The Short Memories of the Financial Flacks

Asian and European securities markets closed up more than 2% last night, and US markets opened more than 2% above Wednesday's close. Transcripts of CNN financial reporter Christine Romans' comments on the meaning of it all are not yet available, but I can say that they were obtuse, disgusting, and blind to reality. Two days have passed since the Congressional Budget Office confirmed what was no secret to anyone who cared to inquire: the rich have appropriated virtually all of the new wealth created in the United States since that appalling fraud, Ronald Reagan, was swept into power in 1981. But to Ms Romans that is Tuesday's news; it no longer describes reality. Her report this morning was a giddy celebration of the markets' confirmation of the strength of the US economy.

Many American suburbs have become depopulated and shuttered ghost towns; millions of citizens have lost the economic basis for the self-esteem that defines the middle class; state, cities, and villages are literally bankrupt or are on the edge, and an empty vessel with a job on cable is looking at a day in the life of capitalism and concluding that the economy is strong!

The morning mail brought news of a remarkable proposition made by Warren Buffett while being interviewed on CNBC last July.  I had not heard of it until a friend sent it my way as part of a mass mailing to what, by the number of addresses appears to be a large minor fraction of the American middle class. July was the month of the Rubert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, so the musings of Buffett were not on the front burner. America's second wealthiest and probably most amiable billionaire was asked about the deficit, and what follows is my reply to my friend.

Buffett’s heart is in the right place, but his remedy for incessant deficit-creation is extreme, unwarranted, and, in many cases in which it would be administered, far more damaging to the economy than the deficit itself.

Buffett proposes that every member of the congress be ineligible for re-election if the deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product exceeds 3%. According to the Historical Tables of the United States Government there were, beginning with the year 1930 and ending with 2010, 32 years in which this was the case. Deficits exceeding 3% are anticipated in 2011 through 2014. Deficits are rightly associated with periods of recession and depression; they have the effect of mitigating the deflationary, destructive features of severe downturns. Thus, deficits from 1932-1940 were above 3%, except in 1937 and 1938 when FDR foolishly pulled back federal spending in response to same kind of anti-deficit quackery we hear today. In those years the country slipped back into depression. War spending beginning in 1940 producing deficits that reached 30.3% in 1943 worked their Keynesian magic and provided a job for anyone who had a pulse.

From 1946 (-7.2%) until 1974, budgets were in and out of deficit usually by fractions of a percent. In 1975 the economy stalled, and for the working class has remained stalled for 36 years. Deficits, as a consequence, have returned, rising above 3% in 17 of those years. Without deficits adding to the 25% of the economy that represents government spending, this would have been a time of abject depression for wage workers and many in the white collar class. As it happened, it was merely a puzzling, exasperating, demoralizing time for the lower 80%. Those above that level scarcely noticed what was happening, and I suspect that most of them don’t understand it today. The lords of creation at the top had no doubt about what was happening as their appropriation of new wealth ran to hundreds of percent.

Under the Buffett rule members of 7 congresses from 1932 through 1947 would have been ineligible for re-election. The French experience of revolving door governments after the Second World War comes to mind as does the word chaos. Under the Buffett rule every congress sitting at a time of recession would be history, and the country would, in addition to keeping the lower (by this time) 90% alive, be looking for 535 candidate hitherto untainted by association with deficit. Chaos on steroids with a Naga Jolokia pepper up its ass.

I am guessing that Warren Buffett knows all of this,  and that he spoke the language of Hyperbole as so many of us do when a fawning press suggest to us that we are as gods on Olympus. But let us not be bulldozed by the casual opinions of anyone, be he billionaire or ragged trousered mechanic. Hysteria is for the Tea Party. We should be about cool.

It's time to retire the adjective incredible and the adverb incredibly. A Google search of the web found approximately 835,000,000 uses of these words - somewhat more for the adverb than for the adjective. For the present into the middle future they have about as much value as did the Papiermark during the German hyperinflation of 1921-23. By comparison, the much-used expletives shit and fuck found their way to the Internet 89,000,000 and 171,000,000. Even allowing that shit and fuck can't get past the network standards departments - premium channels not included, it's a blowout for the i-words.

