Complex. I misplaced a point responding to Todd Purdum's Kerry piece yesterday, and I want to make it now because I think it goes to something larger about the Times' basic politics.

Quoting a statement in National Review Online that tries to smear John Kerry as an "angry antiwar protester" back in the day, Purdum demurs a bit in the next sentence, the one that begins his report proper: "The full picture is complex," he says. What I didn't note yesterday is what "complex," as Purdum uses it here, signifies in journalist-speak, outside its deployment in Kerry meme-building.

What the NRO says is bullshit [thinks Purdum]; Kerry wasn't some radical antiwar fire-breather. But I can't say it's bullshit, because then why am I writing this? "Complex" lets me off the hook—that puts the story firmly in good old-fashioned the-truth-is-in-the-middle territory, and from there I can run with all this rehashed thirty-year-old crap that doesn't lead anywhere.

[Hey baby, William Safire's not the only writer who can read minds.]

Why do I care about this? Purdum mentions later in his piece that Kerry's opposition to the war "arouse[d] intense passions" at the time, and still arouses them now. That's just another version of the "complex" dodge—and yet it points to an actual story that might have emerged from this assignment, one that would have examined the political passions animating attacks on Kerry, examined how opposition research fuels / is fueled by those passions, one that could have thought about the uses and abuses of Vietnam-era history and imagery in current politics. Purdum might, for example, have been led to notice the recent production of John Kerry-Jane Fonda photos, both the genuine one his story mentions and the parallel fake it ignores. He might have informed his readers about how right-wing attack politics works, and how it's shaping up to work in the current election cycle.

Of course, writing and running a story like that would have required imagination on the part of Purdum and his editors—neither side being apparently much given to the exercise of imagination, if the recent past is any guide. I offer the story-that-might-have-been as a kind of thought experiment: could such a piece appear on A1, or elsewhere in the Times as we presently know it? I don't think it could. The story I'm imagining proceeds from the assumption that the smear isn't just false, but that it's illegitimate: that the smear needs not to be reported for its content but to be examined, as evidence of a political pathology.

Purdum won't say that NRO is full of shit, not because he's a wing-nut himself but because, paradoxically, he's a liberal—a Times liberal. The political hallmark of Times-style Establishment liberalism—byproduct, perhaps, of the absolute value it places on consensus as the guarantor of social peace—is the automatic way it invests the holders of institutional power, governmental or corporate, with legitimacy. If you're in office, if you're somebody that somebody in office listens to and associates with, what you say is to be taken seriously on its own terms. Which is all well and good, I suppose, unless you're at a point where the people in office and their pals are crazies and liars and thugs whose chief desire in life is to take a sledgehammer to the joint before absconding with whatever loot they can collect.

Bereft equally of a theory of power and a theory of history (those are, perhaps, the same thing), Times liberalism can do nothing but naturalize the current political landscape, whatever it may be. The truth is always in the middle—but the center can't hold unless it blinds itself to the direction it's being shoved in. And that, kids, is one of the ways in which creeping fascism manages to creep.

posted by michael  3:26:21 PM  
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Be very afraid, part 2. As a follow-on to Tuesday's post about the Saudi oil story, I'll note this article from Power and Interest News Report ("China's Demand for Energy is Reshaping Power Structures Around the World")—thanks to Enduring Friedman for the link. The article doesn't address the concerns about Saudi production that Jeff Gerth wrote about in the Times, but it does mention the implications for the global energy system of China's rapid economic expansion. As of last year, China has surpassed Japan to become the second largest oil importer in the world.

The seemingly endless demand for energy has persuaded China to focus much of its attention on finding foreign sources of oil and gas. China sits on major deposits of coal, but the government is trying to move towards cleaner burning sources of energy for environmental and health concerns. Chinese crude oil imports rose by 31 percent in 2003, at an increased cost of 55 percent. The higher prices that Beijing was forced to pay last year have helped to focus China's efforts on establishing a reliable and steady source of oil.

posted by michael  1:51:03 PM  
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Greenspan and the Social Security swindle. Newspapers are usually weak on history, and coverage of Alan Greenspan's House testimony last week on tax policy and the Social Security system was no exception. Imagine my surprise when, a few short days after printing Edmund Andrews' see-no-evil coverage of Greenspan's appearance, the Times offers Week in Review space to David Cay Johnston ("The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept") to put the record straight.

Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.

Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan [em. mine], who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.

On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance. ... This year someone making $50,000 will pay $6,200 in Social Security taxes, half deducted from their paycheck and half paid by their employer. That total is about $2,000 more than the government needs in order to pay benefits to retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled, government budget documents show.

So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?

The advance payments have all been spent.

Congress did not lock away the Social Security surplus, as many Americans believe. Instead, it borrowed the surplus, replacing the cash with Treasury notes, and spent the loan proceeds paying the ordinary expenses of running the federal government.

Only twice, in 1999 and 2000, did Congress balance the federal budget without borrowing from the surplus.

Read the whole article to get a measure of the dishonesty implicit in Greenspan's recent testimony on the issue. [Good stuff elsewhere: Slacktivist usefully offers the Greenspan story in parable form; Billmon excerpts a CNN transcript in which Lou Dobbs, interviewing Johnston, experiences what looks like a Damascus moment, complete with graphs.]

A government that funds itself by taking disproportionately from the less wealthy is a government that in effect redistributes wealth upward. That seems a pretty simple proposition to me. I don't take it as shocking news, or as news at all: the fate of the so-called Social Security "lockbox" just illustrates the unexpected magnitude, in one dimension, of that redistribution. My question is, When are the Democrats finally going to learn how to talk about taxes and income in a way that makes this immediately apparent to the electorate? When are they going to learn how to tell people that private wealth is maintained at a social cost, as a social choice—and that the illusory (lottery-culture) freedom to get rich that Americans are supposed to value is paid for by giving up real and available freedoms: like, say, the freedom from fear of financial catastrophe that a universal health care system would buy?

posted by michael  1:22:58 PM  
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