Authoritarianism in Turkey and the United States + Islamic State Responds to Russia

Turkish president Recep Erdoğan's strategy of tension appears to have paid off. His Justice and Development Party (AKP), confounding pollsters who predicted another dead-heat election, has won a majority in parliament. It took the shredding of a ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and sowing divisions in Turkish society that will not be bridged anytime soon, but it guarantees that Erdoğan will remain in power for the foreseeable future and that he will take a crack at revision of the constitution to formalize an executive presidency. Right now the presidency is mostly a ceremonial post, which necessitates that Erdoğan rule through cut-outs like prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu report in "Erdogan’s Party in Turkey Regains Parliamentary Majority":

With 99 percent of the votes counted, according to the state broadcaster TRT, the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., captured 49.3 percent of the popular vote, giving it a solid majority of 316 seats in Parliament.

The victory for the A.K.P. came at great cost to the cohesion of Turkish society. Critics say Mr. Erdogan’s divisive rhetoric, by denigrating opponents as terrorists or traitors, helped polarize the country. And a government crackdown on dissent in the lead-up to the vote, with mobs attacking newspaper offices and a recent raid on a media conglomerate opposed to the government, raised concerns abroad about Turkey’s commitment to democracy.

Erdoğan's raids on and closure of opposition media has an approximate parallel in the United States. The Republican National Committee (RNC), following the CNBC-hosted GOP debate last Wednesday, pulled a debate scheduled for February that was to be televised by NBC News and Telemundo. The feeling among the Republican presidential candidates, as well as the RNC, is that questions from the moderators have been hostile. The candidates are seeking to have more control over the process. To that end, they convened in Alexandria, VA in an attempt to articulate a negotiating position towards the networks.

As Ashley Parker notes in "Republican Campaigns Meet in an Effort to Alter Debates":

They emerged with a modest list of demands, including opening and closing statements of at least 30 seconds; “parity and integrity” on questions, meaning that all candidates would receive similarly substantive questions; no so-called lightning rounds; and approval of any graphics that are aired during the debate.

The campaign representatives also moved to take the Republican National Committee out of the debate negotiating process, calling for the campaigns to negotiate directly with the TV networks over format, and to receive information about the rules and criteria at least 30 days before each debate.

Ben Ginsberg, a top Republican lawyer and debate negotiator who was invited to serve as a facilitator at the meeting, is drafting a letter — without the R.N.C.’s input — that the campaigns plan to send to the networks within 48 hours. Mr. Ginsberg called the committee immediately after the meeting to convey the group’s next steps.

It is hard to generate any sense of outrage on behalf of the corporate networks or the sidelined RNC. The media monopoly and the national duopoly central committees are working hard to make sure that the candidates who have raised the most corporate cheddar are waved through to the general election. This means Hillary, and now, with the approval of billionaire investor Paul Singer, Marco Rubio.

Nonetheless, the orchestrated Republican attacks on the liberal bias of the corporate mainstream media reek of authoritarianism.

Sadly, as Erdoğan proved again yesterday, authoritarianism works. It is just in the case of the CNBC debate brouhaha authoritarianism is being used against the font of authority, the mainstream corporate media. So who knows how this is all going to play out in the GOP primary.

I think it is pretty safe to say that the corporate mainstream has successfully circled the wagons around Hillary. With the phony challenge of a Biden bid successfully surmounted, her first debate performance hailed as a commanding victory and the Benghazi committee hearing rapidly receding in her rear-view mirror, Hillary is all set to roll up Sanders come Super Tuesday.

A triumphant Erdoğan means that Europe will come a-calling again in search of a solution to the refugee crisis, a crisis which promises to grow more acute. Turkey's election in June, the one that failed to deliver Erdoğan his majority, was purported to be a referendum of Turkish disapproval of the war in Syria. Now that Erdoğan is in possession of his majority I would imagine that Turkish support for jihadist networks in Syria and attacks on Kurds will be amplified.

The downing of a Russian charter jet in Egypt is clearly the work of jihadists. Islamic State in the Sinai is claiming responsibility. Yet the West is putting up a smokescreen, saying that it couldn't be a jihadist group because such groups don't possess surface-to-air missiles. Poppycock. No such hedging was indulged when it came to blaming Novorossiyan forces for the downing of MH17. What we have here is a reprisal for Russia's forceful entry into the war in Syria.

Russia's reply should be interesting. For what it is worth, if I were a ruling member of the House of Saud, I would be nervous.

Obama Guts Dodd-Frank + Umbrella Movement Epitaph + Grocery Store Torture Report Discussion

When we look back on the Obama years, I fear, they will be seen as a dividing line. On one side of the line will be the quaint notion that people actually have a say in how we live our lives; on the other, the dystopia of our lives as actually lived in a brutal society held together by lies ruled by the super-rich and their police-state enforcers.

