"That's The Wrong Way To Go" - Robert Shiller Slams America's "Excessive Lust For Wealth"

Authored by Robert Shiller, originally posted op-ed at The New York Times,

The Transformation of the ‘American Dream’

“The American Dream is back.” President Trump made that claim in a speech in January.

They are ringing words, but what do they mean? Language is important, but it can be slippery. Consider that the phrase, the American Dream, has changed radically through the years.

Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, have suggested it involves owning a beautiful home and a roaring business, but it wasn’t always so.

Instead, in the 1930s, it meant freedom, mutual respect and equality of opportunity.

It had more to do with morality than material success.

This drift in meaning is significant, because the American Dream - and international variants like the Australian Dream, Le Rêve Français and others - represents core values. In the United States, these values affect major government decisions on housing, regulation and mortgage guarantees, and millions of private choices regarding whether to start a business, buy an ostentatious home or rent an apartment.

Conflating the American dream with expensive housing has had dangerous consequences: It may have even contributed to the last housing bubble, the one that led to the financial crisis of 2008-9.

These days, Mr. Trump is using the hallowed phrase in pointed ways. In his January speech, he framed the slogan as though it were an entrepreneurial aspiration.

“We are going to create an environment for small business like we haven’t seen in many many decades,” he said, adding, “So, essentially, we are getting rid of regulations to a massive extent, could be as much as 75 percent.”

Mr. Carson has explicitly said that homeownership is a central part of the Dream. In a speech at the National Housing Conference on June 9, he said, “I worry that millennials may become a lost generation for homeownership, excluded from the American Dream.”

But that wasn’t what the American Dream entailed when the writer James Truslow Adams popularized it in 1931, in his book “The Epic of America.”

Mr. Adams emphasized ideals rather than material goods, a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” And he clarified,

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are.”

His achievement was an innovation in language that largely replaced the older terms “American character” and “American principles” with a forward-looking phrase that implied modesty about current success in giving respect and equal opportunity to all people. The American dream was a trajectory to a promising future, a model for the United States and for the whole world.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the term appeared occasionally in advertisements for intellectual products: plays, books and church sermons, book reviews and high-minded articles. During these years, it rarely, if ever, referred to business success or homeownership.

By 1950, shortly after World War II and the triumph against fascism, it was still about freedom and equality. In a book published in 1954, Peter Marshall, former chaplain of the United States Senate, defined the American Dream with spiritually resounding words: “Religious liberty to worship God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience and equal opportunity for all men,” he said, “are the twin pillars of the American Dream.”

The term began to be used extensively in the 1960s. It may have owed its growing power to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, in which he spoke of a vision that was “deeply rooted in the American Dream.” He said he dreamed of the disappearance of prejudice and a rise in community spirit, and certainly made no mention of deregulation or mortgage subsidies.

But as the term became more commonplace, its connection with notions of equality and community weakened.

In the 1970s and ’80s, home builders used it extensively in advertisements, perhaps to make conspicuous consumption seem patriotic.

Thanks in part to the deluge of advertisements, many people came to associate the American Dream with homeownership, with some unfortunate results. Increasing home sales became public policy.

In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, subsidizing home purchases during a period in which a housing bubble — the one that would lead to the 2008-9 financial crisis — was already growing at a 10 percent annual rate, according to the S.&P. Corelogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price index (which I helped to create).

This year, Forbes Magazine started what it calls the “American Dream Index.” It is based on seven statistical measures of material prosperity: bankruptcies, building permits, entrepreneurship, goods-producing employment, labor participation rate, layoffs and unemployment claims. This kind of characterization is commonplace today, and very different from the original spirit of the American dream.

One thing is clear: Bringing back the fevered housing dream of a decade ago would not be in the public interest. In “House Lust: America’s Obsession With Our Homes,” published in 2008, Daniel McGinn marveled at the craving for housing in that era: “In many neighborhoods, if you’d judged the nation’s interests by its backyard-barbecue conversation — settings where subjects like war, death, and politics are risky conversational gambits — a lot of people find homes to be more compelling than any geopolitical struggle.”

