A Moment of Awe and Joy: Susan Boyle

This blog, and my book, have been pretty unremitting in relaying downbeat news and analysis. So I thought it would not hurt to post a story, and some links, that will bring a joyful lump in the throat to even the most hard-bitten of politicos and wonks.

I am often the last to learn about current fads and popular culture, so I stumbled across the story of Susan Boyle in Saturday's New York Times: Unlikely Singer is YouTube Sensation. If you are one of the few remaining sentients unaware of Susan, as I was, I suggest you first read the story, and then go to YouTube to hear her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream."

Susan Boyle is a 47 year old, unemployed, unmarried church volunteer from tiny Blackburn, Scotland, who competed in the "Britain's Got Talent" show. Both her performance, and the reaction of the glamorous judges, is something to behold. As the writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote in the Huffington Post, the audience and judges "were initially blinded by entrenched stereotypes of age, class, gender and Western beauty standards. . . until her book was opened and everybody saw what was inside."

Read the story, then watch the video at this link.

You might also want to follow this with the video of the other performance mentioned in the Times article, a soaring rendition of Puccini's "Nessum dorma" by Welsh cellphone salesman Paul Potts. It is at this link.

Bartels Finds Declining Equality and Influence

Caleb Hamman

chamman@butler.edu

Economic and political inequality are among the most significant aspects of U.S. decline. Both topics are the focus of the most recent work of Princeton Political Scientist Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. In his book, Bartels sets out to analyze the political causes and consequences of economic inequality, arguing that these are both substantial and urgently relevant to alleviating injustice.

Naturally, Bartels begins by assessing the extent to which economic inequality exists in the United States. After detailed review of current literature and government data, Bartels offers findings very much in line with those of The End of the American Century, essentially that “current levels of inequality rival those of the Roaring Twenties,” making it fitting to speak of a “New Gilded Age” or a “retrogression of historic scope.” As Mason points out, this sort of inequality can lead to monstrous disparities, such as CEOs making more than 500 times their average employee, and has effectively caused the United States to become more unequal than “any advanced industrialized country.”

Like The End of the American Century, Bartels finds that current inequality is not a recent phenomenon, but has been growing sharply since the 1970s. Although this observation is generally accepted, Bartels then goes on to make a less mainstream claim—that increasing economic inequality is a largely a result of public policy. While Bartels readily concedes that economic factors like globalization and technology have contributed to inequality, he staunchly refuses to attribute the entire dynamic to arcane “market forces” or inculpable “economic realities.” Rather, a significant role is played by political intervention, an idea Mason also highlights by discussing issues like the “elimination of the federal welfare system” and the “stagnation of the minimum wage.”

Bartels goes one step further. He argues that U.S. economic inequality is “profoundly shaped by partisan politics”—specifically that “middleclass and poor families” have “fared much worse under Republican presidents than they have under Democratic presidents.” This is not necessarily a novel notion, but rarely has it been supported by such detailed analysis. Using exclusively Census Bureau data and controlling for non-partisan variables such as international crisis, Bartels conclusively demonstrates that the incomes of most have grown at substantially higher rates under Democratic presidents than under their Republican counterparts.

After illustrating his findings with three chapter-length case studies, Bartels turns to his second major point—the political consequences of inequality. Here, his research is particularly disturbing. In calculating the recent responsiveness of U.S. Senators to their constituents, Bartels finds that:

Senators’ roll call votes were quite responsive to the ideological views of their middle- and  high-income constituents. In contrast, the views of low-income constituents had no discernible impact on the voting behavior of the senators…the statistical results are quite consistent in suggesting that the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution were utterly irrelevant.

Examining the potential causes of this mass political exclusion, Bartels finds that “biases” in “senators’ responsiveness to rich and poor constituents are not primarily due to differences between rich and poor constituents in turnout, political knowledge, or contacting.” Rather, “the data are consistent with the hypothesis that senators represented their campaign contributors to the exclusion of other constituents.” As Mason puts it, “When people do not…contribute to political campaigns, they are less likely to be listened to by legislators or policymakers, and their interests are less likely to be taken into account in the political process.”

In analyzing the totality of his findings, Bartels delivers a particularly sobering assessment:

In Aristotle’s terms, our political system seems to be functioning not as a 'democracy,' but as an 'oligarchy.' If we insist on flattering ourselves by referring to is as a democracy, we should be clear that is a starkly unequal democracy.

Despite such foreboding, Bartels attempts to end with a more hopeful thought: Since inequality has been largely been brought about by conscious political action, there seems to be potential for prescriptive change. As Bartels puts it, “We can make these choices.” But as Mason points out, we are quickly running out of time.

"The End of the American Century" on Kindle!

The End of the American Century is now available electronically on "Kindle" from Amazon.com. I myself am still a little skeptical of this method of reading books, but even so I think it is cool! And the price is right!

How Torture Hurts and Weakens the U.S.

Mark Danner is our contemporary Diogenes, searching (often vainly) for the honest man and using dogged empiricism to establish the truth. His focus in recent years has been on the U.S. use of torture and his latest report, in the New York Review of Books, is "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means."

As a followup to my recent post on the Spanish court considering criminal charges against U.S. officials for the justification and use of torture, I offer these two quotations about the effects of U.S. torture on our values and our security.

