Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Second rate reporter says what?

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The revolution will be supervised.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

In my day, never was longer.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Peak wingnut was a lie.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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Freddie deBoer wrote for Balloon juice from 2011-12.

Freddie deBoer

Once Again, On Student Loan Bubbles

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We are in something of a crisis, although a frequently overblown one, when it comes to student loan debt. I have written at great length about ways both to lower the cost of college and to help those who are struggling under the weight of student loan debt. However, I firmly believe that this problem needs to be understood as a humanitarian one which has the chief problem of hurting people who don’t have to be hurt, and not as an asset bubble which could cause ripple effects that sink the rest of the economy.

I think the urge to call a student loan debt bubble is based on multiple factors. First, we have bubbles on the brain, for obvious reasons, and calling bubbles has become a hallmark of lazy journalism and commentary. Second, this is a favored argument of  conservatives, and libertarians, who don’t like government subsidizing education and largely hate the professoriate and dislike what they perceive to be the politics of the university system. Finally, you get it from Gawker, which is always eager to call other people chumps, as part of its basic financial model which trades stroking its readership for clicks.

What contributes to conventional asset bubbles, whether they be in condos or tulips or stocks? There’s a few key factors that don’t apply at all to student loan debt.  Assets in typical asset bubbles are transferable and they are appreciable and they are held by private entities.

Take the housing bubble. It’s the go-go 2000s. Financialization has attracted a massive amount of investment capital. Why? Because rates of return are so high. Why? Because you can speculate, in part. What can you speculate on? You can speculate on assets that can appreciate and that can be transferred. So take a house and a mortgage. I’m Joe SubPrime. I want to buy a house. The mortgage company is hungry for more business, as is the bank that buys the loan as part of a big CDO, as is the hedge fund that wants to make bets about the value of that CDO. Everybody wants me to get the house, so I do. Being SubPrime, I can’t actually afford to pay the mortgage. But, crucially, the mortgage is backed by the collateral of the house, an asset which can appreciate itself. There is a value to the collateral, in other words, that is independent of the value of the loan. This is supposed to make mortgages safer for the banks than unsecured debt like credit card or student loan debt, where the only enforcement mechanism is the negative impact on a borrower’s credit report.

But, as we know, in practice the collateral of the physical property made mortgages far riskier. Because the value of the real estate kept going up, borrowers could keep refinancing their loans (and often, their lifestyles). And in the event that someone did default, the banks could take their real estate at a time when that was a valuable asset. Everything was groovy, save for those poor squares who got predatory loans they couldn’t afford, as long as everybody believed that housing values could only go up. For as long as housing prices were rising, the bubble expanded and expanded and expanded….

That, really, is the fundamental bubble mechanism that cause the financial crisis, the (bizarre in hindsight) conventional wisdom that housing prices couldn’t go down. Once it became clear that housing was overvalued in some places, it punctured the market and brought prices down almost everywhere. That meant that individual borrowers now couldn’t refinance to stay ahead of their payments, which led them to default, which pumped the now-cratering housing market full of foreclosures, left in the hands of banks who couldn’t sell them and who suddenly had previously-valuable CDO assets reduced to nothing, causing banks to approach failure, forcing them to discontinue their normal operations like lending to businesses, which forced those businesses to downsize dramatically or fold altogether, sending millions into the job market and dramatically slowing the growth of our economy.

The basic mechanism, in all of this, was based on the misconception that the collateral associated with the mortgages could not depreciate. In other words, the housing bubble was just that, a bubble in housing and not in mortgages.

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An Extensive Guide to How the Government Creates Jobs

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Corey Robin, reflecting on the fact that the government now employs as few workers per capita as it did in 1968, suggests that perhaps that’s a place to look for how to solve our unemployment crisis. Maybe the government should create jobs in an unemployment crisis rather than destroying them.

