Got up this morning and found I hadn't squirreled away any links during the week: all I had was a bunch of open tabs with promising bits and pieces. So this was rather quickly thrown together, but a couple pieces are exceptionally deep.

Nothing yet on the Occupy Wall Street movement (which, by the way, has a presence here in Wichita). Needless to say, I not only approve of the protests, I think they are necessary. For one thing, they provide a forum for public education on issues that had been quietly swept under the rug after the election in 2008 of Obama and a Democratic Congress. From early 2009 it's become clear that Obama was not going to make the case for change in the economic system, but aside from the occasional carping blogger we've sat idly and impotently on the sidelines, while the right bankrolled the sham Tea Party movement. But the protests don't just provide more balanced information. They provide the sort of emotional heft needed to get that information taken seriously. One may be skeptical about whether it will work, but the American political system is pressure sensitive. Until now, that pressure has only come from the right and its interest groups, and that has swept all good intentions before it. Moreover, the economic issue is one that has tremendous built-up energy behind it. This is not something that's going to evaporate soon because this is something that has so many unconscious and subconscious victims waiting for something to come into focus.

• Thomas Geoghegan: What Would Keynes Do? John Cassidy has a generally useful piece on Keynes in the Oct. 10, 2001 New Yorker (not readily available online; also see Cassidy's blog) where he stresses the importance of aggregate demand in recovering from a recession, and goes to great lengths to illustrate that Keynes' concern was to salvage capitalism, not to bury it. But Geoghegan takes a different tack: he argues that the real problem with the US economy is the longstanding and ever-burgeoning trade deficit, and finds plenty of support for that in Keynes:

  For Keynes, the problem would be not just getting people into stores, or even getting employers to hire but getting our plutocracy to invest. It's not just our jobless rate but our huge trade deficit that would appall him. He'd be aghast to see the United States bogged down in so much debt to the rest of the world. [ . . . ]

  In 1936, when Keynes wrote his classic -- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money -- he was emphatic on this point: no country, ever, should run up any kind of trade deficit, much less the trade deficit on steroids we are running. Of course, in 1936 and for years after, the United States was the biggest creditor country in the history of the world. So Keynes never worried about our being a debtor country -- rather, he spent much of his last days begging the United States to get other countries out of debt. If he came back and saw the colossal external debt we run now, he would be pushing for a serious plan to bring it down just as hard as he'd be pushing a stimulus for full employment. [ . . . ]

  Keynes believed that practical leaders would always see the supreme importance of keeping the country out of external debt -- indeed, he seemed to see this as the first duty of the state. For Keynes, in his later years, it was the economic analogue to defending one's country. Avoiding an external debt was an act of patriotism and national self-preservation in a sense that even reducing unemployment was not. It's "fighting for freedom," in Skidelsky's phrase. Keynes would not believe how Obama, the Tea Party, the Democrats, the Republicans -- our leaders -- pay so little attention to our whopping trade deficit, as if it had nothing at all to do with our slump.

  The right, the Tea Party, the Concord Coalition, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson, Peter Peterson -- they want to bring down the federal deficit. The left, our side, generally wants to go deeper into debt and get to full employment. Then we'll bring down the federal deficit. Then we'll have full employment and all will be well.

  But until we bring down the trade deficit and fix our balance of payments, there is no way out of debt.

  OK, Geoghegan still has Germany on his mind: the prime example of a high-tech nation which runs a positive trade balance (even, it seems, at the expense of the rest of Europe, which it's managed to trap in its Eurozone). But the main effect of the US trade deficit isn't just to make the nation as a whole poorer. It's to increase inequality within the nation, and the effect of that is increased misery for most Americans. The way it works is simple: we send our dollars abroad, where they are collected by the elites -- foreign businessmen, multinational corporations, the politicos they all have to bribe. If we had balanced trade, those dollars would come back to the US and many of them would trickle down to workers, but since we don't produce that much others want to buy, the dollars have to be redeemed elsewhere: buying US bonds is relatively benign, but mostly they go to run up the price of US assets, one of the main ways the rich get richer. And as the rich get richer, they become more powerful and more able to make the rest of our lives miserable -- perhaps you noticed that by now. The big problem with inequality isn't statistical: it's that you make life at the bottom cheaper, therefore more disposable. And since those at the bottom don't like such shabby treatment, the increased hierarchy depends ever more on brutality.