The first is from President Obama, in an interview on 60 Minutes:

I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantánamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against US interests all around the world.... The whole premise of Guantánamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.... Are we going to just keep on going until the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that’s really going to make us safer?

And Danner's response to Obama's sentiments:

This is as clear and concise a summary of the damage wrought by torture as one is likely to get. Torture has undermined the United States’ reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo.

Canadian Perspectives on "The End of the American Century"

Perhaps it is not so surprising that I have gotten more reactions to my book from outside the U.S. than inside it--especially from Canada. I have been interviewed on Canadian national television and radio, and have received more emails about the book from Canada than from any other country (including the U.S.).

The following is a recent email from Ann Ridyard from Montreal, who is a retired manager with a manufacturing company. Her thoughts, I venture to say, reflect those of many from north of the border. She gave me permission to post this, with her name. My responses to her points are indicated in brackets [].

-------------
Dr. Mason,

I finished reading your superb book The End of the American Century recently
and I wanted to write to thank you for publishing such a well-documented and
interesting book. You put into words all my thoughts and observations
concerning life in America at the beginning of this century.

As a Canadian living in Montreal, I feel that I received better information
from non-U.S. based media outlets than you did in the USA during the Bush
years. I was elated when Mr. Obama was elected as the new President, his
arrival could not have arrived at a better time.

I would like to offer a few comments.

1- Chapter 8, the World Sours on the US: I believe that most people felt
that the first Bush presidency was stolen from Al Gore. Furthermore, Bush
was still an unknown quantity. However, when Bush was re-elected for a
second term after the invasion of Iraq and the discovery not of weapons of
mass destruction but rather the discovery of Bush/Cheney lies, most
non-Americans were astounded and that caused the 'souring' to extend to the
American people at large.

[I had a similar response, Ann. I thought it was bad enough that this playboy millionaire was elected in the first place. It was his re-election in 2004 that prompted my writing of this book. See my earlier post on "The End of America's Shame")]

2- Military service was obligatory for many years and obeying a superior
officer was drummed into the population. This respect and blind obedience
to authority could be a reason why the people believe the president no
matter what.

[I am also astounded by the tendency of the public--and the media--to blindly accept whatever the president has to say. But I don't think obligatory military service explains this, since the military draft in the U.S. was ended in 1973. In my view, which I discuss in my book, it is the poor state of public education in the U.S., which erodes the ability of Americans to think critically about public affairs, and to effectively evaluate data and evidence]

3- This is just a thought, but could it be that keeping a large segment of
the population in poverty assures that there will always be an ample supply
of soldiers?

[I do not think there is any conspiracy here to stimulate the flow of young people into the military by keeping people poor. But I do think that the high rates of poverty, and the poor career prospects for many young people, does lead them into the military]

4- I believe that the G.W. Bush presidency came as close to a disguised
dictatorship as it could get. It is fortunate that the presidency is
limited to two terms, if not for that, I think Bush would have tried to
steal it another time. We all breathe easier now that Mr. Obama is
president.

[I agree! G.W. Bush, with his abuse of executive authority and of fundamental human and Constitutional rights--especially habeas corpus--took us farther away from democratic politics than we have been in many generations. Obama is, indeed, a breath of fresh air!]

Once again, thank you for your fine book, I have recommended it to family
and friends. I continue to read and reflect on your comments posted on the
'endoftheamericancentury' website.

Yours truly,

Ann Ridyard

China Now Has Top 3 Banks in World

China now has the three largest banks in the world, measured by market capitalization. This is a stunning change, and yet another indicator of China's rapid emergence as a global economic power. According to a New York Times article, three years ago, China did not have a single bank among the world's top 20. Now it has the top three and four of the top ten.

The United States, due in part to the banking and financial crisis, has dropped considerably in global banking. In 2006, the U.S. had 7 of the top 20 banks, including the top 2. Now it has just 3 of the top 20 and the largest, Morgan Stanley, is rated fifth.

If banking is so crucial to market economies--as Americans are constantly being reminded that it is--then the decline of US banks, in combination with the rise of Chinese ones, provides another example of the relative decline of the United States.

Furthermore, it seems that the Chinese economy, and its banking system, is in position to weather the storm of the global financial and economic meltdown. Most of the big banks in the West lost 20% or more of market value in the first two months of 2009. In China, the top two banks lost only 3% and 8% in value, respectively and the third largest, the Bank of China, actually increased by 5%.

As the New York Times notes, while most of the world is in financial collapse, "China's economy has suddenly become too big--and too healthy, expected to grow by at least 6.3 percent this year--for the rest of the world to ignore."

Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who oversaw White House Asia policy from 1998 to 2000, sees China as one of the first countries to emerge from the current crisis and one of the very few countries that will emerge from it "without having high levels of government debt."

Lecture on the Rising Powers and the Decline of the US

On April 1, I gave a lecture on "The Rising Powers and the Decline of the U.S." as part of the Foreign Policy Association's "Great Decisions" series, sponsored by the Mid-North Shepherd's Center in Indianapolis. A video of this presentation (50 minutes) including pictures of the slides in my powerpoint presentation, is viewable at this link. (You might want to fast-forward through the first few minutes, where we struggled with the microphones and audio!).