Last night the House of Representatives narrowly passed a budget bill (Ashley Parker and Robert Pear, "House Narrowly Passes Bill to Avoid Shutdown; $1.1 Trillion in Spending") that guts a main provision of Dodd-Frank, the key piece of legislation designed to prevent another Great Recession. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, no one's idea of a Leftist firebrand, broke with the Obama, who was lobbying for the bill, and asked her caucus to reject it. The budget ending up clearing the House with 162 Republicans and 57 Democrats voting yes.

Jonathan Weisman explains in "Furor Over Move to Aid Big Banks in Funding Bill" what it is that the House just did:

WASHINGTON — In a 1,600-page, $1.1 trillion spending bill, a provision to roll back an obscure financial regulation became a focal point of uproar as Congress struggled to keep the government funded. 

The “push-out” regulation — a measure to ensure that banks trade their riskiest financial instruments without the protection of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve’s backup — was controversial from the start. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were shoveled into Wall Street banks after instruments like credit default swaps became worthless in the financial crisis, but even some crucial Democrats were unsure if Congress went too far when it voted to include push-out in the landmark Dodd-Frank law to regulate Wall Street in 2010. 

But with regulators pressing to put rules into effect to carry out the law, a provision in the enormous spending bill to remove the push-out regulation drew bipartisan outrage. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said she was “heartbroken” by the “taint” visited upon the spending bill, which would finance virtually all of the government through September.

***

The fierce Democratic opposition over the Dodd-Frank rollback provision created the odd spectacle of President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. calling Democrats to muster support for the spending bill over the opposition of Ms. Pelosi. 

“I love the American political system, I really do, but the ability to sneak in substantive policy measures and make it take it or leave it, I think it’s appalling,” said Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who is a prominent critic of the nation’s big banks. 

The push-out legislation assumed outsize importance, not only because of what it does but because the biggest Wall Street companies have fought it since it was proposed. 

The language in the spending bill was inserted by Representative Kevin Yoder, Republican of Kansas, but he did not write it. Citigroup did. In 2013, the bank and its allies were able to corral a bipartisan vote to pass the rollback out of the House Financial Services Committee. In an analysis by The New York Times of Citigroup emails, more than 70 lines of the committee’s 85-line rollback bill came from Citigroup’s recommendations.

The banking industry strongly supports the rollback measure. James C. Ballentine, an executive vice president at the American Bankers Association, said financial instruments like credit deferred swaps are used to mitigate risk, not bolster it. To force their trading into units unprotected by federal taxpayers would be onerous, he argues. 

“The push-out requirement to move some swaps into separate affiliates makes one-stop shopping impossible for businesses ranging from family farms to energy companies that want to hedge against commodity price changes,” Mr. Ballentine said. 

Tony Fratto, a former official in the Bush Treasury and White House, called the opposition “a lot of hyperbole” around “an incremental common-sense regulatory improvement.” 

Mr. Johnson said the evocation of family farms and mom-and-pop banks was specious. The four largest banks conduct more than 93 percent of all derivatives trading in the United States. The repeal push is for them, he said. 

Such banks can still deal in derivatives and credit-deferred swaps in units uninsured by the federal government, but they could charge clients a considerably higher premium if they could keep that federal backstop. 

“In 2008, we learned the economic consequences of conducting derivatives trading in taxpayer-insured banks,” said Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, calling the repeal Congress is contemplating “illogical.”

We're back to where we started before that 2008 election-night celebration in Grant Park when Oprah and Jesse Jackson cried for the television cameras.

Obama has been a terrific bust. His administration has returned the U.S. military to Iraq, has signaled a open-ended commitment to staying on in Afghanistan, has embarked on a New Cold War with Russia, is pivoting to Asia to confront China, and now has provided the crucial support to gut Dodd-Frank.

Most people understand that it was Wall Street's addiction to lightly-regulated derivatives that caused the financial crisis. Obama's support for a federal backstop of the big banks' derivatives business proves that nothing has changed.

So next time you run into a liberal who wants to tell you that Obama is a good and decent leader who would always do the right thing if not for those devilish Republicans in Congress remind him of Obama's support for the 2015 budget.

The epitaph of the Umbrella Movement has been written by Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher, "Hong Kong Protesters Lose a Last Bastion, but Vow to Go On." The goal here, as in any political campaign, is to claim victory, regardless of the actual outcome, once the campaign is over. Note the tabloid-like opening:

HONG KONG — Constance So, a slightly built university student, wept as she looked for a way past the tightening ring of police officers closing in on the last of the sizable protest camps in Hong Kong. 

With friends urging her to avoid an arrest record, Ms. So, like many others, decided to give up voluntarily. There was no violence, only a few defiant final stands and many tearful goodbyes, as the nearly three-month Umbrella Movement disbanded. 

“It was like my home,” Ms. So said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying them.” 

For the Hong Kong authorities and their superiors in Beijing, the peaceful end to the protest is likely to be seen as a major victory. They repeatedly rebuffed demands for a greater degree of democracy in this former British colony, and defused the longest sustained political uprising on Chinese territory in many years without a bloody crackdown.

