeachment requires two-thirds of the Senate, and removal by declaration of unfitness requires, if the President contests it, two thirds of both the Senate and the House.

What this means is that the outcome of any effort to remove him is uncertain, and will in any case take time, possibly a lot of time.  If he doesn’t resign, if he’s determined to stay as President, then we’re stuck with Trump for the near future.  I wish that were not true, but it is.

But even if Trump is eventually removed---what is the result?  Mike Pence as President?  At least Pence is sane, I guess, but it’s not exactly every liberal’s dream situation, is it?  Ah, but what if the “Russia thing with Trump” (Trump’s phrase) snags Pence as well, so both are gone at once?  To which I have to ask, as a first reply, how far into fantasyland are we willing to go?  How likely is it that both the President and the Vice President will be impeached?  And then, as a second reply, I have to say that even if such a miraculous thing did happen, we’re not much better off. 

Here’s the line of succession after the President:

Vice President:  Mike Pence.

Speaker of the House: Paul Ryan.

President Pro Tempore of the Senate: Orrin Hatch.

Secretary of State: Rex Tillerson.

Secretary of the Treasury: Steve Mnuchin.

Secretary of Defense: James “Mad Dog” Mattis.

Attorney General: Jeff Sessions.

We can keep going, but it doesn’t get any better lower on the list.  Ben Carson is on the list (13^th in line); Betsy DeVos is on the list (15^th).   The Republicans control all of the government at the federal level, and at the state level too in most states.

So we get back to the issue I’ve been raising, clumsily, with friends for a very long time:  the Democratic party needs to look for the radical solution, in the actual meaning of that word.  It needs to return to its roots.  It used to be the party of working people---all working people.  In Minnesota the official name of the party is the Democratic Farmer Labor party, and that used to be an apt description of the party nationally as well.  Farmers no longer believe that to be true---and labor has been increasingly skeptical as time passed, and, in my opinion, for good reasons.  A large fraction of the Democratic party, for a time at least, succumbed to neoliberal third-way politics that accepted the rational-expectations, free-market economics of free-trade, small government, tax cuts and deregulation.  The economy grew, slowly, but wages didn’t; businesses grew,  sometimes quickly, but middle class jobs vanished.  And much of the country has just given up on Democrats caring about their neighborhoods, their towns, their industries, or about them.  And the result is the county-level election maps that look almost uniformly red across most of the country.  Democrats will respond that Hillary got more votes than Trump did, and Democrats get more votes much of the time for Congressional seats as well (when the whole of the country’s votes are added together).  But the problem can be seen in this 3D map of election results.  The Democratic votes are very localized, mostly to big cities.

The Democrats, IMHO, forgot, for a time, the base that brought them to the dance.  All of those people who don't fall into the special categories the modern Democrats care about have to look somewhere else for a champion.  They look to Republicans because they're the only other game in town.  It's a mirage: the Republicans won't be their champions either.  Can't be, if they want to stay free-market Republicans.  And if the Democrats won't, and the Republicans can't, those people are just out of luck.

Trump’s presidency, I think, presents all of America with a hair-on-fire emergency that will be difficult to fix.  Fixing it, removing him from office, may take years.  It might take until the 2020 election.  But even after it’s fixed, progressives might still have lost, and might still be lost, if we don’t fix ourselves as well, if we don’t reconnect with a significant number of the people who no longer believe we even want to represent them.  We have a lot of fence mending to do.  We’d better get to it.

Or, alternatively, we can just get used to the idea of President Pence and a permanently Republican House.

Trump has lost.

I'm not sure anyone at the White House recognizes that at this point, after firing three separate prosecutors or investigators, after all the smokescreens and diversions, after the bouts of loony tweets, it's no longer possible for this to have a good outcome for Donald Trump.

He should have the right to the presumption of innocence---sorry, fellow progressives, but he should, as an American and even just as a human being---but he has shredded that presumption by his rage and panic toward anyone who gets close to the investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election. And now, no matter how an investigation comes out, he will lose.  Because if there is no investigation, if he manages to suppress it, then half the country or more will believe that he is hiding something terrible.  And if an investigation is pursued and finds his campaign innocent of all wrong, many people, maybe even a majority, will be cynical about that, and will presume that he simply managed to manipulate the outcome. Even if some associates in his campaign are found guilty of being complicit with Russia in this, many people, maybe even a majority, will believe that Trump knew about it at the time, and that he sacrificed his campaign staff to hide his own guilt.

The last possibility, of course, is that a strong independent investigation finds "problematic" (Sally Yate's word) behavior from Mr. Trump himself. What the response to that might be would be interesting, but it certainly could (hypothetically) include impeachment, or even some pretty nasty prosecutions---colluding with a hostile foreign power to subvert an American election is treason.

Which of those outcomes is good for Trump?  If he has a long term goal here, a plan that turns all of this to his advantage, I have to admit I can’t see it.

One more comment on Fearless Girl and Charging Bull

My brother-in-law Craig posted a link on Facebook to this piece about the Fearless Girl.  Since I haven’t posted here for very long time I thought I’d post my response to it.  I’ve been following the “Fearless Girl” discussion in WaPo and elsewhere, thinking it’s all a bit off topic…I like both statues, and I think their current positions make a clear statement that’s relevant right now, but it’s not any of the statements that other people seem to see.