This is not to say that homes have no appropriate place in our dreams or our consciousness. To the contrary, in a 2015 book “Home: How Habitat Made Us Human,” the neuroanthropologist John S. Allen wrote, “We humans are a species of homebodies.” Ever since humans began making stone tools and pottery, they have needed a place to store them, he says, and the potential for intense feelings about our homes has evolved.

But the last decade has shown that with a little encouragement, many can easily become excessively lustful about homeownership and wealth, to the detriment of our economy and society.

That’s the wrong way to go. Instead, we need to bring back the American Dream of a just society, where everyone has an opportunity to reach “the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.”

Nationalists Turn Into Snowflakes, Put Out $3K Bounty For Woman’s Murder Over Her Free Speech

Never has unadulterated hypocrisy marched itself to the forefront on a silver platter more efficaciously than on Independence Day in the United States — that is, until 2017, when my online friend decided to test the public mettle — by urinating on a Chinese-made American flag.

Oh, yes. She did.

And thankfully so — exercise of rights ultimately staves off their evisceration. Without occasional tests of the protections granted all U.S. citizens, those boundaries of protection shrink, unabated — because, if you don’t value freedom of expression, just wait until expressing yourself freely cannot be achieved without a consequent stint behind bars.

In that spirit, my friend, Emily Lance, placed a flag on the rim of a toilet on the 4th of July, and — using a device allowing women to stand and urinate — let loose, unleashing a torrent of urine against the Stars and Stripes as a friend videotaped the immediately-viral act.

“Fuck your nationalism,” the dedicated activist narrated on video since deleted by Facebook and YouTube, as the song, “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band, played in the background. “Fuck your country. Fuck your stupid fucking flag.”

Offended? You should be.

You should be offended that the U.S. military maintains a presence in 150 of 196 nations on the planet. Offended the CIA employed the grossest human rights abuses known when it psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured detainees — even though that method has been proven utterly ineffective. Offended the Authorization for the Use of Military Force granted a blank slate for perpetual war anywhere on the globe. Offended the most heinous terrorist organization yet to manifest only did so because the West sought and hoped for a caliphate of terrorists. Offended millions of people abandoned their homes for flimsy life rafts, risking their otherwise uneventful lives to escape relentless American and allied bombs.

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You should be offended our prisons incarcerate more per capita than any other nation — fascist dictatorships, included — on the planet. Offended the police, with seemingly endless authority over our daily lives, kill with nary a consequence, even in questionable situations. Offended free speech has been forgotten to cater to those too sensitive to bear it. Offended protest is being criminalized in a growing number of states. Offended medical choice isn’t an option in a nation claiming to value choice. Offended acceptable expression has been narrowed so severely, your right to redress grievances has been summarily erased from the books — and from the hemp-based paper on which those rights were putatively enshrined.

You should be offended with your own damnable hypocrisy — calling for the bodily harm of someone committing a nonviolent act against a symbol — rather than voting out the pols excusing the wholesale murder of innocents inside the bounds of sovereign lands.

Instead, you’re offended that bodily waste met striped and starred fabric — made in China, no less.

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This hypocrisy — not our farcical shreds of freedom — is why we’re so hated around the planet. In fact, it’s why blowback — not terrorism — comprises our greatest threat.

Those indelible impressions the U.S. has effected on the world — not to mention innumerable other unnamed iterations — comprise just a fraction of the motivation to carry out the one act an otherwise helpless citizen might choose to force the spotlight on the issues: desecration of the flag.

So, that’s what Emily Lance did — she chose the symbol of pain for millions around the planet who experience the full brunt of American exceptionalism to focus the rage of living only symbolically free in the one nation pompously regurgitating liberty, but failing to live up to the hype.

To call the act inflammatory would belie the altogether appalling backlash instantaneously generated the moment video of the July 4th stunt was posted to Facebook — a reaction so horrifically hypocritical, the exercise of free speech has since extended into death threats to Lance’s family members.

Threats to dissect Emily with knives, bludgeon her body, and even a $3,000 bounty for her head, rumored to be posted to Craigslist, now dot the activist’s Facebook timeline — as if she injured each individual in cold-hearted glee.

But she didn’t — she exercised an albeit fraught freedom and catapulted an astonishing hypocrisy into the world spotlight.

