The invisibles

I'm getting used to the fact that in the minds of Republicans, working people whose paychecks come from the local, state, or federal government don't exist.  Their jobs don't count as jobs and the money they earn and spend on food, clothing, rent or a mortgage, and to pay taxes doesn't work its way into the economy as a whole but vanishes into the ether, its existence proved only by red ink in the budgets and higher taxes Republicans have to pay.

This is how Right Wing agitprop minister and pseudo-historian Amity Shlaes is able to argue that the New Deal didn't reduced unemployment.   She counts government workers as unemployed---until 1942; government workers who wear uniforms and carry rifles belong to a special category of government workers who somehow don't count as government workers.

This is how the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is able to claim that the government never created a job, despite the paychecks he has collected from government and despite the fact his job is to help lots of Republicans get government jobs.

This is how Senator John Ensign can blithely suggest that his home state of Nevada can cut services without the workers who provide those services losing their jobs.  Those workers don't exist to him as people.  They're just bloat.

And it's not only people whose checks are signed by a government employee who are invisible.  People whose companies depend on the contracts they have with the government, people who build and repair roads and schools and dams and canals and levees and ports, people who sell things for money from cashed government paychecks, and fix roofs and serve meals and wash cars and deliver flowers and pick up trash for money from cashed government paychecks---they're all invisible too.

So it's not surprising that the Republicans in the California State Senate and Assembly aren't worried about the 20,000 people about to lose their state jobs and the thousands of others who will lose their private sector jobs and the thousands of others who will lose their businesses because of canceled projects.  They aren't worried about ruining those people's lives and they aren't worried that those people will remember who ruined them come the next election.

Invisible people cast invisible votes.  Can't count what you can't see.

Seriously.  To most Republicans in Washington, and apparently in California, most of us are invisible, no matter who signs our paychecks.  To them the country is a very small place populated only by themselves and their friends and family.  The rest of us just work there.  To the rest of us it looks as though the Republicans have decided that it's worth ruining the nation to advance their own agenda of tax cuts for their relatives and pals.  But to them they are saving America, at least the only part of it that isn't invisible to them.

The rest, who may not be as self-centered and blind, are betting that the economy is just going to get worse or better no matter what the President and the Democrats try to do and either way, they'll be ready come 2010 to say "Told you so!  All that spending by liberals doesn't do any good."

They're missing the fact that most Americans are not pro-big business idealogogues.  We don't care if Keynesian economics works or if it's better to do nothing because in the long run the economy will right itself.  As Harry Hopkins said to the original Hooverites, people don't eat in the long run.  What we want is relief right now.  We can worry about the long run in the long run.

In the medium run we're going to remember who voted to make our lives miserable in the short run, who voted against relief, who voted to wreck the country in order to further their own return to power in the long run, power they want only to continue to withhold relief and wreck the country further, because a nation full of ruined, desperate, hopeless people is a nation full of people who will work cheap.

They think.

_________________

Obviously I think that come the next election voters are going to remember who sabotaged every reasonable attempt to provide relief and salvage the economy.   But this depends on voters knowing who did it.  I wrote a few weeks back that one advantage FDR had during his first hundred days that President Obama doesn't have was a national media that on the whole wasn't trying to hide the facts from the people.  It wasn't that the press corps was made up of wiser and better men and women, although I think there were probably more then than there are now, because the jobs went to people who wanted to be reporters more than they went to people who wanted to be players and celebrities.  But I might be romanticizing.   The truth was the misery was just too great to be denied and the nation had suffered through three years of Hoover vainly promising that things would get better in the long run.   It was plain as day to everybody.  FDR and the Democrats wanted action and action now.  The Republicans were in the way.

That should be as plain as day now.  The President and the Democrats want to take action and, please, save it for another day whether or not that action is enough or to your particular liking.  The Republicans want to do absolutely nothing but sneer and gloat and root for the President to fail.  And what's happening in Washington, is happening in the states, particularly in California.  But you might not know that if you didn't read this New York Times article carefully and all the way through.

California's in a mess.  Things are getting worse by the minute.  The state needs money yesterday.  But nothing's being done.  Help is not on the way.  Why?  What's the problem?

"Intransigent" lawmakers and a governor "bereft of allies and influence."

Which is the true.  In the way half the truth is true.

The governor has allies and influence---among Democrats!  The intransigent lawmakers are all Republicans!

The Times reporter, Jennifer Steinhauer, gets around to mentioning that.   Nine paragraphs down the word "Republican" makes its first appearance.  But basically her lede and the following seven graphs imply that the blame belongs to all the state's lawmakers and that everybody in Sacramento, including the poor bereft and friendless governor, is at fault.

