In this interview, Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a former adviser to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, says the Obama administration has backed the Iranian government into a no-win situation—accept economic sanctions that will destroy the country economically, or risk a war with the United States and its allies that will destroy the country physically.

President Obama’s intentions toward Iran are, as usual, hard to interpret.  I have read commentators who say his earlier talk of dialogue with Iran a setup to show that the Iranians are unreasonable so that he could organize an anti-Iran coalition and justify anti-Iran sanctions, covert action and threats.  I have read commentators who say his anti-Iran sanctions and threats are a setup to neutralize war hawks in the United States and Israel.

Whatever his intentions, the threat to block Iran’s oil exports is a threat to destroy the Iranian economy.  The Iranian government must choose whether to surrender or fight.  The Obama administration would no doubt reply that all the Iranian government has to do to end the sanctions is to give up its nuclear program—that is, its ability to defend itself.  The Associated Press reported in my morning newspaper that Israeli hawks are openly pressing for an attack on Iran while the country is still unable to retaliate.

War to change the Iranian regime is a risky business.  We would risk loss of access to Persian Gulf oil and a worldwide economic crash.  We would risk military confrontation with China and other countries.  We would face the certainty that the surviving Iranians would be committed to revenge against the United States and Israel, and the likelihood of a new regime that actually would be completely fanatical and irrational.

Stepping back from this brink would be a risk to the President’s re-election.  Continuing in the present policy would be a risk to the country.  President Obama has said all options are on the table.  One of these ought to be diplomacy.

Click on The Iranian oil embargo blowback for insight from Pepe Escobar of Asia Times on the impact of an Iranian oil embargo on the economy of Europe and the rest of the world..

Hat tip for the video to Glenn Greenwald.

Click on The First Casualty of War to read an excellent post about the increasing number of incidents in which the troops of the U.S.-backed Afghan government shoot at American and NATO troops.

His web log is in my links menu at the right under “Links to friends.”

John D. HIcks’ classic 1931 book, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, told the story of the political revolt of farmers in the Great Plains and the South against that system.  I read this book in hope that it would offer lessons for reform in the present day.

Unlike today, farmers who worked the land were a large percentage of the American people, and a majority in some states.   They organized politically and eventually formed a third party whose leaders were regarded as both dangerous revolutionaries and ridiculous crackpots.  The populist goal — an agricultural economic based on prosperous small independent farmers — was not achieved.

But over time many of their ideas came to be enacted into law.  The lesson of the Populist era is that political reform is more than the art of the possible.  Sometimes it takes leaders who are able to redefine what is possible.

The Great Plains region’s economic distress arose partly from the way that region was settled.  The U.S. government opened up the Far West for settlement by giving large land grants to railroads, who in turn sold the land to settlers in order to have customers.  As a result, the Great Plains and Rockies were settled with lightning speed, compared to the Mississippi Valley in an earlier era.  But farmers on the new lands found themselves with heavy mortgage debt, working land that was less fertile than in the old Midwest and often subject to the monopoly power of a single shipper for their crops.

Most Great Plains farmers had large mortgages.  In those days the dollar was based on gold.  Economic activity increased faster than the gold supply and the purchasing power of the dollar continually increased.  This meant that, adjusted for deflation, the burden of debt constantly increased.

Poor farmers in the South also had to deal with debt and monopoly, as well as special problems of their own.  The whole region was impoverished and reduced to frontier-like conditions by defeat in the Civil War.  Many poor farmers, both black and white, were sharecroppers—tenants of big landowners who paid a share of their crops as rent.  Often the sharecroppers had to borrow money from the landlords each year to financing that year’s planting.  Often they were required to buy necessities from the landlord’s store.  They, too, had debts which they had no realistic hope of paying off.

In the economic depression of the 1870s, which historians now think was as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s, railroads, banks and agricultural middlemen were in a strong enough position to make sure they got paid no matter what.  Individual farmers were not.