Yet even in their defeat, the protesters, most of them college students, left with a new sense of political identity, a willingness to challenge the almighty power holders in Beijing, and a slogan from a science-fiction film that many of them repeated as they cleared out of the encampment in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district: “We’ll be back.” (A sliver of a protest camp remains in Causeway Bay, a busy shopping area.)

Buckley and Bradsher, thankfully, do include a counter-narrative, which has to do with the diminished status of  Hong Kong's tycoons:

Some in Hong Kong worry that the protests this autumn have harmed the long-term cause of achieving greater democracy. 

They fret that Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics. Beijing, they say, could end up even more resistant to further democratization in Hong Kong for fear that a hostile government might be elected. 

“This movement has done more damage to the pro-democracy camp than anything in the last 17 years,” said Steve Vickers, who was a senior Hong Kong police official before Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, and who said he favored the introduction of greater democracy. 

Under the British, and through the first 17 years of Chinese sovereignty here, the most powerful political force has been the leaders of the city’s biggest businesses — heavily Scottish at first, but now mostly Chinese families originally from the neighboring Guangdong Province or from Shanghai. These tycoons have long opposed increases in social spending, fearing they would lead to higher taxes on them.

But the bruising political battle with democracy activists has hurt the tycoons’ image and their clout with top city officials and the Beijing authorities, people with a detailed knowledge of Hong Kong’s policy making said. 

To Beijing’s annoyance, the tycoons were reluctant to criticize the protesters for fear that their own businesses might be boycotted. One of the most politically active business leaders, a real estate developer, James Tien, publicly broke ranks in October with the administration’s support for Mr. Leung and called for more negotiations with the protesters. 

“The tycoons are no longer a factor; their days are past,” said the person who works closely with the Beijing and Hong Kong governments.

Last night at the grocery store I asked the checker, a guy I have known for years, what he thought of the torture report. He said, "Torture? What torture report?"

I explained to him that the Senate had released its study of the Bush administration's post-9/11 use of torture and its creation of a network of overseas secret prisons to house the tortured detainees.

He said, "Well, I'm still glad I live in this country."

"Have you ever lived anywhere else?"  I asked.

"No, I haven't."

"How do you know it's not better in, say, Ireland?"

"Well, you're right. But I would like to think that it is better here."

Democrats Routed: No Indication They Understand Why

The extent of last night's rout of the foundering Democratic Party is captured in the fact that the race for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia has yet to be called. That a threadbare corporate mannequin GOP apparatchik like Ed Gillespie is neck and neck with incumbent Mark Warner is a huge statement. This is a Republican midterm tsunami. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker report in "Riding Wave of Discontent, G.O.P. Takes Senate":

Democratic midterm losses during the Obama presidency now rival those of both Richard M. Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1994 as the most destructive to his party’s political standing in Congress in the post-World War II era. It was a stunning reversal for the president, who was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win a majority of the national vote.

Democratic losses run the gamut. Kay Hagan, Democrat incumbent Senator from North Carolina, was predicted early in the evening to be the victor over Republican challenger Thom Tillis. She lost. Liberal stalwart Mark Udall lost in Colorado (Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper appears to be holding on ). Michelle Nunn was blown away in Georgia. Conservative Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida both won.

The loss has to be laid at the White House doorstep. According to a story by Peter Baker, "President Obama Left Fighting for His Own Relevance":

Just two years after Mr. Obama’s re-election, the midterm results underscored just how far he has fallen in the public mind. Nearly six out of 10 voters on Tuesday expressed negative feelings about his administration, according to exit polls. For every two voters who said they had cast ballots to support Mr. Obama, three said they were voting to express their opposition to him. 

The electorate was deeply pessimistic about the country, with seven out of 10 describing the economy as not so good or poor and eight out of 10 expressing worry about the direction of the economy in the next year.

The most interesting part of Baker article is the picture it paints of Obama. The president -- incredibly -- doesn't think he is to blame:

WASHINGTON — Two things were clear long before the votes were counted on Tuesday night: President Obama would face a Congress with more Republicans for his final two years in office, and the results would be seen as a repudiation of his leadership. 

But that was not the way Mr. Obama saw it. The electoral map was stacked against him, he argued, making Democrats underdogs from the start. And his own party kept him off the trail, meaning he never really got the chance to make his case. “You’re in the Final Four,” as one aide put it, “and you’re on the bench with a walking boot and you don’t get to play.” 

The Republican capture of the Senate culminated a season of discontent for the president — and may yet open a period of even deeper frustration. Sagging in the polls and unwelcome in most competitive races across the country, Mr. Obama bristled as the last campaign that would influence his presidency played out while he sat largely on the sidelines. He privately complained that it should not be a judgment on him. “He doesn’t feel repudiated,” the aide said Tuesday night.

