Who Benefits From Austerity?

For ordinary people, including families and businesses, when they find they have a budget shortfall, they either need to increase revenue somehow--get a job, for example--or practice austerity--belt tightening, cutting back on expenses.  Putting off buying a car, moving to a house with lower rent or mortgage, perhaps even smaller measures, like saving a little on food or entertainment, may make the difference between positive and negative cash flow.  But what happens if a whole community is having a budget shortfall at the same time?  One persons spending is another persons income.  What happens is the whole community declines--a "race to the bottom".   John Maynard Keynes called this "the paradox of thrift".  They only way to break the vicious cycle is for somebody to spend.  Often this is an outsider.  If a community can attract an outside business by giving it tax breaks or other concessions, it creates employment for locals.  But in the larger economy, this is a losing game.  If you attract Walmart or a factory to your community by giving it tax breaks or a non-union workforce, you have deprived the businesses that tried to compete with Walmart of their revenue, including other communities, you've deprived yourself of taxes to provide necessary services such as roads and welfare, and you've deprived your workers of protections from abusive management.  The factory was going to go somewhere.  Your town may benefit over the short term, but the larger economy does not.

Government can play the role of the outsider--government spending doesn't doesn't really come out of the economy--nearly all that spending goes to businesses and workers.  It's merely redistributive.  Moreover, provided government taxes equally, those taxes don't hurt anybody--everybody is left with exactly the same buying power.  Government is one of the few organizations whose interests are purely those of the country at large.  It risks being corrupted--to redistribute unfairly, to those with political influence--but as long as most decision making is conducted in the open, the people have a chance to fight this.

Government debt is unlike family or business debt, or even that of a larger community, like a state.  The small unit can get itself over a bad spell with austerity.  But the government cannot.  Broad austerity just lowers spending for everybody.   But there's a way out: the government has the ability to print money.  Too much of this causes inflation, with the instability that brings, but within moderation, this can be a good thing.  Among other things, inflation makes debts get smaller.  The people who sell debt try to calibrate them to inflation, but there's a market for that, and if they go too far, the borrower will look elsewhere.  Government, uniquely, has the ability to set its own rates.

So who is it that is trying to convince us that government austerity is an important thing?  The people who make a profit by keeping interest rates high relative to inflation--the people who are lending to government: the big banks.  The thing they least want is for government to inflate its debt away.  They have an easy to understand analogy that their spokesmen and lobbyists pitch: family belt tightening.  But the government is not a family.  Do they care that their greed is keeping the economy down and ruining the future prospects of tens of millions of Americans?  Not a whit.

No country has ever cut it's way to prosperity.  Government and business spending is the only way it's ever been done.  Neither is happening right now, and it's killing us.

The Disenfranchisement Strategy

One of the most insidious rhetorical strategies is to disenfranchise your opponent.    This can occur in many ways, but logically, they boil down to the "no true Scotsman" falacy:  believing such a thing renders you unworthy to participate.

At the moment, a series of mass shootings has elevated the topic of gun control in the public consciousness.  The gun lobby, predictably, says that after such a shooting is not the time to have such a discussion and we shouldn't let our emotions overcome the supposedly reasoned position they want us to take.  These shootings have become so commonplace that by that logic, there will never be a time to discuss this.  Of course, that's exactly what they want.  Their goal is to disenfranchise everyone who disagrees with them.

The "voter fraud" meme became a popular strategy for the Republican party in 2004, when they first started losing a few elections.  Here in Washington State, Dino Rossi attempted to prove that illegal voters in Democrat leaning districts had boosted their results.  When the courts did a careful examination, nearly all of the "illegal" registrations proved to be a misunderstanding on the part of those claiming voter fraud.  In fact, election fraud is quite an old problem, and the Republicans have been very guilty of it.  This came to a particular head in November 2000.  Using a technique called "caging", legitimate voters with recent address changes in districts tending to vote Democratic were sent a letter.  The addresses included soldiers recently called to duty, college students, and others who would likely be living at a temporary address.  The subject of the letter contained harmless Republican politicing, but the trick was on the envelope itself, which said "Do Not Forward".  Letters returned to sender would be used to generate a list, which was sent to a cooperative voter registration officer to remove those names from the list of registered voters.  At least 40,000 such names were removed from Florida polls shortly before the election of 2000.  The official (not recounted) result from this election was Bush winning by 537 votes.  When attempts to recount the ballots that were cast were made, Republican troublemakers disrupted the recount effort, culminated in the Republican-dominated supreme court determining that it was impossible to complete a recount in the time available.  In the election of 2004, evidence for hundreds of thousands of miscounted or bogus votes in Ohio, Florida and other swing states--more than enough to change the result and consistent with the surprising difference between exit poll results and the final tally.