Poor farmers in the Great Plains and the South formed state Farmers’ Alliances, which shared information on best farming practices, formed co-operatives to maket their crops and endorsed political candidates.  The state Alliances coalesced into a Northern Alliance and a Southern Alliance; the latter had a Colored Alliance as a kind of auxiliary.

Hicks provided a lot of information about the leaders and inner workings of the Northern Alliance and the Southern Alliance, but, reflecting the attitudes of his time, told virtually nothing about the Colored Alliance.  It would be interesting to understand the workings of a segregated political alliance between blacks and whites in that era.

Farmers in the Great Plains, disillusioned with the two major parties, formed a People’s Party, which came to be known as the Populist Party.  The populists advocated railroad regulation, banking reform, help to farmers in marketing their crops and coinage of silver to expand the money supply.  The silver issue came to dominate populist thinking, and gained their platform the support of mining interests in the Rocky Mountain states.

The People’s Party captured a number of state legislatures and governorships, but their inexperienced and often eccentric leaders accomplished little in the few years they were in power.  In 1892, they ran James B. Weaver for President.  He carried Kansas, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada and got electoral votes in North Dakota and Oregon—as strong or stronger in the silver mining states as in the farm states.

The populist movement in the South was stymied by the race issue.  Democratic leaders argued that, by splitting the white vote, the populists threatened white supremacy.  Many populists remained within the Democratic Party.  Some of the most rabid racists, such as Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina, were also economic radicals, by the standards of the day.

In 1896, the Democratic Party adopted most of the populist platform and nominated William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska for President.  His main issue was expanding silver coinage.  The populists decided to support him rather than running their own candidate.  Bryan carried the South, the Great Plains and the Rockies, but was defeated by William McKinley, who received 51 percent of the popular vote and nearly two-thirds of the electoral vote.  After that the populists were never able to reconstitute the People’s Party.

The populists hoped to gain the support of industrial workers in the big cities, who has their own complaints about big business, but this didn’t happen.  The farmers and the industrial workers were just too different in terms of religion, ethnicity and cultural attitudes.  Neither did the populists gain much support among the prosperous farmers of the old Midwest and the East, who generally had more fertile land and less debt.  In American history, divisions based on region, race, religion and ethnic identity have usually overridden division based on economic class.

Support for populism waned in the 1890s.  Economic recovery brought a measure of prosperity to the farmers.  Gold strikes in the Klondike, Australia and elsewhere brought an increase in the gold supply and an end to deflation.

Mainstream politicians such as Grover Cleveland, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt regarded the populists as dangerous revolutionaries and also as crackpots.  But as Hicks pointed out, many populist proposals came to be adopted.  The federal government tried to support crop prices.  Railroads were regulated.  Monopolies were in theory outlawed.  The Federal Reserve System provided some control over the money supply.

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Why has there been such a change in the regional base of the Democrats, who supposedly represent working people, and the Republicans, who supposedly represent big business?

The usual explanation is that, in our era, issues such as abortion rights, gay rights and school prayer, which did not exist in the Populist era, override economic issues.  While there is some truth in that, I think the more important reason is that, just as in the Populist era, neither party represents the economic interest of struggling working people.  This was pointed out by Thomas Frank, in What’s the Matter With Kansas?  and Joe Bageant, in Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Click on What Good Are Democrats? for my earlier post on Frank’s and Bageant’s books.

Click on What’s the Matter With Liberals? for Thomas Frank’s analysis of the Democrats’ failure to be populists.

Currently a strong effort is being made to discredit the New Deal by opponents of public works, unemployment insurance and other government programs to revive the economy in recession.

The case against the New Deal is that unemployment never fell to pre-1929 levels until the coming of World War Two.  But by other economic measures, the New Deal was in fact a success.  The top chart above measures Gross Domestic Product in terms of by what percentage it was higher than its low point in March 1933.  The bottom chart above measures industrial production by what percentage it was higher or lower than in October 1929 when the Great Depression began.

The two charts showed that economic recovery began when President Roosevelt took office, and faltered only in 1937 when he decided that his economic recovery program had achieved its goal and did not need to be continued.  Full recovery came in the run-up to World War Two.