But the Republican tide was stronger than projected, sweeping away Democrats even in some of those few blue states where the president did campaign. Mr. Obama now faces a daunting challenge in reasserting his relevance in a capital where he will be perceived as a lame duck. If the hope-and-change phase of his presidency is long over, he wants at least to produce a period of progress and consolidation to complete his time in the White House. 

After making congratulatory telephone calls from the White House on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama will kick off that final phase on Wednesday with a news conference seeking bipartisan accommodation on issues of mutual interest, and he invited Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House on Friday. At the same time, aides said, Mr. Obama is eager to throw off the constraints of a campaign that he did not direct and begin to defend his record in a more robust way again. 

“He’s going to be aggressive. He’s ready to go,” said another senior official, who like others did not want to be identified discussing plans before the election results were tabulated. “We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the lame duck. He’ll talk about that tomorrow. We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the last two years. He’s anxious to get going on that.”

This should concern Democrats. It is a portrait of leadership walled off from reality, ready to cut deals on corporate taxation and trade that will accelerate the pauperization of a working class already savaged by the Great Recession.

There is no indication that the Democrats accurately discern the dire straits of the party. They are banking on demographics, that as younger and more non-white voters take to the polls they will vote Democratic. Jonathan Martin, "Voters’ Second Thoughts on Hope and Change," quotes Obama campaign guru David Plouffe as saying:

“We’re on a demographic march that is going to put more states in play,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, citing Arizona, Georgia and Texas. Such raw political projections are, of course, far removed from the hopeful rhetoric that vaulted Mr. Obama to stardom 10 years ago.

The shrewd Thomas Edsall notes, "‘Making the President Small’," problems with the "demographic wave" line of thinking prevalent in Dem circles, at least in terms of the 2016 presidential election:

Democrats counting on favorable demographic trends to carry their party to victory in 2016 should consider three significant developments reflected in the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. 

The first is that the Republican establishment, at least for the moment, has wrested control back from the Tea Party wing. This will make it more difficult for Democrats to portray their opponents as dangerous extremists. 

The second, and more important, development was the success of Republican candidates in defusing accusations that their party is conducting a “war on women.” The effectiveness of Republican tactics on this front is sure to influence strategy in two years, threatening to undermine a line of attack that has generated a gender gap and has been crucial to past Democratic victories.

The third was the powerful showing of Republican gubernatorial candidates in two Midwestern states important to Democrats in presidential elections: Wisconsin and Michigan.

All indications are that Democrats are clueless as to their lack of popular support. It as if they don't understand that their maintenance of a neoliberal Deep State of permanent warfare and endemic joblessness is not something to which voters will actively rush out to the polls register their approval.

Obama occupying the White House for the next two years means that the Democrats will continue to be yoked to a failed, brutal, unpopular Deep State. The GOP was able to remake itself in a jiffy after the 2008 Obama landslide because it was out of power; the Dems controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. There will be no clean break for the Democratic Party.

Hillary's run in 2016 will begin in earnest in a few months. There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Dems will continue to hemorrhage despite all their demographic advantages because it remains a corporate party. Absent some form of makeover to convince voters in the rising demographic -- young people of color -- that the Democratic Party isn't primarily a vehicle for Deep State prerogatives -- war and the concentration of wealth -- losses will continue to mount.

The End of Debt-Ceiling Politics + Hillary vs. Scott Walker in 2016?

The news arrived yesterday with little fanfare; it might not have even been the top story on the Google News page. But it is certainly a noteworthy development. The House of Representatives passed a clean debt ceiling bill -- meaning there are no conditions attached, no quid pro quo, no Keystone XL pipeline, no nibbling away at Obamacare -- raising the amount that government can legally borrow through march 2015. This morning Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker have the story, "House Approves Higher Debt Limit Without Condition."

It is an enormous capitulation by Speaker of the House John Boehner, who had to rely on overwhelming Democratic support (only 28 Republicans voted yes). After three years, the GOP strategy of locking down D.C. with debt-ceiling brinkmanship has been tossed on the dung heap. Last October's near Armageddon must have been enough for the national Republican brain trust, particularly when the GOP was awarded a Get Out of Jail Free card with Obamacare's disastrous online rollout. Republican leadership is keeping eyes on the prize: the U.S. Senate and possibly even the White House. Towards that goal they obviously feel that a low profile, coupled with an aggressive beatdown on Tea Party primary challengers, will deliver them to the promised land.

Clearly there is wisdom in leaving Obama to stew in his own shit. (See Monday's post for Obama's plummeting approval rating as well as the country's burgeoning socialist populism.) But Boehner's adroit elimination of debt-ceiling politics on Tuesday comes at a steep price for the GOP. The internecine warfare between the corporate-financed Tea Party and the Republican establishment which, for the most part, has been kept off the front pages (left to rage online) is now going to -- or at least there is that potential -- blow up big time. As Weisman and Parker point out,

For Mr. Boehner it was a potentially momentous decision. Conservative activists, including the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, L. Brent Bozell’s ForAmerica and commentators on the website RedState.com are all circulating petitions to end Mr. Boehner’s speakership. 