But overuse is not the whole of this offense against the subtlety and nimbleness of the English language. It is the mindlessness that their use puts on display, the shallow unoriginality of the demographic that I take to be the sons and daughters of the boomer generation. For it is from the mouths of the 20-40 year-olds that these leaden nuggets fall most readily.

I was alerted to this incoming tide of fatuity by hearing a young prosecutor describe someone as "an incredible witness," and later when the testimony of the witness was said to be "incredibly credible." A speaker less interested in fashionable utterances delivered at high speed in the manner of a cable host or a fourth at a frat house bong party would described her witness as - merely - credible, meaning believable or plausible or persuasive - three adjectives that are not precisely equal, but that illustrate what is meant by "shades of meaning."

A great many citations of "incredible witness" employ the words as they should be employed, that is, as comments on a witness who could not be believed. Others, like this and this and this one about a woman who broke up a robbery by turning "to Jesus," are evidence that the speaker or writer said the first thing that passed through his mind, meaning a recent thing that passed from the TV or the Internet or his bud, and ignored the 45,000 adjectives to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, most of them, by now, far more vivid and serviceable than incredible. By the way, it's interesting to see how many misuses of incredible are linked to a religious experience or an attempt to convince a reader or auditor of one's deep and sincere feeling about the supernatural. Humbug breeds superficiality.

To say more would mark me as one possessed - a crank - so I shall leave it there with a mere smattering of synonyms taken from Thesaurus.com:

beyond belief - absurd, far-fetched, fishy, flimsy*, implausible,impossible, improbable, incogitable,inconceivable, insupposable, out of the question,outlandish, phony, preposterous, questionable,ridiculous, rings phony, suspect, thin*,unbelievable, unconvincing, unimaginable,


Far-fetched - bizarre, doubtful, dubious, eccentric, fantastic,fishy, forced, hard to swallow, illogical,implausible, improbable, incoherent,inconsequential, incredible , labored,preposterous, queer, recondite, strained,strange, suspicious, unbelievable, unconvincing,unlikely, unnatural, unrealistic

Unconvincing - assailable, baseless, contemptible,controvertible, fallacious, false, feeble, frivolous,groundless, illogical, improbable, inadequate,inane, inconceivable, incredible , inept, lame,poor, puerile, superficial, thin, transparent,trifling, trivial, unbelievable, ungrounded,unpersuasive, unreasonable, unsatisfactory,unsubstantial, weak, weakly, wishful


I have omitted from this list the word awesome which, with one billion-210-million hits on the web, deserves its own retirement party.

What The Occupation Movement and Labor Have In Common

Capital is no more human than are corporations. To grant capital a right that by its nature it does not deserve is as foolish as regarding a corporation as a citizen with the rights that citizens are guaranteed by the United States Constitution. A recognition of the inhumanity of capital and its instrument - the corporation - is what labor and the October protest movement has in common. 

When labor leaders deride anti-corporate protesters for their youth, their apparel, or their manner of expressing themselves, they betray the interests of their members and followers. 

When youthful demonstrators deprecate unions as corrupt-by-nature, when they disparage working class accents as the emblem of the outmoded, when they imbibe the sweet poison of anti-union corporate propaganda, they betray the tradition that blossomed in the heady days of the New Deal.

Americans who sell their labor to employers are in the working class, and their bedrock interest is a working class interest. Americans who live on the returns of capital have the appropriate loyalties. 

It Is 1984, And The Clocks Are Striking Thirteen

"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, [Winston Smith] did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers but to (. . .) every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold and political or ideological significance." George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1981) p. 36

The Times mentioned above is the fictional newspaper of record in Orwell's disquieting prophecy. But there is another Times, and although it is published in New York, it purports to report and to record "all the news that's fit to print" in these United States. The New York Times has acknowledged in nine articles published between September 19 and October 4 the occupation of Wall Street, and entertains the possibility that this is a national movement with staying power. Orwell's Times would not have mentioned such a protest once, nor would such a protest proceeded beyond the gathering of the first three demonstrators. But are the papers so different?  Look here and decide.