This, of course, is controversial. Whether the government can ever truly be said to “create jobs” is a matter of great debate. Because the reality is filled with such nuance, complexity, and higher order thinking, I thought I would do all I could to lay out the complicated dynamics and intricate aspects of governmental job creation. You should probably take notes, and don’t be ashamed to consult with a dictionary. Set aside a good chunk of time to read this post, preferably broken up into many discrete sessions, as you don’t want to strain yourself. Brew a cup of coffee. I’ll warn you that, despite my best efforts to distill all the necessary information, you might need access to some prerequisite knowledge to take this all in. Graduate level statistics wouldn’t hurt. Fair warning.

Alright, here is a step-by-step guide to how the government creates jobs:

Step One: The government hires people to perform useful tasks that benefit society.

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Late Night Open Thread: Bane Totally Sounds Like the Great Owl

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I wasn’t a big fan of The Dark Knight Rises, without even getting into all of the discussion about the movie’s politics. Like Film Crit Hulk, I find it thematically confused, and I am one of those annoying types who can’t get past plot incoherence, even in action movies. I also thought it was way too long. But I understand that I’m in a small minority there and don’t want to be a snot about it.

The weird thing for me is that a lot of people have identified Tom Hardy’s Bane (and his voice) as the worst part of the film, whereas I found him by far the best part. I wasn’t as enamored of the Joker in the previous film as everybody else; I find the agent of chaos thing frustrating, as it seems to absolve the filmmakers of the responsibility to give him consistent motives. In contrast, I found Bane a more menacing and cool figure. (That was a little diminished at the end, following the reveal of a plot twist.) And I dug the voice, a lot. I find its weirdness, and especially that strange gentility to it, a lot more intimidating than if it had been a typically gravelly villain voice. It was familiar, though, and I couldn’t place it for awhile. But then it hit me.

He totally sounds like the Great Owl from Secret of NIMH. Compare, for example, about the 1:13 mark of the Batman clip (“With no survivors!”) and about the 1:45 mark of the NIMH clip (“Mrs. Jonathan Brisby?”). What say you?

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Deep-Pocketed Libertarians Are Trying to Take Over Higher Education

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Mo Tkacik, one of those rare Internet journalists who is frequently guilty of actual journalism, has the goods on the continuing conservative takeover of the University of Virginia system. Billionaire Randian Randal Kirk and his money have wormed their way into the bureaucracy of UVa and torpedoed the study of climate science on Virginia. It’s an inconvenient science for our Galtian overlords, given that it keeps revealing the objective reality of global warming and incredible ecological devastation. So, since the administration has taken over the American higher ed system from the people who actually research and teach, and many college administrators are straightforwardly corrupt, climate science is on the outs. As Tkacik points out, this isn’t Kirk’s first go round; he essentially executed a hostile takeover of his alma mater, Radford University, and even had a local reporter pushed out for investigating it all. Welcome to the future of higher ed, where plutocrats lacking in any educational credentials whatsoever take advantage of empty posturing about “dynamism” and “market forces” and “innovation” to gain control of the educational apparatus. It starts with your David Brooks or your Atlantic, it ends with Randal Kirk squashing legitimate climate science.

The little irony in all of this, of course, is that this is political bias in its most pure and shameless form. Conservatives and libertarians hate political bias in the academy, except when it is conservative or libertarian, in which case they love it.

If you’re not a fan of mine, rejoice, for with the secret election of Mitch Daniels to the presidency of Purdue (which, incidentally, was undertaken by a Board of Trustees that was directly remunerated by Daniels), I will know be working at ground zero for one of these hostile takeovers. I can’t wait to watch a totally unqualified, vicious partisan– hey, Mitch– turn a world-class research university into a conservative propaganda machine, all the while crying “liberal bias.”