And it was Mr. Boehner who raised such high expectations around the debt limit. In 2011, he established what has become known as the “Boehner Rule”: any debt ceiling increase was supposed to be offset by an equivalent spending cut. 

“This is a lost opportunity,” the speaker conceded. “We could have sat down and worked together in a bipartisan manner to find cuts and reforms that are greater than increasing the debt limit. I am disappointed, to say the least.”

Also, there is this tasty morsel a few paragraphs down:

In a closed-door session Monday night, Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, accused the speaker of being in the pockets of the insurance industry, a charge that stirred outrage among many of his colleagues.

There is a good chance, I think, that it will blow over quickly. It probably already has. More extreme weather in the South, Tom Brokaw diagnosed with cancer, etc., will suck up the attention of news consumers.

I have a coworker who follows the daily news. When she gave me a ride to the train station yesterday after work I asked her what she thought about the House passing the debt ceiling. She said that she had glimpsed the headline right before we left, but that she didn't read the story or really even think about it.

Chalk up a "W" for Boehner and the GOP establishment.

Before signing off, I'd like to mention that Trip Gabriel has a good story, "In Governors’ Races This Year, Lessons for 2016," about Republican governors running for reelection. He focuses on four Republicans in the industrial North -- Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich of Ohio, Snyder of Michigan and Corbett of Pennsylvania:

National Democratic groups hope to take back the four executive mansions held by Rust Belt Republicans by attacking on social and economic issues — the incumbents’ cuts to education, their opposition to raising the minimum wage and abortion restrictions they signed into law. 

“They’ve all fostered hostility and divisiveness despite running as moderate technocrats,” said Danny Kanner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association, which bought its first television ads of the 2014 cycle in Michigan, attacking Mr. Snyder. “On the economy, they gave huge tax cuts to the wealthiest and corporations. They paid for it by raising middle-class taxes, and because that wasn’t enough, they cut education.” 

Mr. Walker’s bitter 2011 showdown with the unions made him a national figure. He remains a hero of the Republican grass roots and a favorite of wealthy donors like the billionaire David H. Koch, who founded a nonprofit group that contributed heavily to the governor’s campaign to avoid a recall. That appeal to the party’s base and its donor class has some conservative pundits and strategists banging the drum for a presidential bid. 

Mr. Walker, who insists that his focus is on 2014, seems to gain in stature each day that enthusiasm for Gov. Chris Christie, Republican of New Jersey, ebbs in the scandal over the closing of bridge lanes. 

But Mr. Walker has also helped polarize his battleground state. A Marquette University Law School poll last month showed his job approval reaching a high — of just 51 percent.

Can you imagine a more nauseating general election in 2016 than Hillary vs. Scott Walker? It would be 12 months of rockem sockem corporate robots.

Paying the Price of the Bush Years

Federal employees return to work this morning. The deal that Obama signed into law after midnight was put together in the Senate. It is the same as outlined on this blog a few days ago, minus the one-year delay in the reinsurance tax on health plans. (CNN provides the text of the actual bill.)

What does it accomplish? Basically nothing. The splinter of a bone tossed to the GOP in the form of an income verification requirement for individuals who receive a subsidy to purchase health insurance has been dismissed as meaningless by the White House. The House-Senate budget conference to be concluded by December 13 that the new law mandates will likely be a failure due to the Republican's ban on raising new revenue.

The last two-and-a-half weeks accomplished nothing and resolved very little. The New York Times editorial board said "The only things Republicans achieved were billions of dollars in damage to the economy, harm to the nation’s reputation and a rock-bottom public approval rating." This standoff was about the internal politics of the Grand Old Party. Speaker Boehner played a game where he gave the Tea Party enough rope to hang itself hoping that it would sate the fire eaters in his caucus for the next go-round. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker describe it in this morning's story, "Republicans Back Down, Ending Crisis Over Shutdown and Debt Limit":

Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks ago. 

“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said. “People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”

Good analysis in today's paper is provided by Jeremy Peters' "Losing a Lot to Get Little." Peters is skeptical that the Tea Party has learned anything:

“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early September any president could have had. And we managed to change the topic.” 

The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its borrowing authority yet again. 

It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short months. 

*** 

Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.

The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen. 

Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans. 

Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.

Like a cradle-bound baby fondling his excrement, we're doomed early next year to some form of a repeat of this October's nauseating, self-indulgent Republican identity crisis. We're paying the price of the Bush years. So frightened by the rise of Obama and the discrediting of the GOP brand after the brazen lies that led to the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, Republican sachems felt the need to lie down with the kooks and the Birchers. At this point there is no indication that there will be any change of direction in 2014.