As furious former and current service members, their families, and other devotees to the symbolism in Old Glory crawled out of the self-aggrandizing, misbegotten cracks to wish death upon an otherwise unknown person on the Internet, Lance — obviously no shrinking violet — wrote in a post to Facebook,

“Freedom (of speech/expression) means that I’m entitled to do and say as I please, EVEN if you don’t like it, so long as I am not physically hurting someone – and no, your precious feelings don’t count, that’s your own problem. What don’t you people understand? You’re celebrating freedom while damning me for doing the same. You can’t have it both ways. FREEDOM OR NONE. Practice what you preach or shut the fuck up.”

She has a point.

Indeed, while the bulk of condemnation centered around disrespect for the flag, critics widely missed that Lance’s act not only falls under constitutional protection, desecrating the symbol of the nation embodies the freedom putatively defended by the military. Those threatening death and mutilation against the woman bold enough to express displeasure with the direction of this hopelessly self-serving government would do well to re-examine what the United States allegedly stands for — freedom.

Perhaps a nation born of the blood of the land’s original inhabitants and built upon the involuntary toil of enslaved Africans and others could never comprehend freedom as a concept on which to base its existence — though, perhaps, it should.

In propaganda — advertisements, corporate news, and Hollywood cinema — the United States can do no wrong. In reality, it rarely does right by those under its control — much less, those under the bombs dropped so readily.

Testing American mettle means teasing the bounds of acceptability and tolerance — what better way to test its willingness to stand for the ideals of freedom than by destroying the symbol so dear to so many.

Instead, Lance merely proved the laughable hypocrisy in Americans’ claiming the nation the freest of all while calling for her murder for expressing a freedom apparently untenable to the national conscience.

We must face, as citizens of these once-United States, the crimes of our government for the brazen reduction of people to commodities those wrongs encompass — failure to do so engenders only militancy in the cause of knocking the imperialist empire from its self-appointed pedestal.

This nation is not exceptional — it’s ordinary. Worse, it’s complicit in the misery of billions, and — no matter how extraordinary the somnambulant American public finds itself — this shameful fact cannot be extricated from our national identity.

We are not gods. We haven’t mastered life. Our government and military commit the worst atrocities in our name — yet, people are enraged about a piece of cloth — one not even manufactured in the United States?

To say priorities have been compromised would be gross mischaracterization and understatement.

“People are wishing illness, harm, and suffering upon me over a piece of fabric,” Lance later tellingly asserted online. “People are willing to MURDER someone over a flag. It’s so sad that people don’t realize how brainwashed they are. I’m gross for peeing on a symbol? LOOK AT YOURSELVES. You people epitomize all that is foul.”

No matter how much so many wish it so, the American flag is only a symbol — however imbued with personal meaning for any individual — the flag is just a symbol. You cannot equate military service — even the ultimate price — with a piece of colored cloth.

Not when the provocative among us aren’t offered the same platform to express distaste as those expressing pride.

The true beauty of our protected freedoms in this land are most clearly seen when someone expresses themselves in a way or on a topic on which we don’t necessarily agree — then, and only then, is its foundation and strength actually proven.

This experience proves that foundation — and the flag flying emptily above it — deserve to be condemned.

Moral Supremacy And Mr. Putin

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?

Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.

During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar Assad alone.

With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”

Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.

O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.

If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a “killer.”

Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.

Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”

Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.

When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?

Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong — that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?

While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long march” together.

John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a murderer, and a killer.”

Yet, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest who engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with Russian tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose to general secretary of the Communist Party, Ronald Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk to every Soviet leader.

Why? Because Reagan believed the truly moral thing he could do was negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

He finally met Gorbachev in 1985, when the USSR was occupying Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghan patriots.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.

Undeniably, we were on God’s side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?

Was it not at least morally problematic what we did to Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted and burned to death?

How many innocent Iraqis have perished in the 13 years of war we began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

In Russia, there have been murders of journalists and dissidents. Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine ally, has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug dealers and users since last summer.

The Philippine Catholic Church calls it “a reign of terror.”

Should we sever our treaty ties to the Duterte regime?

Have there been any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected government?

Has our Turkish ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, killed no innocents in his sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted coup?

Some of us remember a Cold War in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and when the Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3) organization.

Sen. Rubio notwithstanding, the CIA has not been a complete stranger to “wet” operations or “terminating with extreme prejudice.”