The Charging Bull artist does have a point that the Fearless Girl changes the meaning of his sculpture---but he misses the point too, possibly because he's so captured by the meaning he originally intended.

The Bull had already changed its meaning, though, long ago.  When he sculpted the bull I think Mr. Di Modica saw Wall Street as a meaningful symbol of the economy in general: a prosperous Wall Street was an indication of a healthy economy. That was not true even then for much of the country, but I think it was what he meant, and the bull was intended to restore all of our spirits after the financial catastrophe in 1987. But since then we’ve had decades in which Wall Street prospered and much of the rest of the country stagnated. The financial sector simply sucked up all economic growth. In 1950 the financial sector was 2.8% of GDP; by 2006 it was 8.3%. In 1980 the average employee in the financial sector earned about the same as employees in any other industry; by 2006 they earned about 70% more than average. (from “The Growth of Finance”, Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013). And the industry, with its high salaries, took the best minds from the best universities and sat them down to pore over spreadsheets. All of this might have been worth the cost if the industry had become more efficient: instead, productivity in the financial sector was at best stagnant.

And then in 2007-2008 the banks and investment houses collapsed, and Wall Street collapsed with them, and the lot of them dragged the world down in the undertow. Wall Street began to be seen as providing the country with little value and enormous risk---not for them, but for us. When the economy was good we got nothing and they got everything. But when the economy failed they still got everything: they got bailed out, and we had to bail them, and the managers who were the builders of the great collapse got single year bonuses the size of our lifetime incomes. The banks played us for suckers in many ways: as Bernie Sanders once said, Wall Street is a place where fraud is their business model.

As labor productivity rose inexorably from year to year and wages stalled, or even went backward, as hedge fund managers and bankers and the financial industry in general sucked in all the growth in the economy and left crumbs in their wake for the rest of the country, we who live in the economy began to see the Bull as representing that culture of fraud and greed. That tarnished the Charging Bull and changed its meaning long before the Fearless Girl came along.

So the Fearless Girl was a response, not to Mr. Di Modica’s original image of hope for recovery, but to the message of blind greed that Wall Street has projected for a very long time. In this case, art is not the unchanging statement intended at its first creation: the older art’s meaning evolves and new art replies. It is a conversation, and one that I think we desperately need to have.

But the Fearless Girl also has a very different meaning than its sponsors intended. Women everywhere have been uplifted by her, to them she is a statement about the need for women to be admitted to the highest levels of management in the financial world. I’m glad for the uplift, and agree with the egalitarian principle, but I’m not sure I see the value for the rest of us out here in the non-finance world if the men at the hedge fund conference tables whose hearts have been grievously damaged by greed are supplemented with a group of women whose hearts have also been damaged by greed (or why would they even want to be part of the industry as it stands?) It’s not really uplifting for women to reach the heights of an industry whose business model is fraud, and whose driving motivation is a covetous lust for personal wealth.

State Street, who commissioned the Fearless Girl, says her importance is not just her gender but also her age: she is a young girl, they say, and so she represents hope again for a better future. I see their point. But to me the most important thing about her is not that she is a girl, or that she is a young girl: the important thing is that she is an ordinary young girl. Look at her: nothing about her says “rich” or “hedge fund” or “executive”. She is a girl we’ve all seen, in city and country, all over the world. Is she stubborn and defiant? Lord, yes, but as a parent who raised a daughter I can tell you that is not an attitude unique to the Fearless Girl sculpture. Girls everywhere are capable of stubborn defiance, even in places where defiance is dangerous, and particularly dangerous for girls.

So I see her---because I like to see her---as representing not only the defiant demand of women for equality of opportunity, or the defiant demand of the young for a future they can look to with hope, but also of representing all of us who are ordinary, who want, defiantly, to say, not to the Wall Street that Mr. Di Modica saw in 1987 but to the Wall Street we see now, to stop all the blind charging, and to come down and live with the rest of us. It will be hard, I know. You’re addicted to your greed, and addiction is hard to kick. But the human world is out here. We work all our lives to create value, and the statistics on productivity say that we create more and more value every year. It’s time for all of us, women certainly but men as well, to share some of the rewards.

I understand Mr. Di Modica's resentment, and I do think he has a point.  But I think Fearless Girl needs to be where she is for the moment.

Eventually, if we can re-attach wages and productivity in the economy, I'd like to see her standing next to the bull, both facing the same direction, and both moving defiantly into a common future.

SpaceX, government and creative destruction

Charles Krauthammer was excited, in his op-ed a few days ago, by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which managed to return its booster rocket to land intact.  He wrote a column in praise of it, and in praise of the new role of private enterprise in extending and expanding the technology of space travel, particularly the pursuit of space travel at lower cost. 