Death Rattle of the Grand Old Party

This morning I'm listening to Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which is appropriate because it dawned on me as I read about the Republican shutdown of the federal government and an approaching default on the federal government's debt that the Grand Old Party is doomed. There is no way forward from this. The party that was hailed 45 years ago in Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority is now a revanchist white minority made up overwhelming of evangelicals and religiously observant voters along with libertarian Tea Party types. They are resentful that a black man occupies the White House. They fear the colored hordes and the gays and the flannel-wearing beard rockers who occupy the metropolitan areas where the future of the country is located. The people who elected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush can no longer do so. Demographically their day is done. And they are pissed. So they are going to fuck shit up.

That's where we're at. Read Thomas Edsall's latest blog post, "Anger Can Be Power." Built around a description of Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg's ongoing study called  "The Republican Party Project," it provides compelling proof that the Republican Party cannot survive. Not only is it knit together by a very limited, paranoid, exclusionary concept of "whiteness," but its two major blocs of supporters -- evangelicals and libertarians -- are at root opposed to one another. A libertarian has no truck with a Bible thumper. What you have is an incredibly unstable situation. You have the popular base of the GOP at war with the organizational elite, and then you have the popular base -- united now because a black man runs the White House -- that is fundamentally divided between evangelicals and Tea Party "stab in the back" conspiracy lovers. This type of volatility is not the stuff of which a stable organization is built.

Get ready for more rough sailing. Jonathan Weisman's story today showcases a solid body of opinion within the GOP that a government default would be no big deal, that it could managed. What can't be denied -- because we went through this once before in the summer of 2011 -- is the negative effect that even the possibility of a default has on the markets. The Dow plummeted and the credit rating of U.S. was downgraded for the first time. So far the Dow has been down around 100 points each day for the last couple of days the market has been open. This is less than one percent. It's going to take more than that for the Tea Party fever to break. If the sides remain dug in through today I would imagine by Thursday and Friday the market drops should pick up.

Republicans don't even know what they want to get out of the shutdown. This is from a story by Jackie Calmes and Ashley Parker:

Earlier, House Republicans left a closed-door caucus with their terms for any negotiations unclear. In recent days, their stated goal has broadened from defunding or delaying the health care law, whose insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, to unspecified deficit reductions. One lawmaker after another offered a simple message, which Republicans are counting on to reverse the tide of public condemnation: Republicans want to negotiate, but the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Mr. Obama will not. 

“I think that Harry Reid and President Obama will recognize that their position of no negotiating is not resonating with the people anymore,” said Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a member of the Tea Party faction that forced Mr. Boehner’s hard-line stand on government financing and the debt-limit increase. 

Especially with new polls showing Republicans in the worst position, Democrats in Congress and the White House seemed undaunted by that line of attack, calling it disingenuous. As Mr. Obama said at his news conference, since last spring Republicans have repeatedly refused to form a conference committee to resolve differences between the separate annual budgets passed by the House and the Senate.

Republicans don't know what they want to get out of the shutdown because even in their fevered dreams of destruction they themselves can't imagine Obama making a time machine appear that would take them back to the 1960s when they were the emerging majority.

Democrats Need to Return to the "50-State Strategy"

Eventually Democrats will have to come to the realization that they need to remain constantly mobilized on a national campaign footing; Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy but with resources if not at par at least in the ballpark of a presidential campaign. What are the chances that this will happen? Slim. Obama gets it; in January it was announced that Obama for American would turn into Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy non-profit able to raise unlimited amounts of money. But chances are that it will be another Change To Win -- a reshuffling of chairs on the Titanic.

A reading of today's paper is all one needs to understand why a full-tilt Democratic mobilization is required. First, from Ashley Parker's frontpage story on Boehner's refusal to bargain on the sequester, "Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts, and House G.O.P. Cheers":

“We asked him to commit to us that when the cuts actually came on March 1, that he would stand firm and not give in, and he’s holding to that,” said Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “I think Friday will be an important day that shows we’re finally willing to stand and fight for conservative principles and force Washington to start living within its means. And that will be a big victory.” 

Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican who was elected on the 2010Tea Party wave and has had his differences with the speaker, was similarly complimentary toward Mr. Boehner. 

“He’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and I think it’s working to our favor and to his,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “I get the feeling that our party is probably more unified right now than it has been at any time in the last several months.” 

Mr. Boehner, in some ways, finds himself the leader of the House Republicans with nowhere to actually lead. 

Among those who placed him in his post and could conceivably remove him, the test of his leadership seems to be how little action he takes. In a closed-door meeting and subsequent news conference this week, Mr. Boehner said the House was done negotiating over spending cuts until the Senate “begins to do something.” 

Mr. Boehner began the new Congress on shaky footing, a seemingly chastened man. Speculation swirled that he might not be able to hold on to his speakership (he did), and he was forced to pass two major pieces of legislation — a last-minute New Year’s Eve deal to avert automatic tax increases, and a Hurricane Sandy relief bill — without the support of the majority of his conference through the help of Democratic votes. On Thursday, Mr. Boehner again moved a piece of legislation through the House without majority support from his rank and file — the Violence Against Women Act. 

The result showed that conservatives seem willing to give him some running room on social issues as long as he holds firm on the fiscal front. 