Was it not LBJ who said of the Kennedys, who had arranged multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had been “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”?

If Trump’s talking to Putin can help end the bloodshed in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.

The Trump Doctrine

Submitted by Matthew Jamison via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Inauguration of the billionaire property developer and businessman Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States has ushered in a new era in American politics and international standing. It was a surreal moment due to the fact so many believed it would never happen. Mr. Trump must be credited with the fact he possess unique political and charismatic skills that a man with zero experience of running a political campaign, running for political office or having ever served in government, could have got himself elected President at the outset of his very first political campaign, is quite remarkable.

What is more remarkable is that Mr. Trump largely drove his campaign and success with the capturing of the Republican nomination and subsequently the White House, largely through the sheer force and theatrical, flamboyant personality of his character, a deep understanding of his audience/market and an uncanny ability to utilise and harness mass media to attract attention to himself and his campaign. He did all this in the face of stiff resistance from many within his own party and the Establishment and mainstream media. As a performer he is extremely captivating and this in many ways fuelled his rise to the Presidency. 

President Trump"s inaugural address was quite unlike any in recent American Presidential history. He returned to the dark and pessimistic vision of America and the world originally outlined with vigour at the Republican National Convention. President Trump dubbed the state of America in graphic terms as an «American carnage», in which the nations elite Establishment in Washington DC had allowed the country to rot as they themselves flourished. It was a full scale onslaught against the members of the DC political Establishment both Republican and Democrat and the ushering in of a so-called new way of getting the best for the American people from their political institutions.

What was must striking in policy and political terms was the overtly nationalist doctrine that President Trump enunciated in his Inaugural Address. It would seem for the first time in decades an American administration will be openly and philosophically Protectionist in its actions, policies, rhetoric and thinking advocating for «smart trade» not «free trade» and moving away from free trade type agreements such as NAFTA or the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. The nationalism is striking for its isolationism. 

There is no place in the Trump Doctrine for George W. Bush style messianic, neoconservative interventionism in the name of democratic nation building around the world. The Trump Doctrine is neither liberal internationalist nor American exceptionalism or neoconservative hawkishness rather a traditional form of nationalist isolationism redolent of the 1930s Republican Party of Wendell Willkie who opposed US involvement in the European World War II.

The Trump Doctrine emphasizes American greatness through a heavy focus on nationalism to express the pride in national power and is hostile towards attempts at or achieved restrictions upon national sovereignty to act as an independent nation state rather than in a collective, multi-lateral fashion through organisations such as NATO, United Nations, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Agreement etc.

This nationalist isolationism is most starkly revealed and will have the most radical impact in terms of international trade policy. It will be fascinating to see just how far under the Trump administration America moves away from Free Trade in the international economic architecture of the Western IMF/World Bank system and embraces protectionism with the possibility of trade wars and an undermining of organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the globalized framework of manufacturing. In terms of Great Power Superpower politics the Trump Doctrine will position American global leadership as more of a Chairman of the Board style of leadership rather than the activist World Policeman CEO figure of past administrations post-World War II. Trump wants America to remain dominant and number one but refuses to follow a set of international policies which could bankrupt America for paying for Global hegemony of the Kennedy/Reagan/Clinton/Bush administrations. 

At home a brand of patriotism will be used to attempt to create greater internal cohesion and unity despite the profound divisions within the country and large opposition to the Trump victory. Be prepared to see a wave of America First hyperbole and hyper-nationalism unleashed in an attempt to quell dissent and wrap the Trump Presidency in the American flag in a powerfully emotional appeal to the countries most sensitive sensibilities. This will in all likelihood be abused for political purposes of the Trump administration to silence critics and dilute opposition and it is likely to widen the gulf between small town middle America and the coastal big city liberal metropolises stoking even greater social tensions.

The Inaugural Speech was a tour de force in raw emotion powered by a fiery and telegenic, charismatic and motivational, persuasive though hyperbolic public personality and speaker. It was a master class act in mass manipulation and it remains to be seen whether a policy platform for Government fashioned out of this individual driven political insurrection will indeed cure some of the problems facing the United States or whether they will in fact create even bigger problems both for Americans and the rest of the world.