So let me take this rare opportunity to say that I agree with Charles Krauthammer.  I agree that this transfer of spaceflight from government to private enterprise is spectacularly good; I agree with all the benefits he sees in it.  This technology is, hopefully (and finally!!!) mature enough to allow private visionaries to take it and run with it: many of us have been waiting for this and hoping for it for a very long time.  If in fact this technology has reached escape velocity, then I expect the private visionary entrepreneurs to do great things with it, and speed its development along, just as has happened before with many, many other technologies.  I expect them to drive the capabilities up and costs down much faster and much more efficiently than government alone ever would---not (or not only) because small-government fanatics have shrunk federal R&D budgets, but because I believe that competition and quixotic personal vision really are strong forces for putting new technologies to work.

I have still, of course, some discomforts with Dr. Krauthammer’s vision.  Compared with our overall agreement on the goodness the new private industry of space flight, of SpaceX and Blue Origin and all of their present and future competitors, these are minor things; but as a good hypersensitive liberal they irritate me like a pea under the mattress. 

In his column he said this:

“Musk predicts that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold…assuming Musk is even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.”

Yes, total agreement.  But then:

“Which both democratizes and commercializes it.  Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government…”

The surly bonds of government, the cold government chains that held the whole of spaceflight back…right?  Full disclosure: I had a summer job running projectors at meetings at NASA in the late 1960s.  I don’t remember anyone there thinking they were imposing “surly bonds” on anyone.  On the contrary: they were enabling a new human epoch.   Private enterprise, at that time, was not doing space flight, and was not about to do space flight.  And: democratizes it???  Ummm….no.  This transfer from government to private entrepreneurs emphatically does just the opposite.  This un-democratizes it.  Democracy is a form of government.  It is government that is generally controlled by democratic vote; private enterprise rarely is.  From now on, maybe, space flight can be pursued in idiosyncratic and highly undemocratic ways by private investors.  Some of their idiosyncrasies will fail, but with luck some will succeed, for a time at least, before being razed to the ground and replaced by new idiosyncrasies, and old failing entrepreneurs replaced by new entrepreneurs with newer visions, in what Schumpeter famously called the “gale of creative destruction” that produces progress in the private economy. 

But none of them will have to achieve a democratic national consensus to proceed.  That’s kind of the point.

Let’s not forget, though, that getting to lift-off for this industry did require a national consensus, and long, serious government action.  We should praise Musk, and praise the virtues of private enterprise, but that does not require us to despise government’s role in this.  Government’s involvement in spaceflight was not initially a binding restraint: government, instead, was the founding source of the technology that Musk and others have received.  For good reasons and bad---to put a man on the moon in the sixties, or to launch rocket-bombs at London in the forties---governments gave birth this cluster of technologies, and nurtured it through all the hard, expensive years when it could not stand on its own.  Now, finally, it has reached maturity, and we hope it can move out.  It may still need some help, some initial sustaining government support as the largest early customer, but finally, perhaps, it is robust enough for private enterprise to take it on.  But as a rough comparison of public to private contributions to this, Elon Musk invested approximately $100 million, other investors about the same amount, and NASA has invested something like $500 million in SpaceX (see Wikipedia on SpaceX funding here).  But NASA has spent something like $790 Billion (current dollars) in the last 50 years to get here (Wikipedia on NASA funding here). 

We can’t know whether that long government-led incubation was a root requirement, without which space flight would never have happened.  Perhaps it would have---after another millennium or two.  But this is one of government’s best roles: incubating research and development that is so long term or so large scale that private enterprise either can’t or won’t pursue it on its own.  The end result of this activity by government is not just the fulfillment of some motivating national goal.   It’s not even the laudable goal of advancing science.   The real, long-term result of the moon landings and the mars missions and all the rest was SpaceX.  Not SpaceX specifically, but the possibility of SpaceX and of all of the others that will swarm after it, the possibility of one or many industries that will employ many millions of people.   

And as someone who worked at NASA in the 1960s, very briefly and at an invisibly low level, I can tell you that we knew that.  Did you think we were just trying to give Alan Shepard the opportunity to hit a golf ball on the moon??  We were creating the human future.  We were establishing the foundations on which vast future industries would flourish long after the moon landings were over.  We knew that from the start.

On Archangels, eye makeup, cultural narcissism, and, y’know, stuff like that.

I’m sitting in my back yard, without a coat, without a sweater, listening to the rumble of lawnmowers on the morning of December 5^th, 2015.  I should write a post about global warming, I guess, and this post may come to that in the end.

But something else has been on my mind overnight. 

No, not shooters in San Bernardino, or refugees from Syria, or walls along the border with Mexico either, although it may come to those too, in the end.  The list of things it may come to in the end is long. 

I’ve been thinking about the sublime voices of Goths.  Well, of a particular, modern Goth.

Ok, that’s obscure.  I’ll explain.  I’m sure this is some kind of deeply embarrassing sin.  But as long as you promise not to tell anyone, I guess I can confess.

Sometimes, following the crazy tangle of links down the right side of the YouTube screen, something about the picture that YouTube displays for one of the “got talent” performances catches my attention.  So I glance furtively around to be sure no one is looking, and then click on it.  I did that a day or two ago, and I found….