  Part of the reason the United States isn't doing better is that, thanks to the trade deficit, Keynesianism has lost its punch. On the evidence of The General Theory Keynes would argue that a stimulus has to be bigger, or work harder, as long as we have this external debt. Consider a twist on Keynes's famous Aesop-like fable about the Bank of England. Let's drop the Bank of England and make it all about the Federal Reserve. As Keynes would put it, rather than do nothing in a slump, it would be better for the Fed to bury bank notes in bottles and pay Americans to dig them up. Not only do we goose employment but there is a multiplier effect.

  But Keynes did not say we should put bank notes in bottles and bury them in China and have Chinese workers dig them up. Why not? Well, it doesn't do us any good. It does not employ any US workers. And of course, there would be no "multiplier." The beauty of the stimulus is the "multiplier" effect. OK, I will oversimplify: if we hire Americans to dig up the bottles with bank notes, they have cash to spend. In 1936 they might go to spend it at the corner bar. The bar hires more wait staff. They go out and buy more groceries. Someone buys an extra truck and truck driver to bring the fructose syrup in from Iowa for our Froot Loops, and . . . should I stop?

  It just goes on and on . . . jobs, jobs, jobs, multiplying to the Pythagorean heights.

  But it's not 1936. It's 2011. Now after digging up the bottles, Americans will go to Target and Walmart and spend on bags of kitty litter made by child labor in China. And what's going to happen to the multiplier when the Obama bucks we spend end up over there? In Chapter 10 of The General Theory Keynes writes, "In an open system with foreign trade relations some part of the multiplier . . . will accrue to the benefit of employment in foreign countries." Or, as he said, there will be a bit of "leakage." But that's OK if they buy back from us. If there is a balance of trade, it's OK. But they aren't buying back from us. They are buying more from Japan and Germany, so our stimulus goes out of China and over to those countries.

  Also:

  There are other reasons Keynesianism has lost its punch.

  First, by making their own cutbacks, our state governments can nullify the federal stimulus. In 1936 the states were just toy governments. The New Dealers hated them. But now they are far bigger public sector employers than Washington. By virtue of state constitutions requiring balanced budgets, they have to cut when Keynesian theory would have them spend. If the stimulus did not stimulate, we can partly blame our fifty Tea Party constitutions, which require a foolish "austerity" in the states. In our system of federalism, a Keynesian-type stimulus is half unconstitutional.

  Second, the rich are so much richer now than they were in our Keynesian golden age (let's say 1940 to 1975). If Obama gets GDP growth up by 1 percent, most of that goes to the superrich. It's beyond their capacity to consume it -- i.e., to unleash a multiplier effect. The Financial Times has a regular supplement called "How to Spend It," but it's beyond their human strength. There's too much to spend.

  A stimulus can wake up an egalitarian country's economy, since everyone is spending. But a stimulus cannot wake up the economy of a super-plutocracy: the people at the very top just roll over in bed.

  The third part of the article has a number of recommendations about what to do (especially "what Keynes would do"). All are worth quoting, but I'll refrain. The key insight is that the rise of the financial industry coincided with the increase in trade deficits, and that it made matters worse by luring the rich into speculation instead of making long-term investments in making things that could be exported. (It also piqued their taste for the easy gains of usury and larceny.) So anything that would rein in the banks would be a plus: usury laws, strict regulation, a transaction tax, eliminating the tax breaks that allow the Mitt Romneys of the world to buy up companies and pay for them by sticking them with crippling debt. Then there's this:

  The one standard way of being competitive abroad is to cut wages here -- to improve the terms of trade. Keynes hated the idea of cutting wages. It was the standard remedy of classical theory, and he loved to point out that cutting demand at home might only prolong a slump. But suppose the government could dramatically cut nonwage labor costs by assuming the cost of health insurance? If our government could deliver just one Keynesian "shock" to make us more competitive, it would be single payer national healthcare. At least right now, we should expand Medicare coverage (lower the eligibility age) and adopt a public option, so that the government can have more bargaining leverage to beat down by decree the stupefying prices we pay to get well in an ever more concentrated healthcare sector.