Then there's this beaut of a graph.

In a Legislature dominated by Democrats, some of whom lean far to the left, leaders have been unable to gather enough support from Republican lawmakers, who tend on average to be more conservative than the majority of California’s Republican voters and have unequivocally opposed all tax increases.

See that.  The way this passive-aggressive sentence is constructed, because the Democrats dominate the Legislature they own the problem.  It's their fault they can't gather enough support from the Republicans.

Note the totally irrelevant aside about how some of those Democrats lean far to the left.  So?  Are they in the way?  Doesn't appear to be the case.  The Democrats agreed to a Republican demand for more corporate tax cuts.  Not a sign those far left leaning Democrats are putting up much of a fuss.  But somehow their mere existence has made it impossible for the Democratic leaders to do their job of overcoming Republican obstructionism.

Note this too.  "Republican lawmakers...tend to be more conservative than the majority of California Republican voters..."  Another way of describing someone who is more conservative than your average Republican these days is Right Wing kook.  There are more than just a few Right Wing kooks in the California Legislature, but Steinhauer doesn't feel compelled to note that some Republicans lean far to the the Right.  They're just "more conservative".  Conservative is a nice, soothing word that implies principle and virtue.  The list of negative connotations of far left leaning is too long to get into here.  But what it boils down to is that Steinhauer has pretty much blamed the bomb-throwing commie hippie leftie types for making it impossible for the principled and virtuous conservatives to agree to any deal.

That's not the upshot of the whole story.  By the end it's obvious the Republicans are the problem and happy to be the problem.  But for almost the first page of the story Steinhauer goes out of her way to avoid placing any of the blame directly on the Republicans.

Related fuming:  Steve Kuusisto on The GOP and the Charnel House.

Updated:  Carl reports that Republicans in Kansas are just as blind, stubborn, smug, destructive, and dumb as Republicans in California and Washington.

And Matt Yglesias catches Poltico's David Rogers having the same trouble straight-forwardly describing what Republicans are up to as Steinhauer had.  This time the subject is the Republicans' lying about funding for high speed rail in the stimulus bill.  Matt:

Needless to say, this reality is at odds with the made-up story conservatives have been telling all weekend about $8 billion being earmarked for a train to Las Vegas. And Rogers, as we’ll see, knows what the truth is, knows what conservatives have been saying, and knows that the two are different things, but he can’t quite seem to describe what’s happening with regular English words...

Updated again, because the drama continues:  Over at Calitics, they're covering the California madness in real time.

Comments

[sabretom]

Excellent recitation of the facts. If the Democrats would just list these facts during each election, they'd win those elections. The Democrats would rather be the nice guys that get along with everyone. When that happens, Republicans win. Just list the facts, Democrats, and you will win.

[Apostate]

You are right that it is the media's fault that the majority doesn't realize exactly how much the Republicans love to screw the ordinary person. Unfortunately, that's not about to change any time soon.

The Republicans are going to succeed in destroying the country before enough people cop to their game to prevent it.

[Doghouse Riley]

"Millions for ideology, but not once cent for survival."

And, y'know, it would be particularly amusing, if it weren't so galling, to listen to Michael Steele from a mid-sized Midwestern city, run by Republicans for 32 of the last 40 years, which has just built its NFL team a billion-dollar football palace (replacing one 25 years old) the team contributed nothing to, and had just enough time to absorb the news that the trans-legal taxing authority which controls the place is $45M in the red this year, and has $43M in bond payments to make thanks to the collapse of financial markets, before the NBA team starts whining that it wants the $15M a year it spends on operating costs for the stadium we built for it eight years ago (replacing one 25 years old) absorbed by the same bunch. Got a new $1.25 billion state-of-the-art airport terminal, too; we've revived downtown over the past thirty-five years with tax dollars and tax abatements; nobody builds anything large without a government guarantee in pocket first. And our (Republican) governor seems to think his job is to junket around the country and across Asia trading tax breaks for PR announcements of how many jobs he's bringing to the state, while what's left of the auto industry is permitted to rot. I mean, we don't even need to get into the jobs government actually creates before we dismiss the carnival pitchmen of the Right.

[Victoria]

Living here in California, the tidbit that leaped from the article for me was this:

"The Senate Republican leader, Dave Cogdill, said he thought he had all the votes needed to get the deal done in each house. But on Sunday, two Republican senators — Dave Cox, who was originally thought to be the last vote needed, and Abel Maldonado, whom Mr. Schwarzenegger had been able to woo into voting against his party in the past — said they would reject the plan.