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Professional Written Commentary is Fundamentally Broken

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The news about Jonah Lehrer’s latest bits of journalistic malpractice– fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan, of all people– doesn’t come as a surprise to most, considering Lehrer’s recent history of self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is, to my mind, a minor crime, one that’s perhaps inevitable in a digital age that expects writers (or content producers, in the horribly ugly vernacular of our media) to churn out words by the thousands. But that incident did get the antennae raised, which is likely why perpetually redfaced reporter  Michael Moynihan was chasing down quotes in Lehrer’s book in the first place. To many people, this must feel like an inevitable confirmation.

The question is why anyone would expect much else but scandal and failure in the realm of professional written commentary. I have been reading paid political and cultural commentary voraciously for a decade, and it seems to me to be a broken culture. Totally broken. The professional and social conditions of the profession are not in any sense oriented towards producing truthful, challenging, or moral outcomes. The large majority of the professional opinion writers I follow have a primary goal of advancing their personal brand, that horrific social-professional fusion that views getting page views and getting invitations to the latest DC grabass cocktail hour as merely two facets of the same effort. There are important exceptions, including people whose politics I reject entirely. (Take Conor Friedersdorf, who’s wrong about most everything but also very principled and very aware of these problems.) When writers change publications or think tanks all the time, and when friendly relations with editors and bigwigs matter vastly more for professional advancement than telling the truth, you get writing that’s written to demonstrate insider status and fealty to the proper authorities. Additionally, the medium is currently obsessed with cleverness, which has nothing to do with wisdom or honesty. Jonah Lehrer was inevitable.

What is the accountability, in paid commentary these days, for getting things wrong? What’s the penalty for failure? When someone like Jeffrey Goldberg gets a sizable raise following his efforts to get us into Iraq, it’s a very fair question, especially considering that so many members of our commentary writing corps constantly call for more accountability from others. Sure, the fact that Lehrer got called out for this is a good thing, and an act of self-policing. (Though if you think you’ve seen the last of Lehrer, you’re sorely mistaken.) But what is going to happen to fix the culture that produced him in the first place?

Lets’s take a minor example, a Slate post about the Olympics. Written by Josh Levin and Justin Peters, two of the smug, grasping tryhards that seem to multiply around the offices of that publication like mushrooms after a heavy rain, it’s a model of the kind of  writing that David Plotz seems to think is endlessly entertaining: shit-eating, self-aggrandizing cleverness, designed primarily to make the audience feel as if it is in on a joke, rather than to inform or challenge them. Inoffensive, as far as things go, and low stakes, given the subject. But when you pay people to write professionally about the real world, there is an expectation that they get the basic facts right. First, the story claimed that the French relay win yesterday was the best thing that happened to France since the birth of Jacques Brel, precisely the kind of oh-so-clever, aren’t we just so wonderfully worldly bit of throwaway self-fellatio that Slate simply cannot get enough of. Sadly, Brel was Belgian, as commenters pointed out, so the post was changed to say that it was the best moment in French history since the invention of the croissant. Sadder still, the croissant was invented in Austria, as other commenters have point out. I suppose that can still be a great moment for France, but how is that any different than the situation with Brel? Apparently, it’s different enough; that language remains.

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A Simple Observation on Chick-Fil-A

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I’m not going to weigh in on the ethics or efficacy of recent tactics by local politicians to punish Chick-Fil-A for its bigotry; you can get that many other places. I just want to point out a simple similarity: when local politicians in Boston and Chicago use zoning or licensure or similar to ban Chick-Fil-A, they’re using tactics that conservatives have used for decades in the abortion fight. Not able (yet) to muster sweeping reform at the national level, they have taken to bending the rules and pushing the envelope at the local level, in thousands of discrete steps. Abortion rights, I’m very sorry to say, have been severely curtailed for thousands of American women, despite the fact that Roe is still the law of the land. Pro-life activists have gotten there not through large-scale national legislation or litigation but through a thousand little cuts.

I see the Chick-Fil-A thing as a similar set of tactics: absent widespread reform, you take a few stabs at it in friendly confines peppered across the country.