Andrew De Leon.  Yes, from 2012.  Since I only see these things on YouTube, and only when I chance on them, I’m always late to find them, and others are way ahead of me.  But if you’re not, if you haven’t heard this young man, take a few minutes and just listen.

Start at his first audition here.   Really:  you have to look at that first audition first, or the rest of the post will be confusing.  So go watch, I’ll wait.  Don’t be afraid.  His eyes may look like they have x-ray powers, but there is no great harm in them.  (At least I hope not.  Andrew, take note: if you actually do have x-ray powers, please use them only for good.)

Are you back?  Amazing, wasn’t it?  All of that from solitary practice in his room.  It is one more bit of evidence that there are exceptional things happening in well hidden places everywhere, things we can’t know about because the people doing them, for whatever reason, are keeping them close, keeping them from our sight.

Now watch Andrew in his semifinals.  I want to say up front that this is what can happen to a nice, cloistered young Goth when he’s exposed to the defiling influence of the outside world.  I want to say that, but I suspect this was in him from the start.  But you decide.  Go ahead, please: Here’s the link.  (Crank up the volume for this one…and full screen, too; much of what I reacted to was visual.)

Did you notice that last note, the last “Amen”, and his eyes as he finished and looked down at the judges?  At 1:38 in the video. 

I do understand that the quiet smile on his face is just a sense of blessed relief that he nailed the high notes, combined with a quick check to see what the judges thought.  But that look!   At that point, after that elegant, sweet, mesmerizing performance of a religious work, on that stage lit like a gothic cathedral, with spots like rays of holy sun transformed to gold or blue through a stained glass window, he looked like a portrait of a saint, or an angel (or maybe an archangel since parts of the lyrics of his song were originally provided by Gabriel).  At that instant those astonishing eyes looked as though they were seeing through the judge’s bodies and seeing their hearts and souls, and forgiving them in spite of that.  I am not religious; the opposite, if anything.  But at that instant, just for that instant, I felt a disturbing tremble in my disbelief; a kind of minor crisis in my lack-of-faith.  Andrew at that instant seemed to release his inner archangel.  How many of us ever have the courage, or the ability, to do that?  I was transported out of the drab world by his performance.

Simply awesome. 

It was a comment by one of the judges afterward that brought me back to ground again.  Sharon Osbourne---yes, Ozzy Osbourne’s wife---recommended that Mr. De Leon dispense with his Goth look so that he could be taken more seriously.  His look was too exotic for Ozzy Osbourne’s wife??  Really??  That’s a little weird.  But of course she didn’t say that, exactly: she took him seriously and she loved him from the start and said so.  And the audiences clearly loved him.  She meant that for the sake of his career he might need to be taken seriously by the rest of society, all of it, even by the more rigid subcultures in this land of the free that might dismiss him because of his appearance.   And I know why she had that fear for him.  We all know.  There is across the world, in every different place and time, a cultural arrogance, even in the smaller cultures, in regions or religions or classes or races, a subcultural arrogance, a sad, vulgar, coarsening subcultural narcissism, that wants to see in others exactly what we think we see in ourselves.  Sameness is comforting and undemanding.  Difference, on the other hand, is threatening, and there is an instinct to spurn and repel it. 

And that made me think of our national response to the Syrian refugees, and to all the refugees across the world that are desperate for help.  And it made me think that if we allow global warming to continue there may be many more refugees in future decades, refugees from hunger, disease, and yes, war, a wild assortment of them in all kinds of colors and religions.  We may even be among them, or some of us may.  There is precedent in this country for mass displacement by environmental disaster.  When was the last time you read The Grapes of Wrath?  (Hey, I did warn you up front that it might come to this in the end.)

But enough, for now, of that.   This day in the sunshine, in my back yard on the warming earth, is too nice to start down that road.  I’ll have to do it, but tomorrow, or the next day, or some day after that.  I’ll have to write a quick post explaining to all the Governors who are refusing the Syrian refugees, including my own state’s Governor Hogan, that it’s possible to see difference not as threatening, but as energizing. 

But for now, to Governor Hogan I will just say:

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”---Hebrews 13:1

And to Mr. De Leon I will say:  thanks for that radiant Ave Maria.  Stay Goth as long as you like; it looks good on you.  You labored on your voice alone in your cloistered room, and labored also on your look, and created your own excellent art in both efforts.  You created yourself.  From all appearances available to me in these two videos you did a damned fine job of it.  I think we can trust you to continue to create yourself in the future.

And to you readers, who now know my secret weakness, my embarrassing habit of YouTubing talent-shows, I’ll just quote the famous prayer of that other sinful hedonist Saint Augustine of Hippo: “Lord, grant me chastity and continence---but not yet”.

Greece off the grid and other Greek stories

There were small craft warnings out on the Chesapeake yesterday, so of course I went sailing.   No rain, no storms, just sun, wind, and a field of whitecaps all across the bay through a long afternoon.  On a day like that, though, in small craft warnings, in wind creating waves up the whole fetch of the Chesapeake, sailing is, let’s say, not entirely a passive experience, so I’m a bit stiff this morning.  And I was awakened this morning at a crazy early hour by thunder and a brief but energetic rain.  So I’m not out walking or running, or any of those things I keep trying to do to keep from aging too fast. 