  It is horrifying to see even the "tough" new President Obama proposing to shrink Medicare -- aside from leaving people uncovered, shrinking coverage means shrinking the government's power to dictate the price and leaves employers and the rest of us exposed to higher healthcare costs. If the president wanted to increase the trade deficit, the best thing he could do would be to cut Medicare coverage and give the government even less power to hold down the healthcare costs that make us even less competitive abroad than we are now.

  Finally, I think Keynes would hold up on the small stuff -- i.e., the cuts in the payroll tax or the proffer of one more investment tax credit -- for none of that will matter (if it ever matters) until we get people out of loans. In one way or another, in keeping with the ancient wisdom of the Bourbons and the Habsburgs divined by Keynes, we have to take down the scaffolding of this creditor-debtor economy in which our country is imprisoned.

• Andy Kroll: Flat-Lining the Middle Class: Numbers, numbers, numbers. Here's the executive summary:

  In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period.

  And yet the verdict couldn't be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past 10 years were a bust. A washout. A decade from hell.

  Paychecks shrank. Household wealth melted away like so many sandcastles swept off by the incoming tide. Poverty spiked, swallowing an ever-greater share of the population, young and old. "This is truly a lost decade," Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz said of these last years. "We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s." [ . . . ]

  In the meantime, the middle class has flat-lined. Life support is nowhere close to arriving. One lost decade may have ended, but the next one has likely only begun.

  The statistics are all too familiar, but they seem to have little impact, perhaps because the definition of middle class is so fluid and its mystique is so tendentious. I wonder if it's possible to credibly spell out what a middle class standard of living is, what occupations fit into that definition (at least 50 years ago, when it was generally agreed that this was a middle class nation), and how those alignments have changed. For instance, in 1960 my parents were middle-aged (father was 35, worked in a factory; mother older, was a homemaker); they owned a house; had net savings; they had health insurance, a defined-benefits pension; they would be able to afford to send their three children through college (not that we all made it; I wound up going about $2000 in debt after transfering to a fancy private college). One can argue that they were middle class. If so, how many 35-year-old blue-collar workers with a single-income and a wife and three kids can say the same today? Certainly, some occupation group have held pace and can still be considered middle class, but not blue-collar workers, and probably not huge swathes of white-collar workers (like teachers). Moreover, others have hung on by adding a second income and/or accumulating a lot of debt, but that's not really the same thing. It's an exaggeration to say that the middle class "has flat-lined" but it's certainly shrunk a lot and slipped up the income distribution scale to where it's become an increasingly elusive status. On the other hand, median wage (or salary) earners are finding less and less separating them from the poor -- often nothing more than a lost job or underinsured illness, things that can happen almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as being picked off by the DC Sniper.

  By the way, John Cassidy has a blog post, Poverty and Income in America: The Four Lost Decades, on this:

  If you do the comparison with 1973 it is even worse. The figure for median earnings of full-time male workers in that year (when O. J. rushed two thousand yards and Tony Orlando had a chart-topper with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree") was $49,065. Between now and then, Archie Bunker and Willie Loman have suffered a pay cut of more than twenty-five dollars a week.

  Is it any wonder Americans are not as optimistic as they used to be?

  Cassidy points out this that this has been pointed out before, citing an article he wrote in 1995 ("Who Killed the Middle Class?" -- again, abstract only online).

• Jane Mayer: State for Sale: On the bankrolling of the Republican resurgence in North Carolina, thanks largely to a conservative moneybags named Arthur Pope, with a hat tip to the Supreme Court for letting money enjoy free speech.

  Yet Pope's triumph in 2010 was sweeping. According to an analysis by the Institute for Southern Studies, of the twenty-two legislative races targeted by him, his family, and their organizations, the Republicans won eighteen, placing both chambers of the General Assembly firmly under Republican majorities for the first time since 1870. North Carolina's Democrats in Congress hung on to power, but those in the state legislature, where Pope had focussed his spending, were routed.

  The institute also found that three-quarters of the spending by independent groups in North Carolina's 2010 state races came from accounts linked to Pope. The total amount that Pope, his family, and groups backed by him spent on the twenty-two races was $2.2 million -- not that much, by national standards, but enough to exert crucial influence within the confines of one state. For example, as Gillespie had hoped, the REDMAP strategy worked: the Republicans in North Carolina's General Assembly have redrafted congressional-district boundaries with an eye toward partisan advantage.