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama, whose political fortitude he questioned publicly and privately.

It's the Tea Party triumphant. The Tea Party is calling the tune and Boehner is dancing the jig. There is where we're at. Birchers run the show. They're safe in gerrymandered districts, districts which could soon be multiplying if the Roberts Court scraps Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Charlie Savage outlines the devastating impact of losing Section 5 in a story, "Decision on Voting Law Could Limit Oversight," that appears alongside the sequester coverage:

J. Gerald Hebert, who formerly handled voting rights litigation for the Justice Department and is now in private practice, said that losing Section Five would be “devastating to protecting voting rights” because the costs of a lawsuit are so steep. Jon Greenbaum, the legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it would mean that the bulk of changes that now receive automatic scrutiny by the federal government could take effect without any review, eliminating a deterrent against mischief.

Minus a full-tilt mobilization this is our present and our future. The nation is run by neo-Dixiecrat, John Birch Society conservatives. Their power base is the House of Representatives, thanks to the gerrymander and corporate cash, which has been and will continue to be augmented by their other base of power, the Supreme Court.

Paul Krugman's column this morning is a good one, "Ben Bernanke, Hippie." In it he compares those who argued against invading Iraq during the Bush-fomented war hysteria in late 2002, early 2003 to those who have been arguing against implementing austerity during a global recession. In both cases critics of elite groupthink were dismissed as Hippies. Krugman's point is that Bernanke's energetic defense, during an appearance before the Senate on Tuesday, of government action to stimulate a depressed economy has turned him into a Hippie.

Is there a better way to wrap things up here on Friday morning than a track off one of my all-time favorite Hippie albums? Here's "The Poor Ditching Boy," from Richard Thompson's Henry the Human Fly (1970):

Grand Bargain Sought

Friday the sequester kicks in. Republicans aren't budging, though some in their caucus are grumbling about the Pentagon cuts. A good place to start the work week is Robert Pear's story this morning, "As Governors Meet, White House Warns Cuts Would Hurt States"; it runs down the basic math of the sequester:

On Friday, the administration said, $85 billion in cuts will automatically begin to take effect, with many domestic programs facing reductions of 9 percent and some military programs being reduced by 13 percent in the remaining seven months of the federal fiscal year.

“There are constraints to what an agency can do in taking this across-the-board $85 billion cut,” Mr. Werfel [the controller of President Obama’s budget office] said. “The way the law is written, it has to be taken from a percentage cut from every program, project and activity.”

Under the Budget Control Act of 2011, which created the latest version of the sequester, some programs, like Medicaid and food stamps, are exempt from the automatic cuts, and cuts in Medicare payments cannot exceed 2 percent. 

Social Security benefits would not be cut. But the White House said that the automatic budget cuts would force the agency to “curtail service to the public,” and that the backlog of Social Security disability claims would increase.

The Obama administration is outlining what these cuts actually mean: loss of education funding in Ohio; vaccines in Georgia; services for victims of domestic violence in Pennsylvania; etc. Republicans are crying foul; they're asserting all the doom and gloom is a public relations stunt designed to scare. But if you're a Republican what else can you say since you are unwilling to put corporate tax loopholes on the table?

But what's really troubling is Richard Stevenson's article from this past Saturday. What has not been mentioned much in the sequester coverage is what Obama is willing to give up:

Even as President Obama lashes out at Republicans over the automatic spending cuts that take effect next week, he is simultaneously sending them a strikingly different message: he is still interested in a big deficit-reduction deal and as evidence of his good faith has left on the table proposed Medicare and Social Security cuts that liberals hate.

His aides point to Mr. Obama’s continued willingness to swallow, over the intensifying objections of most of the left side of his party, a new way of calculating inflation adjustments for Social Security benefits that would reduce the growth of payments – in effect, a benefit cut. And Mr. Obama has alluded repeatedly to his willingness to re-engage with Republicans based on his last offer for $400 billion in Medicare cuts, made during the negotiations in December over the so-called fiscal cliff; that’s a level that gives heartburn to some Democrats in Congress who see no need to compromise at this point.

As the citizenry goes back to sleep after the election last November followed by the high stakes fiscal cliff negotiations in December, Obama's proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare are flying under the radar. Here's the take from a post this morning on naked capitalism:

The only logical inference that can be drawn is that Obama remains committed to inflicting the “Grand Bargain” (really, the Grand Betrayal) on the Nation in his quest for a “legacy” and continues to believe that the Sequester provides him the essential leverage he feels he needs to coerce Senate progressives to adopt austerity, make deep cuts in vital social programs, and to begin to unravel the safety net. Obama’s newest budget offer includes cuts to the safety net and provides that 2/3 of the austerity inflicted would consist of spending cuts instead of tax increases. When that package is one’s starting position the end result of any deal will be far worse.

In any event, there is a clear answer to how to help our Nation. Both Parties should agree tomorrow to do a clean deal eliminating the Sequester without any conditions. By doing so, Obama would demonstrate that he had no desire to inflict the Grand Betrayal.