Which means I’m sitting idly on my couch at 6:13 AM, wondering what to do with myself. 

I guess I have a few minutes to write.  So I might as well say something about what I thought was the most interesting piece in yesterday’s Washington Post: it was on the Sunday Opinion page, at the bottom, but it wasn’t exactly opinion.  It was simply an observation.  In the print version it was titled “Greece’s invisible economy”, but online it seems to be titled “Lessons in resiliance from rural Greece”.  In it, Alexis Adams, a resident of Red Lodge, Montana (but also apparently a resident of Leonidion, Greece), described a side of the Greek economy that will be largely undisturbed by the negotiations with Europe, or with the IMF, or with a change from the Euro to the Drachma, or the New Drachma, or as Mr. Adams points out, to the Obol, which was the Greek currency 2500 years ago.  As you might have guessed, he was describing the traditional lives of rural Greeks, where “traditional” is a condition established over centuries, or even millenia.

Here’s a snippet from Mr. Adams’ piece:

“my neighbors in rural Greece carry on with their lives as they have for centuries. Invisible to most economists, they subsist in ways that cannot be measured easily by typical economic yardsticks. Nonetheless, their economy is real, will help them survive the current crisis”

His whole story, but particularly this quote, reminded me about something I’ve talked about here before (using Malala Cake as an excuse): GDP is a very rough estimate, and it very specifically does not include non-market activity.   It does not include household production of things.  So he’s probably right that the Greek GDP measures includes very little of the economic activity of Mr. Adams’ neighbors.  They grow their own food, make their own cloth, and raise sheep and goats that provide them with milk and cheese and meat.  Since these things are not bought or sold in markets, they do not appear in the GDP.  But they are, without question, economic activity of the most basic kind. 

And Mr. Adams declares that 39% of the Greek population lives like this.

The official measure of the ratio Greek government debt to Greek GDP is up in the range of 170% these days, but Greece’s GDP is severely depressed.  It has declined by about 25% since 2008.  If the Greek GDP even returned just to its 2008 value, the debt-to-GDP ratio would decline to about 130% (very rough numbers).  But that doesn’t account for any possible growth in potential GDP for the last 7 years.  And if Mr. Adams’ data is right, it takes no account at all of much of the production of nearly 40% of the Greek population.

The other interesting comment on Greece yesterday, or perhaps the day before, was this column by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics and former Chief Economist at the World Bank.  Prof. Stiglitz has an even more caustic view of the European agreements with Greece than I do.  He says:

“One underlying problem in Greece, in both its economy and its politics, is the role of a group of wealthy people who control key sectors, including banks and the media, collectively referred to as the Greek oligarchs.”

And

“The rationale behind many of the key structural reforms has not been explained well, either to the Greek public or to economists trying to understand them. In the absence of such an explanation, there is a widespread belief here in Greece that special interests, in and out of the country, are using the troika to get what they could not have obtained by more democratic processes.”

And

“…special interests in the rest of Europe and some within Greece itself have taken advantage of the troika to push their own interests at the expense of ordinary Greek citizens and the country’s overall economy…When a country is down, there is all manner of mischief that can be done.”

And he, like many others, is skeptical that the current agreement will work at all, unless there is a quick and substantial change in the strategy of the European Commission and the European Central Bank (the IMF has already changed its strategy proposals for the better).  The expanded austerity will do nothing but expand the Greek depression, which will, by the same kind of arithmetic I used above, drive the Greek GDP further down and the Greek debt-to-GDP ratio up.  And as increasing unemployment and inequality mount, so will resentment. 

At least for 60% of the Greek population.  The 40% that Mr. Adams has described will apparently simply continue their lives as they have through all the history that has washed over them and around them over the last millennium or two.

Disgust first. Then frustration.

Good lord. 

This has been in progress for a couple of days, and much of it is old news by now.  But I’ll record my own take on it anyway. 

Last Friday I wrote out a little frustration with Greece, expressing the daydream that maybe we could get Donald Trump out of our hair for a while by sending him to Greece to teach Tsipras how to negotiate.  That used to be something Trump had a reputation for doing well, and Tsipras, apparently, has no clue about what it even means.   But I waited to post what I wrote on the count-to-ten-first principle.  Then Saturday I was out all day teaching a sailing class on the Potomac, and was thoroughly tired and hot when I got home.  So I waited until yesterday morning to look at it again.

Sigh…

I’ll get back to Greece in a minute, but I have to follow a distraction from yesterday morning’s news first.   I’ll say this up front: Mr. Tipras, I withdraw my threat to inflict Donald Trump on you to teach you the art of negotiation.  No matter how good at it he is, it would not be honorable any more to inflict him on anyone, for any purpose.

Donald Trump was back on the front page of the Washington Post yesterday, and has been on all kinds of news since.  I supposed it’s good for his campaign in the very short run.  This time he declared that Senator John McCain is “not a war hero” on the grounds that McCain “was captured”.   Apparently heroes, to Trump, are people who don’t get captured.  That’s what he says, anyway.