Now it is impossible to be certain to what degree recovery was due to the New Deal and to what degree it was due to the natural swing of the economic cycle.   The only way you could have proof one way or the other would be to have two timelines, one with a New Deal and one without, which is impossible outside science fiction.   The case for the New Deal is that economic recovery started to falter in 1937 with President Franklin Roosevelt started to curtail government spending and return to a balanced budget.  The only way you could convince me that the New Deal was futile would be to show me a nation that brought about economic recovery through economic austerity.

Here is a chart showing the rise and fall of employment during the 1920s and 1930s.  Raw employment numbers give an overly favorable impression, because a certain amount of job growth is needed just to stay even—that is, just to keep up with population growth.  Even so, the chart shows that the U.S. economy did generate millions of new jobs during the New Deal period.

Here is the perspective of Charles W. McMillion, former associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Policy Institute and a former contributing editor of the Harvard Business Review.

The official U.S. Business Cycle Dating Committee established that the downturn that began in August 1929 ended in March 1933 with the remarkable economic expansion that started within days of FDR’s bold—if trial and error—New Deal programs.  By any normal definition, the Great Depression had ended by late 1936, with all major indicators surpassing their previous peaks.

A second cyclical downturn officially began in May 1937 when FDR, always a fiscal conservative, mistakenly thought the economy had become self-sustaining and slashed public spending programs to balance the budget.  These harsh and premature spending cuts caused another severe recession that ended after 13 months in June 1938.

Even in this severe downturn, annual GDP did not fall back below its 1929 peak.  And although many suffered and most economic measures did fall back below their 1929 levels, not one fell anywhere close to its March 1933 low.  For example, although industrial production fell sharply in the 1937-38 recession, at its low point, in April 1938, it remained 49 percent above its level of March 1933.

When the economy again contracted sharply in late 1937 and early 1938, FDR quickly reversed course and rapid growth immediately began again. GDP soared by 10.9 percent in 1939 and industrial production soared by 23 percent. … …

Despite the new record peak in the number of jobs by late 1936, because of population growth and because more people were encouraged to seek jobs, the unemployment rate did remain very high until public spending programs truly exploded with the start of World War II.  But even here, it was again vastly expanded government spending, this time to fight the war, that ended high unemployment. … …

Myth and ideology aside, the data show that from 1933 through 1936 the New Deal produced double-digit annual growth in GDP, production, after-tax income and private investment, with strong consumer spending and job growth exceeding their peaks in the 1929 bubble.  The Great Depression ended by late 1936.

While a new, severe recession began in May 1937 because FDR prematurely slashed public spending on New Deal programs, rapid growth quickly resumed in late 1938 when funding was restored. … …

Today, the U.S. and the world again face extreme crises similar to those in the early days of the 1930s.  The largely unregulated private financial and commercial sector has utterly bankrupted itself.  … …

But history has shown that crisis can bring people together in common, public purpose or it can set them against one another. Our circumstances are far too dangerous to leave uncorrected the antigovernment disinformation and myths from the 1930s, and in our own generation.

Click on The “FDR Failed” Myth for McMillion’s complete article for Campaign for America’s Future, which was the source of the top two charts.

Click on Learning from the New Deal’s Mistakes for more on what the New Deal actually did.  [Added 1/31/12]

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Click on Basic Instructions for more like this.

Hat tip to Balloon Juice.

War had come to an end, but famine came in its place.  There were three men who each stole a sack of corn from different owners, but they were all caught.

The first owner brought his thief to the judge, and the maidens said everywhere that he had done right.

The second owner took the corn away from his thief and let him go in peace.  The maidens said he has done well.

The third owner went to the thief’s house, and when he saw what misery was there, he went and brought a waggon-load of necessaries to relieve their distress.  Frya’s maidens came around him and wrote his deed in the eternal book, and wiped out all his sins.  This was reported to the Eeremoeder, and she had it made known over the whole country.

==From a 13th century manuscript quoted by Making Light.

Political scientist Tom Ferguson tells the story.