This is also Krugman's position: just repeal the sequester. But, according to today's frontpage story by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker, the sequester is going forward, not so much for the reason stated by Republicans, that it is a strategy to bring Obama to the table willing to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare (because we know from the Stevenson story that Obama is already there); no, the sequester is going forward for purely political reasons. According to Weisman and Parker,

With so many rank-and-file Republicans adamant that they would rather see the cuts stand than raise any taxes, Speaker John A. Boehner finds himself in a bind. Three times this year — on the tax deal to resolve the fiscal cliff, on a measure to suspend the debt ceiling and on a package of Hurricane Sandy relief — he has let legislation pass the House against the votes of a majority of Republicans. In 2011, Republicans accepted caps on military spending as well. 

Each time, the speaker has promised to stand his ground on the next showdown with the president. That showdown comes this week. 

Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an Iraq War veteran with combat experience and a rising Republican star, said that the speaker was in a “very tough position” in one-on-one negotiations with the president, and that the opportunity for a grand bargain was gone.

Republicans must feel as if they have lost the upper hand with Obama in the recent fiscal cliff and debt ceiling negotiations. Never mind the results of last November's election. But given Obama's willingness to sell the working class down the river in search of a grand bargain, I'd say the House GOP is doing all of us a favor.

House GOP Quick Kicks Debt Ceiling

House Republicans decide to "punt" on the debt ceiling.  The story by Ashley Parker (she covered the Romney campaign during the past presidential election) in yesterday's paper about the Republican retreat in Williamsburg revealed that Paul Ryan was arguing for a short-term extension of the debt ceiling. I thought that this would take time to play out, like a week, as the Republicans haggled among themselves. But by Friday House Republicans had uncharacteristically reached consensus. Here's how Jonathan Weisman lays it out in today's frontpage story:

The decision represents a victory — at least for now — for Mr. Obama, who has said for months that he will not negotiate budget cuts under the threat of a debt default. By punting that threat into the spring, budget negotiations instead will center on two earlier points of leverage: March 1, when $1 trillion in across-the-board military and domestic cuts are set to begin, and March 27, when a stopgap law financing the government will expire.

Reordering the sequences of those hurdles was central to the delicate Republican deliberations that resulted in the new plan. In the days leading to the Williamsburg retreat, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman and former vice-presidential nominee, had been meeting with the leader and three past chairmen of the conservative House Republican Study Committee to discuss a way through the debt ceiling morass.

Those conversations led into Thursday morning, when Mr. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, opened the retreat by going through the timeline for the coming budget fights, according to aides who were there.

They turned the floor over to Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the House Ways and Means chairman, who delivered a blow-by-blow description of the economic disaster that could be wrought by a government default. Mr. Camp also talked through the notion held by some Republicans that the Treasury Department could manage a debt ceiling breach by channeling the daily in-flow of tax dollars to the most pressing needs, paying government creditors, sending out Social Security checks and financing the military. His message was that it would not work, the aides said.

Then Mr. Ryan stood to talk over the options he had developed with the House conservative leaders. They could do a longer-term debt ceiling extension with specific demands, like converting Medicare into a voucherlike program. Or they could lower expectations, reorder the budget hurdles with a three-month punt, and add the “no budget, no pay” provision.

Persuading Republicans who adamantly oppose raising the debt ceiling took some time, and the ensuing discussion stretched on and on, breaking at noon for lunch on Thursday, resuming at 2:30, until 4 p.m., then concluding Friday.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority whip, met with freshmen early Friday to make sure they were on board. Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor joined Mr. Ryan for one last meeting with conservative leaders — Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Tom Price of Georgia — to make sure they were on board. Then the top four leaders sealed the agreement midmorning.

I would call it more of a quick kick than a punt.  Quick kicks are not done anymore in the NFL. Dan Pastorini was the last guy I saw do a quick kick (maybe Danny White did one that I saw, but I don't remember). It's when the quarterback takes the snap from center, usually on third down, and punts it into the secondary. It catches the defense off guard and leads in theory to better field position than running a regular play on third down and then bringing out the punting team on fourth. The quick kick was a third-and-long play. Quick kicks aren't done anymore because passing attacks are much more sophisticated now and picking up long yardage on third down is a regular occurrence; also, passers used to be punters; punting was a skill set expected of your quarterback. No more.

House Republicans quick kicked wisely I believe. They're on more solid footing to extract their social welfare cuts when the sequester kicks in and then after that when the continuing resolution expires. The closer we got to February the greater the chance for another downgrade by one of the rating agencies; Fitch had said as much. When S&P dropped U.S. debt one notch from AAA to AA+ because of the last debt-ceiling standoff it cost taxpayers billions, not to say anything about loses in the markets. If the GOP Mad Mullahs in the House had pressed ahead with a default it would have been insanely destructive to global capitalism, which, as the Monthly Review argues, is largely concentrated in one country, the United States.