"For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular"

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

A chilling excerpt from this Corrente post, cross-posted to Daily Kos

...It’s conventional wisdom (says Krugman) among many economic schools, not just the left, that economics drives politics, and not the other way round. Economics is seen as more fundamental than politics, certainly more fundamental than electoral politics. Economic trends are deep tides, and political changes are mere waves, froth on the surface.

Yet if you look at the history of the last thirty or so years, it seems (says Krugman) that conventional wisdom has been stood on its head, and that politics drove economics.

And that is our history as we know it. Starting in the 1970s, at about the time of the Lewis Powell memo, an interlocking network of right wing billionaires and theocrats began to fund the institutions whose dominance we take for granted today: The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, the Brookings Institute (over time), and on and on. During this period, College Republican operatives like Rove, Abramoff, and Gary Bauer became important figures in this network, as did the ex-Trotskyite neocons who broke away from the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party. The period was also marked by the steady retreat of the press from reporting, under twin pressures from the right “working the refs”, as Eric Alterman put it, and winger billionaire owners slashing news coverage in favor of “entertainment,” and by the steady advance of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and, later, by Matt Drudge on the web. And if you got hooked into that network, you got the cradle-to-grave protection typical of socialism: You always had a job, whether as a “fellow” or “scholar” at the AEI, a shouting head on Crossfire, as a columnist, as a contractor, as a political appointee or staffer, or as a lobbyist, and so on and on and on. You always got funding. You were made. Just for the sake of having an easy label for this dense network of institutions, operatives, ideologues, and Republican Party figures, let’s call it the Conservative Movement (instead of HRC’s* Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, since it’s not really a conspiracy, except possibly an emergent one. The billionaires don’t — except for Scaife during the Arkansas project, or Rupert Murdoch playing editor — generally pick up the phone and give orders; rather, they manage the Conservative Movement like an investment portfolio of entertainment properties; some start-ups (Politico), some stars (FOX), some cash cows (Limbaugh), some dogs (American Spectator)). Slowly but surely, well funded and well organized Conservatives pushed their ideas from unthinkable, to radical, to acceptable, to sensible, to popular, and finally into policy, in a process described as The Overton Window. As surely and ruthlessly, progressive ideas were marginalized, and then silenced altogether. And spending what it took, the winger billionaires used the Conservative Movement to restructure politics, and having restructured politics, economics. To their economic benefit.

For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular. At the micro level, for example, if you want to create an aristocracy, then you want to eliminate any taxes on inherited wealth, despite what Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might say about the values entailed by that project. So, the Conservative Movement goes to work, develops and successfully propagates the term “death tax” — which they may even believe in, as if sincerity were the point — and voila! Whoever thought that “family values” would translate to “feudal values” and dynastic wealth? At the macro level, their ROI has been spectacular as well. Real wages have been flat for a generation; unions have been disempowered; the powers of corporations greatly increased; government has become an agent for the corporations, rather than a protector of the people; the safety net has been shredded; and so on and on and on.



The picture tells the story. The Conservative Movement succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the billionaires who invested in it. Despite the remarkable gains that we have made in productivity, they creamed most of it off.

Today, in 2007, the Conservative Movement is in runaway mode, like a reactor with no control rods or a car with no brakes. Ideologically, the Movement began as a drive to roll back the New Deal in reaction (see Peter Arno’s wonderful New Yorker cartoon nearby) to the hated FDR**. But now, with no checks, the winger billionaires have begun to roll us farther back to the Darwinian conditions of 1890s Gilded Age, and, with the destruction of habeas corpus, roll us all the way back to the time, before the Magna Carta, when the king’s word was law. Any limitation, any limitation at all, on the corporate powers that create the income streams from which the billionaires feed must be removed; hence the nonsensical idea that corporations, as fictive persons, have free speech; hence the aggrandizement of executive power, with huge and secret money flows to well-connected firms; hence the destruction of Constitutional government. (All this takes place against a background of looting and asset stripping on an imperial, Roman scale, of which the “subprime” “crisis” is but the latest of many examples.)

The bottom line (says Krugman): Politics drives economics, and not the other way round...

[C_U_L8R]

1. according to that chart

they should be loving the clintons

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

3. Billionaires do well in booming economies, but so does everyone else

What is striking about the Bush era is that Billionaires have done well in a declining economy.

Billionaires made out well in the Clinton era in both relative and absolute terms. The poor and working and middle classes also did well in absolute terms, because the pie was expanding.

Under Bush, Billionaires stopped paying their damn taxes, so for them this crummy economy is as "good" as it was under Clinton.

For the rest of us, the difference is pretty plain.

[Tactical Progressive]

2. I'd agree with that thesis

The reason you're hearing the conventional wisdom that 'economics drives politics' is in fact the very thesis being argued here.

Once Bill Clinton's fiscal and trade decisions along with Al Gore's brilliant plan to commercialize the DARPA internet created - yes CREATED - the economic boom of the 1990's, America's right-wing mainstream media settled across the board on a conventional wisdom that 'Presidents don't really do much to effect the economy'. Democrats, essentially, just happened to be there.

Had Georgie's just-around-the-corner economic resurgance ever materialized every six months for the past seven years, you would have seen the media instantaneously switch direction on their entire conventional wisdom to tout the wonders of tax cuts and by extension the integrity and efficacy of Publican fiscal ideology. Publicans, in short, would have made the economy productive, or in this formulation, politics would be driving economics. But only if success were generated by right-wing Chicago bullshit.

Georgie's three-trillion dollar 'supply-side' scam, however, didn't work. It's been like one long, long recession for the middle class since Alan Greenspan strangled the Clinton-Gore economy for the Publicans during the 2000 election cycle. And right on through Bush's entire tenure it has continued. So there's no reason for the media establishment to turn on an ideological dime and suddenly promote how politics drives economics, because Publican policies haven't driven economic success.

The conventional wisdom, that politics is economically meaningless, continues to serve America's ugly ownership caste and their media frontlines, from eight years of Dem economic success through another eight years of Publican economic failure. That's the only reason this argument even exists.

The rules of this game are simple:
1) Politics doesn't matter to economics when Dem policies are economically successful or Publican policies are economic failures
2) Politics would most certainly be driving economics were Pub policies successful or Dem policies failures

The media would reinforce that a thousand times a day in every subtle way.