Not That TNR Is Much Better Than Obama

I quoted Noam Schreiber in that last piece, but that doesn't change the fact that TNR is still a website that publishes people like Todd Gitlin who calls people on the internet "a wild street mob":

or indeed, where there is a state, there is diplomacy. Where there is diplomacy, some of it must take place out of the spotlight. The diplomats may well be better judges of which part that should be than the bureaucratic squads who stamp classifications on government documents. Surely, overall, the diplomats are better judges than the wild street mobs of the Internet.

This points to what's at the heart of the Wikileaks phenomenon: the complete inability of people like Gitlin to understand that elite opinion is the problem right now, not the solution. That's what the Tea Partiers are tapping into right now, though the Republicans and their think-tank allies are working hard to rechannel the sentiment in ridiculous, counterproductive directions.
Why the hell should Americans trust that diplomats are good judges of what should remain secret? Why the hell should ANYBODY? Sure, they're experts, but they're also an interested party, and the last two years are littered with stories about how interested experts got things wrong over, and over, and over again. Matt Taibbi has practically built his reputation on it, and the things he ferrets out are worse every day. What's the difference between a secret communique and, say, a rocket docket? Both are kept secret.  Both are the province of experts. And both raise one hell of a lot of questions about these experts' and elites' judgement and objectivity when brought to light.

The reason why Wikileaks is being castigated is the same reason why Taibbi got kicked out of one of those secret courts: because they expose just how jury-rigged and questionable these peoples' solutions are.

Taibbi on the Tea Party: "They're Full of S**t. All of Them."

Here, have a Taibbi:

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

This is just the beginning. There is LOTS more. But that's the crux of it. It's hard to make sense of the Tea Party because it doesn't make sense. It's not logical. It is, as Taibbi discovered, "deep down and psychological". It's a reaction to the subconscious knowledge that they're being exploited by someone, but they've been deceived as to who. They blame "radical leftists", and don't even consider that they might be being exploited by people who putatively share the same ideology they do. People who essentially bought and paid for their "grassroots movement", which is as neat a bit of AstroTurfing by the Koch Corporation (and other corps) as you could ask for.

So they're being used. They're being exploited. But it's hard to care when they're calling you a communist:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over — as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

"They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.

"Your race?" I ask.

"Probably," he says.

"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.

"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."

An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff.

Full of shit, narcissistic as hell, utterly delusional, probably racist (though they'd never admit it)...and if you disagree you're a commie bastard who hates America.

This is the group dominating American politics, folks. This is who Obama's going to be conceding things to next year, since conceding to wingnuts is all that he's turned out to be good at. This is the group that's going to be driving policy. People who think that white males are going to be executed by the Death Panels.

America in 2010: It's like something out of a bad SF novel.

"They Don't Call it Bribery in This Country When They Give You the Money Post Factum" (Now With Monday Edit!)

Matt Taibbi's blistering take on Bob Rubin:

The irony of Bob Rubin: He's an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.

As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi's board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.

Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year's crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.

Taibbi piece, "Obama's Big Sellout", is a blistering piece of journalism, not that that's new for Taibbi.

What is newsworthy is Taibbi's reconstruction of the moments just after Obama's election as president. He looks at the people that Obama retained and whom he let go, and the pattern is clear: the progressives and populists that drove the campaign (like Austan Goolsbee and Karen Kornbluh) were all out on their ears, to be replaced with a series of Rubins' Wall Street sycophants and hacks. They were the ones that created the crisis that threw millions of Americans out of work, and the very sort of people that Obama's supporters were voting against. That didn't matter. It was all Rubin, all the time. The appointees ended up being people like Geithner, Larry Summers, Gary Gensler, Jason Furman, and a guy named Jason Furman who liked trade an awful lot:

The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. "The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement," U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.

The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so."

And it might well be...for the "right" Americans.

Yes, the destructive influence of Goldman Sachs is Taibbi's hobbyhorse right now. But he has a point. It's hard to argue that GS isn't running the show these days, and that their alumni aren't being handled the keys to power no matter who is "elected" into executive office.

Choosing a Republican or a Democrat just doesn't matter: GS will be at the reins no matter what. If only they weren't so bad at it.

Edit: Tim Fernholz responds by saying "nuh uh! They were Clintonians, not Rubinians!" He also complains that some of the progressives are more powerful than advertised, and some of the powerful are more progressive than advertised. Perhaps, but he cites as the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board as proof of progressives' power, since a progressive chairs it.

Sorry, but Taibbi addressed that. A top Democrat called it "Siberia". Being on a committee doesn't mean you're going to get listened to, Tim, any more than a late conversion to reform is going to change the fact that you were anti-reform when they chose you.

In any case, Tim gave away the game by acknowledging "the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street" in the Obama administration. Noblesse Oblige from Wall Street is nothing to build regulatations on. They're the ones that ruined everything to begin with.

Monday Edit: Taibbi absolutely demolished Fernholz. Things like the latter-day conversion of Gary Gensler to financial regulation, he said, do not change the fact that Gensler was a massive regulation opponent when Obama appointed him. He goes on to explain himself a bit better:

It is my job to point out that many of the same people who bear direct responsibility for the financial crisis were given positions of great power in the Obama White House, and that in many important ways the Obama appointments represented a resounding reaffirmation of the status quo (I didn’t even mention the renomination of Ben Bernanke), and the exact opposite of “change.” One can argue about the extent to which this is true, but I don’t think the facts are really in question.

The Prospect writer argues that “the problems Taibbi tries to describe aren’t some ridiculous cabal” but instead “come from group-think and structural influences.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was exactly the point of the article. The issue with the modern Democratic party is that its leaders all share a world view that’s extremely narrow. They genuinely believe in Rubinite ideas, have grown accustomed to an incestuous relationship with Wall Street, and they probably think that the right people were put in charge. Their failure to look beyond their own “group-think” for solutions to economic problems is exactly the issue.

Fernholz's response really was weak, and makes me wonder exactly how panicked that RS article has made the White House and its various apologists. Taibbi's right. They don't get it. And because they don't get it, they stand a serious chance of losing all their electoral gains to the crazed modern Republican party. The public is angry, and they're in charge.

It'd be pathetic if it wasn't so horrifying.