Seriously??   Wow.  This on top of the florid ignorance he excreted on the topic of Mexico and our southern border.   And the idiocy of the “birther” episode.  And, and, and.  Yesterday morning’s mental oddity from him is minor, really, compared to his past exhibitions.  But it was, I guess, that final straw for me.  I can’t understand why the Post published this about him, or why anyone anywhere publishes anything about him.  He no longer seems to me to have public prospects, or even public interest.

For the record, I don’t have any problem with Trump when he disagrees with Senator McCain on issues; I often disagree with Senator McCain on issues, and I’m sure that he and I were in very substantial disagreement on many issues in the sixties, when he was a POW in Vietnam.  But go read the Wikipedia entry on his treatment as a prisoner, and how he responded to it.  He suffered terribly as a POW, through long years, with broken limbs, a shoulder crushed by a rifle butt, years of solitary confinement and daily beatings, and he showed honor, commitment and courage that was nothing short of astonishing.  He still shows honor and courage, working for his beliefs every long day with deep injuries from that time that have never completely healed, and can’t ever completely heal.  He was a hero, and he is a hero.  He is wrong, in my opinion, about many things.  But he is still a hero.

As a presidential candidate Trump is a caricature of everything; he’s a caricature of himself, of the tea party, of the Republican Party, of some smarmy, ugly sliver of America.  He’s a Rorschach test, a blot of ink splashed across the political world.  A clown, of course, and I have to agree with the new Huffington Post policy of reporting his antics in their Entertainment section, instead of in their Politics section.  The Washington Post, and every other reputable news source, should follow their lead.  And actually, I think they should go farther: don’t report on him at all.  What could he say by now that would actually be either news or entertainment?  Nothing.

I think Trump might even have thought, for a time, that he was really running for President.  But any such fantasy on his part should now be over.  He expresses the emotional responses of a small group of voters who will be avid for him, for a while.   But he has offended so many, and so severely, that I can’t imagine any general election where he could win any office at all, much less the office of the President and Commander in Chief.

Now on to Greece, the future, the negotiations with Europe, and anything, however dismal, that does not include Donald Trump.

So here’s my question:

What on earth could Tsipras have been thinking when he went into the negotiations with Europe asserting that he had not been authorized by his voters to exit the Euro?  What, then, were the negotiations about?  What did he have to offer, or to threaten if it came to that?  He simply threw himself on their mercy, and when that was lacking he submitted all of Greece to a spanking.

Here are the basics, Alexis.  May I call you Alexis?  The fixation of the rest of Europe was this: how do we make Greece behave, how do we hold their feet to the fire, make them pay their debts and push their budget even further into primary surplus, how do we push Greece to fiscal virtue no matter what the short term cost to them?  That’s what Merkel and all the rest walked into that room determined to do.  That was their goal.  Your task, the first day, was to change the topic of the negotiations.  Your task was to make the whole discussion about this: how do we, Europe, get Greece out of this depression, this catastrophe worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s?  Because that’s the kernel of the problem, isn’t it?  If the Greek depression disappeared, then Greece would be far more able to make the the payments on its debt.  If Greece could reach its potential GDP, then the budget would be in substantial primary surplus and the debt to GDP ratio would not look nearly as scary as it does.

And to do that, to change the topic, you had to make them believe that no agreement that did not achieve at least a hope for foreseeable, predictable, reliable Greek recovery could possibly be accepted.

I need to stress at this point that Greece does have internal problems that have to be fixed, period:  corruption has to stop, cronyism has to stop, the Greek people have to pay the taxes they owe, and so on.  And there are many things that could be changed to make your economy work better.  But you know that.  You don’t need Europe, or me, to tell you any of that.  You could offer those things in the negotiations, since you will have to do them anyway.  But more austerity, more grinding poverty, more depression, more insistence on paying back loans that can’t be repaid, are not among the things that will help Greece---or Europe either, for that matter.

And those last things were the topic that the rest of Europe walked into the room to discuss. 

How could you change the topic?  You had to make them understand that you had a ready alternative to their help, and that you were prepared---reluctantly, but still prepared---to use it, unless the negotiations could find a better way.

I know, easy in hindsight, and I do understand that Grexit would have been very hard.   Just the logistics of changing to a new currency would have been a nightmare.  And I know that the probability that you would have to exercise your Grexit option would have been far above zero; some in the negotiations seemed---and still seem---to welcome that idea. 

But now, now, with this “solution” in place, I feel the likelihood of eventual Grexit has done nothing but rise.  This “solution” is not a solution.  Not really.   It’s a thin patch on a blown tire, and an enduring grievance, and it is an engine driving Europe apart.