In 2012, many states had efforts to disenfranchise voters by requiring them to have some piece of ID that would be difficult to obtain if they were poor--generally called "voter suppression laws".  The courts overturned most of these, but several Republican operatives openly admitted that the strategy was disenfranchisement of voters likely to vote Democratic.

William F Buckley was a master of techniques that would confuse or quiet his opponent.  The simplest and most frequently used was to shout louder--Bill O'Reilly and a number of others frequently use this technique today.  But another was to say something that would leave his opponent confused or startled, during which time Buckley would prattle on about his own position, leaving the quieted opponent looking helpless and foolish.  During a panel discussion after the TV nuclear winter movie "The Day After", Buckley said "But don't you think [the movie] is tendentious?"  It was obvious that nobody else on the panel knew what the word meant, but didn't want to admit it.  (I had to look it up.  Tendentious means "intending to promote a particular point of view, especially a controversial one")   The correct response was "yes, of course it is, that's the whole point of the movie."

The Republicans strategy in the late 90s and early '00s was to create a "Permanent Republican Majority", to make sure they'd preserve power even if they couldn't win it legitimately. In quite a few states, they've gerrymandered congressional districts to the point that even though there were a clear majority of Democratic votes, the states sent a Republican congressional delegation.  They've been very good at winning the elections that counted for redistricting: 2000, 2010, by hook or by crook, and have used those wins to retain power against fairly severe defeats.

The current US Senate filibuster is another illustration: if the majority can't muster 60%, the minority can block any measure or nomination, simply by saying so.

Suspension of Due Process

Several recent cases have illustrated how wrong it is to suspend due process.  There is never a crime so heinous, or a case so cut and dried, that due process can be suspended.  These cases include the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case, the Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif  Guantanamo case, and the Indian gang rape case.

In only one of these cases is there clear evidence that a crime had been committed by the person being held.  In that case, the evidence is so clear, and the outrage so widespread, that few lawyers wanted to take the case for fear of social repercussions.  This an outrage almost as bad as the original crime.   The lawyer is not responsible for the crime; they are responsible for seeing that due process is properly observed.  Being associated with a repugnant criminal should reflect on the lawyer as heroic.  In India, it may take some education to get this point across, but even in this country, political ads attack defense lawyers for playing their role in due process.

Manning may have committed a crime, or he may have merely committed an act of whistleblowing, but it seems clear that holding him in solitary confinement for many months or even years, is much more severe than any crime that Manning himself may have committed.  The harm he may have caused is mainly that carefully maintained secret relationships between the state department and some fairly bad actors came to light.  This may make it harder to cultivate such relationships in the future.  But Assange and the newspapers he was working with had made it clear that he would cooperate with the state department to minimize this.  Instead, the state department refused, leaving Assange no recourse but go through with his release.  The first murders committed by the Apache in 2007 were a clear case of the Fog of War.  The helicopter gunners saw a camera with a big lens and mistook it for an RPG.  Through careful review of the video, there appeared to be at most two guns, probably AK-47s, in the group, and it's clear in hindsight that these were there to protect the photographers in an area that had recently been a hot battle.  This was terrible and should have been used to teach the pilots and gunners to be more careful.  But the subsequent shooting of the van (containing two children) attempting to rescue victims was a war crime.   Instead, the messengers, Manning and Assange, have been treated as criminals.  Manning has not had anything even resembling due process.  The guys who laughed when they killed photographers and children haven't either.

The criminal justice system is imperfect.  Thousands of innocent have been wrongly punished and millions of guilty have not been.  Trials often become media circuses.  That the system is imperfect is not a reason to ignore it.  It is a reason to keep trying to make it better.