  Experts predict that, next fall, the Republicans will likely take over at least four seats currently held by Democrats in the House of Representatives, helping the Party expand its majority in Congress. Meanwhile, the Republican leadership in the North Carolina General Assembly is raising issues that are sure to galvanize the conservative vote in the 2012 Presidential race, such as a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

  Republican state legislators have also been devising new rules that, according to critics, are intended to suppress Democratic turnout in the state, such as limiting early voting and requiring voters to display government-issued photo I.D.s.

  The vote suppression movement has been going on in Republican state legislatures all over the nation, including here in Kansas where you'd think it would hardly be necessary. But low voter turnout is essential to Republican success: when 117 million voted in 2008 the Democrats won the House by 13 million votes; in in 2010, only 78 million voted and the Republicans took the House back. (For these numbers, and more, look here.) Of course, unlimited money had something to do with it, too, and there are other factors. But knowing their platform is not in the best interests of the overwhelming majority, the Republicans play every angle they can.

• Corey Robin: Revolutionaries of the Right: Subtitled "The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism." Robin has a new book out: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011, Oxford University Press) -- I grabbed a copy of it, but haven't had time to dig in yet. His main point is that conservatives today are little different than conservatives any time in the past, at least as far back as when Burke was railing against the French Revolution -- this he contrasts with the efforts of conservative discontents (and their liberal admirers) who are tempted to argue that today's conservatives are somehow different from their ancestors. Robin mostly focuses on Burke, who only matters if you think he matters, but was as bloody-minded about France as Hayek about the Soviet Union, or the worst contemporary you can imagine against Obama.

  A commenter points to an essay written in 2004: Philip E Agre: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?. The intro is spot on:

  Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

  Q: What is conservatism?
  A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

  Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
  A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

  These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

  Further down, Agre talks about the conservative claim for freedom:

  Conservatism constantly changes, always adapting itself to provide the minimum amount of freedom that is required to hold together a dominant coalition in the society. In Burke's day, for example, this meant an alliance between traditional social authorities and the rising business class. Although the business class has always defined its agenda in terms of something it calls "freedom," in reality conservatism from the 18th century onward has simply implied a shift from one kind of government intervention in the economy to another, quite different kind, together with a continuation of medieval models of cultural domination.

  This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

  Much more worthwhile here. I can't even disagree with his claim that "Snoop Dogg's music really is garbage," but caution against generalizing from one data point.

• Jonathan Schell: Cruel America: Starts with the audience applause for Texas Gov. Rick Perry's record of 235 executions, a phenomenon that Jim Geraghty dubbed "voting to kill": a big part of the Bush-Cheney election strategy, a platform that Obama is increasingly well pitched to run on.

  At the GOP debate on the 12th, there was another public expression of enthusiasm for loss of life in Texas. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who favors repeal of President Obama's health plan, what medical response he would recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma.

  Paul answered, "That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks." He seemed to be saying that if the young man died, that was his problem.

  There were cheers from the crowd.

  Blitzer pressed on: "But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" Someone in the audience shouted, "Yeah!" And the crowd roared in approval.

  A characteristic that these exchanges have in common is cruelty. [ . . . ] There have been many signs recently that the United States has been traveling down a steepening path of cruelty. It's hard to say why such a thing is occurring, but it seems to have to do with a steadily growing faith in force as the solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad. Enthusiasm for killing is an unmistakable symptom of cruelty. It also appeared after the killing of Osama bin Laden, which touched off raucous celebrations around the country. It is one thing to believe in the unfortunate necessity of killing someone, another to revel in it. This is especially disturbing when it is not only government officials but ordinary people who engage in the effusions.

  I want to add that cruelty goes hand in hand with brutalization. The more we engage in war, the more cruel we become, and not just to the enemy but to ourselves. And this gets reflected in economic and social policies at home. The essential point of the education "reform" dubbed "no child left behind" was stigmatize and penalize failure. Our justice system spares few expenses when it comes to punishing miscreants, but offers little to help people in need. We've long been told that we need to end welfare programs so that people don't become dependent on them. Now we have to shut off unemployment insurance too. "Tough love," it's called, but being mostly tough it's easily transformed to hate.

• Peter Van Buren: Freedom Isn't Free at the State Department, and How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq: Former State Department functionary, wrote a recent book on what he learned from his service in Iraq: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011, Metropolitan Books).