Open Mic October 5

Mule, you’re con­flat­ing two sep­a­rate issues, an eco­nomic one and a polit­i­cal one.

Eco­nomic: It has been pointed out that busi­nesses (not “con­ser­v­a­tives” but “busi­nesses”) are mak­ing record prof­its. CEOs and other top cor­po­rate offi­cers of big busi­nesses are get­ting record bonuses. There are large com­pa­nies that are pay­ing record div­i­dends to share­hold­ers. But hir­ing and increases in wages and ben­e­fits are being kept rather low.

This isn’t being done for polit­i­cal rea­sons, but for eco­nomic ones. Not to “defeat Obama” but to keep prof­its and earn­ings high for the top 1% or so. I sus­pect they’d be act­ing the same way regard­less of who was in office, the only dif­fer­ence being that a Repub­li­can in the White House would be assist­ing their efforts.

It is a fact that big busi­nesses are sit­ting on immense amounts of unin­vested money — on the order of $2 tril­lion or more. But that isn’t to “defeat Obama”, but only because con­sumers don’t have money to spend. They aren’t being nefar­i­ous about this. They’re being practical.

Polit­i­cal: Con­ser­v­a­tives (par­tic­u­larly elected Repub­li­cans) have been inten­tion­ally stonewalling and fil­i­bus­ter­ing and oth­er­wise killing any leg­is­la­tion that Pres­i­dent Obama pro­poses, even (and espe­cially) items that would improve the econ­omy (exam­ples: the Amer­i­can Jobs Act, Oba­macare, stim­u­lus spend­ing). They’ve even been oppos­ing things they them­selves have, in the past, sup­ported. This is cer­tainly being done with­out regard to the harm it causes the econ­omy. In fact, the harm is a ben­e­fit, because (Repub­li­cans imag­ine) it makes the Pres­i­dent look bad.

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Your con­fla­tion of these two issues (“con­ser­v­a­tives are self­ishly sit­ting on money (not invest­ing in stocks, not hir­ing, not ‘bet­ting on Amer­ica’ … all to make the num­bers look bad so Obama would even­tu­ally be voted out of office”) isn’t any­thing any­one here has said.

We have said that busi­nesses are sit­ting on money, both to increase their prof­its and because con­sumers don’t have extra cash to spend. And we have said that con­ser­v­a­tives are oppos­ing the Pres­i­dent in order to (they hope) ensure his defeat. But these are two dif­fer­ent phe­nom­ena, and you are the only one here who has put them into the same breath.

I would be curi­ous to know if you have found any other writ­ers or com­men­ta­tors else­where who make the claims you put into the mouths of “Team Blue.” Care to fur­nish links?

Mule, in your defense, I do recall Bart dePalma say­ing that the investor class is engag­ing in a “cap­i­tal strike” — that is, he claims con­ser­v­a­tive investors are inten­tion­ally with­hold­ing invest­ments in order to harm Obama because (Bart says) the investor class don’t like Pres­i­dent Obama’s poli­cies. But that’s Bart’s argu­ment, and he never offered any evi­dence to sup­port it. Nor could Bart be con­sid­ered a mem­ber of “Team Blue.”

Mule, just so you know, I didn’t put any of your com­ments into mod­er­a­tion, and I don’t think I ever have.

For myself, I accept your inabil­ity to fur­nish a sin­gle link sup­port­ing your posi­tion. Thanks for the con­fir­ma­tion of that.

Mule, let’s also reit­er­ate what you said to start this par­tic­u­lar bit of con­ver­sa­tion.

Want an exam­ple of this kind of para­noia from Team Blue? How about the con­stant chirp­ing we’ve been hear­ing from The Left month after month of this incred­i­bly weak recov­ery about how con­ser­v­a­tives are self­ishly sit­ting on money (not invest­ing in stocks, not hir­ing, not “bet­ting on Amer­ica”) when they had every rea­son to be doing those things, all to make the num­bers look bad so Obama would even­tu­ally be voted out of office.

So, out of this “con­stant chirp­ing we’ve been hear­ing from The Left month after month”, you are unable to pro­vide a sin­gle exam­ple. Nor have you heard any­one on this site, in response to your com­plaint, sup­port or defend the view­point that you claim is “con­stant” from “The Left.” In fact, we’ve specif­i­cally dis­agreed with it.

So your “exam­ple of this kind of para­noia from Team Blue” doesn’t seem very con­vinc­ing, nor ter­ri­bly preva­lent. Again, I don’t deny that you can find some­one who agrees with it — I bet it’s pos­si­ble to find some­one who agrees with nearly any posi­tion one can imag­ine. But it doesn’t appear to be a very good exam­ple of what you wanted to show.

In your response, you failed to note (or at least chose not to com­ment
on) Mule’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal men­tion of the “ter­ror threat alert”, and
that it amounted to a deflec­tion to his orig­i­nal accusations.

Indeed. I chose not to be deflected.

Mule left a trap there that I didn’t want to deal with before we estab­lished that the orig­i­nal the­sis was faulty. Now that we’ve done that, it’s worth address­ing the sec­ond point.

There is no doubt, and no ques­tion, that the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion politi­cized every aspect of the 9–11 attacks, and used them for cyn­i­cal par­ti­san polit­i­cal pur­poses, includ­ing the bull­shit “ter­ror threat level” propaganda.

Mule, being well-​​informed, knows this is also well-​​documented. He threw that in as a way to imply some­thing about his own cred­i­bil­ity and the cred­i­bil­ity of his accu­sa­tion. To wit, had we been dis­tracted by this sec­ond and unre­lated topic, some of us (myself included) would have pointed out that yes indeed, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion mis­used the non­sense “be afraid, be afraid!” warn­ings just prior to every impor­tant Con­gres­sional vote and every elec­tion. Mule would then have said, “Ah ha!! See! I told you left­ists are para­noid! That proves my first point as well!”

It’s like if one of us were to say, “Repub­li­cans believe in uni­corns! They also are con­vinced FDR spent much of his pres­i­dency in a wheel­chair!” Since the sec­ond (unre­lated) charge is actu­ally true, we can then claim, “See! We were right! There­fore, Repub­li­cans also believe in unicorns!”

I chose first to dis­pel the mis­un­der­stand­ing that led to Mule’s con­fla­tion of cor­po­rate eco­nomic deci­sions with the par­ti­san polit­i­cal games that Repub­li­cans have indis­putably been play­ing, and then just ignore the other game Mule wanted to play.