Just more musings about the political divide...

... and our inability to bridge it. When a concern troll, for perhaps the millionth time, chided someone in a blog's comment thread for calling the American people "stupid," it prompted me to make a distinction between politicians saying such a thing (not at all likely to win many votes) and the value of the statement as social commentary (probably true to a more considerable degree than even most pessimists imagine).

I tried to couch the problem in terms of marketing psychology and its great effectiveness, but, I'm not sure that's the entirety of the problem (although mass marketing techniques have made the problem of adversarial politics much worse). After all, even the most piercing keystrokes of H.L. Mencken's typewriter were not sufficiently powerful to prevent the election of the dunderheaded Warren G. Harding, and that 1920 campaign essentially predated the age of modern advertising, which was only at that moment beginning to spring forth from the fever dreams of Edward L. Bernays.

Americans have always been suckers for clever sloganeering. "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!" "54-40 or Fight!" "A Chicken in Every Pot!" "I Like Ike." "Morning in America." Most slogans are unreconstructed bullshit with, at best, minimal inherent meaning. They are signifiers of preference, placeholders in the political spectrum. The problem today is that, particularly on the right, they've come to be statements of principle in and of themselves, which makes any debate pretty much impossible. "We can't allow the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud!" was, as far as the underlying substance goes, a baldfaced lie, but, it was never meant to be examined for its truth. Rather, it was a rallying cry for war, and an effective one, no less potent (nor less mendacious) than "Remember the Maine!"

So, when Scary Sarah emits the word "freedom," or the phrase, "free markets," some notable, but not large, percentage of the population--in part, because of some rather sophisticated psychological conditioning--gets all warm and runny, not because any great knowledge has been imparted, but, rather, because their limbic systems give them a jolt. Those jolts are the subterranean reason why such people will consistently vote against their own interests.

And that, in a presumptive democracy, is really stupid behavior. So, I think that the tendency has always been with us to ignore the details and give in to what thrills us emotionally. Modern marketing and branding techniques have simply built upon and manipulated that tendency.

Uh, maybe I'm just confused...

... but, if there was a net job loss in November (even though much less than expected), how does the unemployment rate go down?

And by two-tenths of a percent?

Now, a lot of unemployed people could have suddenly died, thus removing themselves from the rolls the hard way. As unpleasant as things have been, that's not statistically likely.

Or, a lot of people could have been shoved off of the rolls of the actively unemployed because they didn't find work in the period when they were receiving benefits and their benefits have run out. But, then, there'd be a similar increase in the U6, and I don't see mention of that.

Or, a lot of people formerly counted in the U3 could be getting a few hours of temp work during the month. That, also, should raise the U6.

So, statistically, what's left? That the BLS has been diddling their birth-death models again.

For a country that measures, in considerable detail, damned near everything related to business, for the sake of business, we can't get statistics--even weekly or monthly--from, say, W-2 withholding data, that gives us an accurate picture of actual employment and unemployment (however noisy that data might be)? Sure, the self-employed don't report on that schedule, but, they're defined in other ways, and are a known quantity, even if their economic activity while self-employed is uncertain over a longer period, so, I'm not sure self-employment is the reason for the statistical inconsistencies.

Much more likely is that unemployment is always a political hot potato, and every administration diddles with the way it's calculated to make it seem like they are doing more than they are, as folks such as Kevin Phillips and William Greider have detailed over the years. When Reagan was faced with truly ugly numbers, he simply included the military in the ranks of the employed when they never had been before. Other Presidents have done similar things. The mere fact that the BLS continues to advertise the U3 rate as the unemployment rate, when the much higher and more realistic U6 doesn't get top billing is evidence that the numbers are spun for political purposes.

Now that the deficit hawks are in full-throated screaming mode, even small changes up or down are going to be seen as more dramatic than they actually are, and we're going to see politicians and economists alike stirring the goat entrails of these numbers for signs and portents. So, it would be kinda nice to think that they were really accurate.

Umm, I note that Mr. Bernanke...

... assiduously avoids any mention of this country's obscenely bloated national security state budget in his assessment, "that's where the money is."

Given that when all the defense-related spending (and its share of interest on the debt) is added up, it's about 80% of the discretionary budget, I would say to Mr. Bernanke that he doesn't know fuck-all about where the real money is.

These fuckers do want to go after old people's security, contrary to Mr. Bernanke's protestations. Business has hated to make its contribution to those funds ever since their inception.

We're in a rocket-powered handbasket to hell, and these sonsofbitches now want to spoil the ride, too.

The President's Escalation Speech....

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

That is all.

For people distressed over the Constitutional abuses...

... created by having a black President in the White House, I suppose this interpretation of the Constitution is in character.

If one were to go by Blech and crew, one might think America's only product is assholes.

Everyone is waiting for the change...

... having expended most of the hope. Well, now, is this an indication of the sort of change we can expect?

The Secretary of the Treasury's office metaphorically moves down Wall Street from Goldman Sucks to Robber Barons `R Us?

Ooooh, that's change we can believe in, yessir.


Yeah, right.

Word to the wise Dems in Congress....

If you keep trying to play into the narrative of the whacked-out doofuses in the extreme minority, if you worry about what they might think about you say or do, you're:


DOOMED!


And, so are the rest of us. Submit to the tyranny of the batshit-insane minority, and we're all fucked.