In the mid-1980s, a group of insurgent Republicans broke with the long established norms governing how the U.S. House of Representatives transacted business.  Led by Newt Gingrich, it derided older Republican House leaders as timid, unimaginative, and too inclined to compromise with Democrats.  Self-styled “revolutionaries” launched vigorous public attacks on Democrats as they trumpeted their own agenda of deregulation, budget cuts, lower taxes, and a baker’s dozen of social issues, from abortion to opposition to all forms of gun control.

Result?  The House boiled over.  Statistical measures of Congressional behavior show that party line votes jumped sharply.

Gingrich and his allies were painfully aware that transforming the GOP’s gains at the presidential level into a true “critical realignment” of the political system as a whole required breaking the Democratic lock on Congress.  So they shattered all records for Congressional fundraising in their drive to get control of the House.  Their success in this and their parallel campaign to rally major parts of the media to their standard are what polarized the system.  The GOP insurgents emphasized fundraising, not just through the usual publicly reported vehicles like the national party committees, but also GOPAC, a political action committee that Gingrich had controlled since 1986, which operated mostly in secret.

In 1992, in the midst of a recession, the Republicans lost the White House. But their dreams of a sweeping political realignment did not die.  In fact, by clearing centrist Republicans out of their perches in the White House, the loss probably helped Gingrich and his allies.

Completely undaunted, Gingrich, Republican National Chair Haley Barbour, and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Phil Gramm orchestrated a vast national campaign to recapture Congress for the Republicans in the 1994 elections.  With the economy stuck in a “jobless recovery” and Democratic fundraising sputtering, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress.

The tidal wave of political money they conjured allowed Gingrich, Gramm, Barbour and Co., to brush aside older, less combative center-right Republican leaders and persist in their efforts to roll back the New Deal and remake American society in the image of free market fundamentalism.  Once in power, the Republicans institutionalized sweeping rules changes in the House and the Republican caucus that vastly increased the leadership’s influence over House legislation.  They also implemented a formal “pay to play” system that had both inside and outside components.

On the outside, DeLay and other GOP leaders, including Grover Norquist, who headed Americans for Tax Reform, mounted a vast campaign (the so-called “K Street Project”) to defund the Democrats directly by pressuring businesses to cut off donations and avoid retaining Democrats as lobbyists. Inside the House, Gingrich made fundraising for the party a requirement for choice committee assignments. Senate Republicans, led by Phil Gramm and other apostles of deregulation, emulated the House.

And so, alas, did the Democrats.

Click on Standstill Nation as the New Abnormal for Tom Ferguson’s full article for the Roosevelt Institute.

Click on Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years by Republicans (And Quickly Imitated by Democrats) for more on Gingrich’s legacy on the Naked Capitalism web log.

Click on Newt Gingrich and Our Dysfunctional Congress for an article on Gingrich’s legacy by Lou Dubose of The Washington Spectator.

Click on Newt Gingrich Is a Saul Alinsky Republican for an analysis of Newt Gingrich’s political tactics from the Washington Examiner.

Click on Language: a Key Mechanism of Control for Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC Memo on political rhetoric.

Throughout his political career, Barack Obama has been lucky in his political opponents.  When he first ran for Illinois State Senate in 1996, his only opponent in the Democratic primary was Alice Palmer, his predecessor, who only decided at the last minute to run for re-election.  Obama was able to show that two-thirds of the signatures on her nominating petitions were invalid, and so he ran unopposed.  In his district, nomination in a Democratic primary was tantamount to election.

In 2004, when Barack Obama first ran for the U.S. Senate, the two strongest potential candidates, incumbent Republican Peter Fitzgerald and predecessor Democrat Carol Moseley Brown, decided not to run.  The Republican front-runner, Jack Ryan, a Goldman Sachs partner who retired to become a parochial school teacher in inner-city Chicago, was embarrassed when the Chicago Tribune sued successfully to have his sealed divorce papers made public.  The papers revealed that his wife, the actress Jeri Ryan, accused him of pressuring her to go to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans and Paris. Ryan withdrew from the race, and Obama’s opponent was the eccentric Alan Keyes, whom he defeated overwhelmingly.