I understand, Alexis, what you meant to do.  You went to Europe with every faith in their good will.  You did depend on the goodness of Europe, which was wonderful of you, but naïve, perhaps, since everyone in the room was an elected politician who had to report back to the voters in their own countries.  They would loved to be good, but their first obligation was to their own constituents, not to you.  You let the conversation devolve to such a dismal state that the primary question seemed to be whether Europe could “trust” Greece.  Trust Greece to do what, for God’s sake?? Bend over and grab its ankles?  The right answer should have been: yes, you can trust Greece to do everything, everything, that is necessary for Greek recovery, and you can trust Greece to hope that is possible within the Euro: because we do hope for that.  In our deepest hearts we want that.  But we must emerge from economic cataclysm.  You, the rest of Europe, can choose to help, or can choose to stand aside.  The right answer should have been: please, help us, we would welcome that, we want that, and to survive as a common currency zone Europe must find a way to do that not just with Greece but with any member country that is in deep depression.  But if your minds or values or whatever is binding you can’t find a way to help us then it will not be left to you to decide whether you will stand aside.  Let’s find a path together, please; that is the path we want.  But if we can’t achieve that, if we in this room can’t find a way to work together, then Greece will take the only path remaining to it toward a credible, sustainable, growing future.

Here’s what you had to do---HAD to do, with no real alternative as a negotiation position:

You had to walk into the room, the first day, with Greek exit from the Euro all lined up, all prepared, planned in detail and ready to go.  You had to tell everyone in the room that Grexit was not desired, but it was prepared, that you could start printing Drachmas at a moment’s notice.  You had to tell them that you desperately wanted to be a part of the Euro zone, that you never, never wanted to start Greek exit, but that your number one priority was that depression in Greece had to be stopped one way or another.  That, you should have told them, was the only real topic of negotiation.   Then the negotiations would not be about how to make Greece behave, or even how to preserve the Euro, it would be about how to make Greece grow again, preserving the Euro whole if those two goals could be jointly achieved.  But in the order of importance, Greek recovery was first.

You had tell them this:  I know you, Europe, don’t want to delay the repayment of your loans, but you have no choice in this.  We, Greece, can’t repay those loans while we are in a deep depression: either you find a new loan structure that is viable, and that will help Greece, or Greece on its own will design that new loan structure and Greece will choose how to delay the payments.  Whether or not the loans will be delayed is not something that either Greece or her creditors have the power to decide.  History and years of austerity have taken this decision from all of our hands.  All we are talking about here is whether there is some way, some European way, to help a member state get out of depression and still remain in the Eurozone.  Any other topic is a useless waste of time: tell me now whether we can keep to the true topic, or let me leave and get started on the terrible task of exiting the Euro.

Yes, you should have said, under the current regime the European Central Bank can starve the banks in Greece.  But the moment these talks fall through, the moment it becomes clear that the ECB really does intend to starve the Greek banks, I can start printing Drachmas and Greece can provide our own banks with the liquidity they need. 

Yes, Greece has debts, and (you should have assured them) we intend to repay them.  But recovery is a prerequisite.  You can try to insist on the current loan schedule, if you like, and within the Euro that would drive Greece to the ground, and your insistence would turn to ashes; the loans as they stand are not sustainable.  You know that.  The IMF says so, in well-reasoned erudite papers.  We in Greece feel that truth every day.   The loans will be repaid when we can manage that.  We want Europe to have a way to help us, to find a way to help us get to recovery, so these loans can be repaid in full.  But if you can’t do that, if we in this room can’t find a European path, then Greece can finance its own recovery both with reasonable domestic spending and by depreciating the New Drachma against the Euro and the Dollar and everything else, to stimulate exports and provide new demand for our products. 

With that background, with the plan B in place, the plan and all the preparations in place, to leave the Euro, you might have been able to change the topic of negotiation from “how do we get those blasted Greeks to behave” to “how do we help Greece to recover, so that Greece can finally grow, prosper, and fulfill all its commitments within the Euro”.   You could have changed the topic because you could have told Merkel, Scheuble, and all the others in the room that they were not in charge of the negotiation.  No one is in charge of the residue of history.  The loans would be delayed and restructured because history had left no other option on the table.  Greece had a path to hope, had a path to growth, prosperity, and fulfillment of its commitments---a bit tardy, perhaps, but fulfillment still, by exiting the Euro.  Their job in the negotiating, given that, was to find a second path, a path within the Euro, to Greek prosperity.

You needed to walk into the room with that all in your back pocket, truly prepared, with the new Drachma all designed (possibly with the word OXI stamped all over it), the right counterfeit-defying paper on the rolls, the printing presses ready to go, and with the preparation in your heart to flip the switch and turn them all on.  You needed to do that because you wanted, and the Greek people want, to avoid flipping that switch, and changing the negotiating topic was your only real long run hope of doing that. 

But without agreement on a valid plan out of here, this crisis will happen again, and again, and again, as long as Greece and Europe keep reeling down this long divisive road.  And at every crisis, Grexit will rear its head.

I hope I’m wrong about that.  Of course I do.  Maybe it all will look better tomorrow, or the day after.  Maybe Europe, now that they have brought Greece to heel, will suddenly become her benefactor, with some kind of Marshal Plan for Greece.  But for now, I don’t see that.  For now, the current agreement seems unlikely to work, and has only made the situation worse.  I hope I’m wrong.  But for now, that’s the way it looks to me.