"Democrats, who had already given into Republicans’ long-held dreams of large tax cuts for small businesses and for some of the entertainment industry and a proposed $10,000 tax break for first-time home buyers, balked at Mr. Maldonado’s request that the Legislature tuck a bill into the package that would allow voters to cross party lines in primaries.

“'I think with an open primary, we would have good government that would do the people’s work,' Mr. Maldonado said."

WHAT?! We're in a massive budget crisis here and this thing stopped because you couldn't get this big-fight side issue "slipped" into the package?! All in the name of "good governance"! That. Is. Cherce.

Fiddle. Burn. Fiddle. Burn.

[Batocchio]

Spot on, Lance. I'm dismayed reading about what's about to hit out here in California. I'm also really sick of teachers, the arts, social workers and the like being devalued, degraded and defunded. It goes beyond being pound-foolish to sheer aggression. Some people just don't count to these fuckers, and that's pretty much the definition of movement conservatism - who cares, just try to get yours and screw over everybody you hate (for irrational reasons) or just don't give a damn about. California will become what the GOP wants the entire nation will become. I hope voters aren't as stupid as these lawmakers, nor as gutless as the press, but I fear severe damage will be done before some of these bastards can be thrown out.

[Linkmeister]

Ambinder at The Atlantic points out that embedded in the stimulus bill is one of the largest tax cuts in history, which might give some Republicans fits in 2010 when they try to run against the stim (an ugly but somewhat funny abbreviation, I think).

[actor212]

Two words for Republicans" Newt. Gingrich.

It never pays to be on the wrong side of history.

[topsy, part one]

Cutting 20,000 jobs (and that's just for starters) is what happens when you "drown government in the bathtub." That's just a metaphor to a well-paid welfare queen like its creator, Grover Norquist, who wouldn't have a job if he didn't have "big government" to serve as the whipping boy for his anti-tax "foundation", with its links to his old buddy from the College Republicans, Jack Abramoff.

Unfortunately, Norquist's catchy little metaphor is reality for the people he obviously thinks are expendable, along with all the programs they administer. See you in line at the DMV, Grover; if there's any justice, they'll skip his fucking number or lose it altogether--and that wouldn't be half bad enough.

[Chris The Cop]

Three things:

1)"This is how Right Wing agitprop minister and pseudo-historian Amity Shlaes is able to argue that the New Deal didn't reduced unemployment."

The problem is the New Deal really didn't. (And I don't know Shlaes from spray paint) See below:

1923-29 - 3.3 percent unemployment
1930 - 8.9
1931 - 15.9
1932 - 23.6
1933 - 24.9
1934 - 21.7
1935 - 20.1
1936 - 17.0
1937 - 14.3
1938 - 19.0
1939 - 17.2
1940 - 14.6
1941 - 9.9

(Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Now looking back, I'm not sure Lance has ever actually said FDR and the New Deal ended the Depression, but it's fair to say he at least implied it. Certainly, FDR provided leadership and instilled hope in a country in a country desperately in need of both, and he taught Americans they could look to their government in times of crisis and demand action, (None of which is chopped liver) but 'cured' the nation of the Depression? Just didn't happen, no matter how you counted the unemployed back then.

2) This whole notion of Republicans = Evil/Shallow and Democrats = Good/Nuanced is all just so much mental masturbation.

3) Even after years of Bush deficits to compare to, the speed at which Obama and the Democratic Congress are racing to bankrupt the Treasury is breathtaking. The problem is, that if the Republicans are hypocrites for worrying about spending NOW, and the Democrats aren't even thinking about applying the brakes, there's no one left to preach restraint.

Right now, we're spending about 20 percent of tax revenues paying interest on the Debt. That will likely be 30 percent by the end of Obama's first term after another 2 or 3 stimulus packages.

[actor212]

Chris,

the New Deal DID reduce unemployment, which had hovered over twenty percent (nearing 25%) under Hoover.

No, it didn't solve it, but it sure didn't hurt.

Plus, you know, some of those public works projects were things like the Grand Coulee dam, which if not built, there'd be no Boeing and no end to World War II.

[Chris The Cop]

Not to mention the Tennessee Valley Authority. Here's hoping whatever's done works faster (and better) than the New Deal.

[cza]

Chris, what's the implication of your TVA reference? Just adding another example of projects like Grand Coulee or is there something more?

[Chris The Cop]

cza.

It's my understanding the Tennessee Valley Authority was a successful example of infrastructure (dams) paid for by government funds during the Depression. It was in agreement with actor212's point about public works projects.

[jobseeker]

If the jobs of state workers don't really count as jobs, then the 20,000 California state workers being laid off shouldn't be counted as unemployed by the "logic" of the right wing.