In 2008, with Barack Obama ran for President, he faced a formidable Democratic primary opponent in Hillary Clinton.  But in the general election, Republican candidate John McCain proved surprisingly inept, and then chose the even more inept Sarah Palin as his running mate.   Given the unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration, it is unlikely any Republican could have one.

Now, in 2010, the likely Republican candidate is either Newt Gingrich, a symbol of political sleaze and corruption, or Mitt Romney, a symbol of corporate wealth and economic privilege.   President Obama’s opponents, and not his record, are his best hope for re-election.

Nate Silver thinks there is a possibility that the Republican nominating convention will choose a candidate other than the ones who’ve signed up for the marathon primary race.   I don’t think that is likely, but it would be a way to nominate a better candidate—that is, one better qualified to be President of the United States.

Click on Some Signs G.O.P. Establishment’s Backing of Romney is Tenuous for Nate Silver’s reasoning in his FiveThirtyEight web log and column.

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I’m highly critical of President Obama’s record.  But in fairness, I ought to acknowledge the President’s achievements.   These achievements are real, even though some of them have to be qualified with an asterisk (*).

• President Obama’s economic stimulus program has apparently helped the economic recovery along.  (*The current economic recovery has been weaker than most post-World War Two recoveries, and it will take a long time to get back to pre-recession conditions, which were none too good to begin with.  Nevertheless, the Obama stimulus program was enacted over Republican resistance to doing anything at all, so the President deserves some credit.)
• President Obama stuck to his promised timetable for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. (*Non-combat troops and armed U.S. contractors remain in Iraq, and the Obama administration probably would have kept combat troops in Iraq if the Iraqi government had agreed to give them extraterritorial privilege.  Nevertheless, the President did what he promised to do, and he deserves credit.)
• The new Defense Department budget calls for a reduction in force and a slowdown in growth in military spending, a necessary step to bring overall federal spending under control.  (*Spending will remain above pre-9/11 levels, and spending will increase on Special Forces and unmanned weapons, thereby increasing the President’s power to wage secret wars.  Nevertheless, this is a politically difficult action.)
• The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to uphold the right of private citizens to make video recordings of police in the performance of their duties.  As Radley Balko wrote on The Agitator, this is a big deal.  Video evidence is usually the only evidence of police abuse of power except the unsupported word of the victim.  Now, the initiative for this may have come more from Attorney-General Eric Holder than from the President himself, but Obama still deserves credit.  No asterisk here.

Click on Pentagon budget set to shrink next year for the Washington Post’s report on President Obama’s proposed military budget.

Click on DOJ Urges Federal Court to Protect the Right to Record Police for background on this lawsuit.

The Obama administration also deserves credit for the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy toward gays in the military, and for compiling and distributing objective data to physicians on the effectiveness of different forms of medical treatment.  None of this, however, outweighs President Obama’s record on war, civil liberties and pandering to Wall Street.

Click on President Obama and his liberal critics for my case against President Obama.

The chart at the top of this post shows that the decline in U.S. jobs has stopped since President Obama took office.  On the other hand, the recovery in jobs is not enough to regain what has been lost and keep up with population growth.   And the charts below show that the current economic recovery has been weaker than average in all respects except exports and corporate profits.

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In the normal course of events, recessions are followed by recoveries.  I’m not smart enough to say how much the current recovery, or its strength or weakness, is due to the President and Congress, and how much is due to the swings of the economic cycle.   I think the best way to stimulate the economy is for the government to invest in things that the country needs anyway, such as repair and replacement of the nation’s deteriorating physical infrastructure, scientific and technical research and maintenance of governmental services on the state and local levels.   President Obama deserves some credit for attempting to do this to a modest extent, against the opposition of Republicans in Congress.

Note:  I originally began this post which I realized couldn’t possibly be correct.  So I deleted it, and combined with post with a post with more correct (or at least more plausible) information.

Click on Regulations Protect Us for an explanation (sort of) of this sign on Radley Balko’s The Agitator web log.