Greece

Greece!  Greece!  Everyone is commenting on Greece, including many of my favorite bloggers: Paul Krugman, Jared Bernstein, Brad DeLong---but as brilliant as they are, they are not the right place to go on this.  With respect to Greece, read Steve Randy Waldman.   He says many of the things I meant to say, but didn’t, and several things I never thought of, or didn’t know.   Here’s a quote from Waldman to tantalize you before I move on:

“It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handling of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict.”

Read his whole post, which is full of detail and insight. 

There are a couple of things I want to add to what Waldman said in his post. 

My first point to add: there are leaders in Europe who complain that the European taxpayers should not be expected to pay Greek debt.  The problem with this complaint is that the European taxpayers will not need to pay the Greek debt any more than they already have.  At this point acquiring Greek debt by other European taxpayers is a sunk cost; the question is how to best protect those taxpayers’ future interests.  The choice before them now is to accept reduced and extended loan repayments with Greece inside the Euro, or accept those same reductions and extensions with Greece outside the Euro. 

Yes, much of the Greek debt is now owned by other European governments or the European Central Bank rather than by private banks, although whether that first “bailout” was to aid the Greeks or the banks is a matter of interpretation.  Here’s what Waldman says about that (echoing many others from 2010 onward, but I think Waldman says it better):

“With respect to Greece, the precise thing that European elites did to set the current chain of events in motion was to replace private debt with public during the 2010 first ‘bailout of Greece’.  Prior to that event, it was obvious that blame was multipolar. Here are the banks, in France, in Germany, that foolishly lent. Not just to Greece, but to Goldman’s synthetic CDOs and every other piece of idiot paper they could carry with low risk-weights. In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc.”

 And to bail out “mostly French and German banks”, the French and the German governments put up the largest chunks of the bailout money, so they now own the largest chunks of the Greek debt.   But does anyone really think that tax rates in Germany or France will rise if Greece delays repayment of its debts to those governments?  Or even if the debts are completely written off?  The governments of those countries might experience some frustration, but their taxpayers would not notice any change in their lives at all.

A chunk of the Greek debt is still privately owned.  So to the private banks and the wealthy private creditors who still own Greek bonds, I would say: you bought Greek bonds because they offered the highest yield you could find.   The reason the yield was that high was that the bonds were risky, of course.  You knew they were risky.  But for whatever reason, whether you rationally believed the risk was less than the interest rate implied or you were irrationally reaching for yield out of desperation, you bought them.  Well, sometimes taking those high-yield risks works out for you.   But the meaning of the word “risk” is that sometimes it doesn’t.  Suck it up.

 On to my second point: everyone is saying that Greece will face some kind of disaster if they leave the Euro.  My question is: compared to what??? 

Economically, Greece is a massive disaster right now, and with the deals offered by the rest of Europe, will remain a disaster far, far into the future.   Europe is offering Greece a future without hope.  A separation from the Euro and a return to the Drachma might be harsh, chaotic, at times possibly miserable, but at least it has a long-run positive buried in it somewhere: that the Drachma could devalue and make Greece’s exports cheaper and more attractive in the rest of the world, so there could be the long-run hope, at least, of an export-led recovery. 

But continue on the current path?  The Greek banks are already closed, or nearly so.  And here’s a graph that’s been wandering the internet, comparing Greece in the last few years (blue line) to America during the Great Depression (red line).  (I found it here, chart 4): 

If there is another turn of the screws of austerity, as Europe has until now demanded, that blue line will very likely turn even further down, or stay down even longer, or both, with no distant clear prospect that looks like hope.   What is going to create a recovery in that scenario?  Yes, I know, nothing lasts forever, so I assume that eventually things would change, possibly even for the better.  But there’s no obvious process that improves anything anytime soon.

Here’s another graph that I found here:

This charts the downturns during the recent recession in other European countries against the downturn in Greece; the dark blue line at the very bottom, of course, is Greece.  In each case, the GDP is plotted as a percent of that country’s GDP in 2008, which is the white dot on the 100% line.

The Greeks are exhausted by depression, sensibly fed up with austerity, and definitely fed up with haughty condescension from the rest of Europe.  Yes, the various Greek governments since the late nineteen seventies have helped create their own problems, with decades of corruption, political nepotism, and even cooking the books.  But the Greek people didn’t do that, and it’s the Greek people who are now living through a depression with no end. 

What is happening now, to Greece, seems to me to be exactly the opposite of what the financial system is supposed to do.  It’s supposed to allocate money from those who have it to those who can best use it, who can use it, that is, for the best interest of the general economy.  It’s supposed to help the economy, improve the economy.  What is happening now is that the European financial system is sabotaging the nation of Greece, systematically destroying the Greek economy, and crippling generations of Greek people. 

What should happen now?  I don’t know, precisely: but whatever is done should offer hope to the people of Greece.  Not the harsh Austerian hope that says someday, if you only believe, things will get better by magic.  And not the moralizing threat that if they don’t pay up the European austerity enforcer, the Confidence Fairy, will smite them in her terrible wrath.  No, it has to offer real hope, in a reasonable time.  

This is what has to be understood by Greece’s European creditors: any deal they offer has to contain more hope, and better long run prospects for Greece, than Grexit does.  Otherwise why should Greece accept it?