The question is, how do you feel about that sort of thing? You can take it in any number of directions: fear of a backlash, concern over the undermining of democratic principles, pragmatic happiness in scoring a few points for your side, concern that such efforts divert attention from national reform, and certainly the sense that if your opponents play dirty, you’ve got to, too. All I can say for sure is that this is the kind of situation where our ethical stances tend to be determined  by our positions on the issue at hand. If you’re a pro-life conservative, you should recognize that your compatriots have opened this door. If you’re a liberal, you should recognize that, when people say that we need to adopt more of conservatism’s methods if we want to win, this is what they’re talking about. For good or for ill.

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the West Wing Problem and the Sorkin Problem

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For years now, I’ve been talking about what I call the “West Wing Problem,” a phenomenon in which media liberals declare that it is offensive for people on the left to be straightforwardly proud of their own values.

I was never really a fan of The West Wing, but I also never had the same problem I heard again and again (and again) from other liberals: “it’s like a liberal fantasy!” Then, as now, this attitude baffled me. Why would liberals have a problem with a show that straightforwardly believed in the moral value of contemporary American liberalism? Certainly, there’s no equivalent dynamic on the right. The idea of conservatives saying that a show or movie is objectionable because “it’s like a conservative fantasy” is absurd on its face. I would argue that this is the basic reality of American politics: conservative intellectuals treat conservatism as something to be proud of; liberal intellectuals treat liberalism as something to be ashamed of. Is it any wonder who has the rhetorical advantage? Whenever people question why so many voters evince liberal policy positions but vote Republican, I immediately think of this problem. People don’t want to vote for a party that is ashamed of itself.

You can add a corollary to the West Wing Problem, which is the Aaron Sorkin problem: the liberal conviction that the biggest political problem is other liberals. Alex Pareene offered a scathing attack on Sorkin, which begins “Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals.” In the piece (which seems to acknowledge the West Wing problem), Pareene asserts the same old nostrum that people hate liberals because liberals have the temerity to unapologetically believe in stuff. I don’t particularly see much difference between Aaron Sorkin and Bill O’Reilly’s flavors of certitude. Smug? Condescending? Self-righteous? Check, check, check. It’s just that liberals spend all their time calling Sorkin an asshole and conservatives would never do so to O’Reilly. It takes Pareene until the 16th paragraph to share that he “certainly agrees with [Sorkin] on many particulars.” If conservatives know one thing, it’s that you never bury that particular lede.

One of the most popular and consistent pieces of liberal conventional wisdom is that Americans hate self-righteousness and sanctimony. The proper political response, in this reading, is to stop acting like we know what’s right. But where does this conviction come from? After all, the more successful political ideology engages in almost nothing but sanctimony. I assure you: Sean Hannity does not lie awake at night, concerned that he’s become too self-righteous. And the rest of movement conservatism certainly doesn’t criticize him as such. Sure, people say they don’t like self-righteousness, but they follow and vote for people who are purely self-righteous. Maybe we should start paying attention to what people do instead of what they say.

I think the truth is that a lot of liberals just want to complain about what they think is annoying, so they turn it around and claim that the American people think it’s annoying. That this materially hurts their cause goes unconsidered.

As someone on the loony fringe, I am used to the notion that I am the problem, and that if only Jon Chait was allowed to carry out the cull he so clearly yearns for, moderate Democrats would rule the country and bring on a new age of only-slightly-less rapacious capitalism and oligarchy. I think, in fact, that the complete opposite is the case. I think the problem is exactly the Jon Chaits, who constantly chase the center while conservatives, cackling gleefully, drag it to the right. Even if you win an election, you end up giving them all the ground. We’ve been doing it and doing it and doing it and it is not working. If centrism and captulation and triangulation actually worked, we wouldn’t have lost so many of the rhetorical battles, and we wouldn’t have newscasters claiming without consequence that this is a center-right country.

If you’ve keep losing, you’ve got to go after your most basic assumptions about what it takes to win. Particularly the assumptions that justify self-injury.

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