Inertia you can believe in

With the U.S. mid-term elections still a week away, the media is glutted with polls and prognostications. Cable news has offered up a menu of non-stop pundit stew, bubbling with hyperbole and featuring hard-to-digest floating bits of bias spiced with speculation and guess work.

For this reason, lest you collapse of intellectual starvation in the interim, it is up to us to offer something like a fact, something solid which, as it happens, is also something of an antidote to the hand-waving and hand-wringing of most pre-election "coverage."

Take to heart the near-hysteria of the newspapers or the TV reports and you would think the United States was on the verge of a political cataclysm, a transformational event that will change all our lives and the very nature of American politics. In this respect, the coming election is seen as something akin to the recent transformational events that we have seen associated with the economic crisis, subsequent Wall Street reform, and health care reform. In each case, our world would never be the same.

And in each case and in this case the opposite is true. Not only is the world the same, it is in several key respects samer. (Yes, I said "samer." It’s my blog and I’ll make up the words around here if I want to.) Some of the traits we most expected to change have become more entrenched, even more impervious to reform.

Banks are back to sub-prime lending, some even more actively than before. Other banks — especially those in Europe and China — are still underestimating and under-reporting their financial weakness. New economic bubbles are percolating up throughout the emerging world. The U.S. is facing another predictable financial crisis — two actually, one having to do with a trillion dollars in underfunded public pension liabilities, and the other having to do with the current or looming insolvency of a large number of cities, counties and states — with the same inaction as before. Not only are most derivatives traded in the world still beyond regulation, they connect to the huge and hugely volatile world forex markets in ways that should have us all more nervous than we were before. Wall Street reforms passed by Congress not only failed to address many core problems they still are a long way from having much effect on the problems they did manage to zero in on, because we are a long way from implementing many reform provisions, legal challenges will block many and delay others, and underfunding will make enforcement impossible on others.

A similar story is the case with health care reform which, while addressing a few of the gross flaws in the health care system, has left the grossest flaws unaddressed — and getting worse. What was underfunded is becoming even more so with every passing day, and that underfunding remains the single greatest threat to the United States’ economic and thus strategic health… exactly as it was prior to all the health care hubbub in Washington, in the media, and in the small minds of those whose ideologies have no room for the solutions we so urgently need.

In the same way that the Wall Street establishment and the health care establishment have shrugged off change at precisely the moment it seemed most likely to come, in the same way that somehow political elites managed to resist campaign finance reform in the midst of the grotesque abuses of campaign finance of the past several years (and then conjure up a Supreme Court ruling that perversely equated money with speech, thus granting the rich more "free" speech than the poor in a way that would undoubtedly have bewildered and nauseated the founders), so too have the members of the United States’ permanent political class led by its hapless, compromising, polarizing party leaders managed to produce a system that simulates change without actually allowing it.

Take the "stunning", "earth-shattering" results of the upcoming midterms. What if the big projections of a swing to the Republicans are accurate? What if they pick up 50ish seats in the House and 8 or 9 in Senate? Even were they to do this that would amount to little more than a 10 percent swing among the 535 seats in the Congress. Furthermore, and more importantly, it would give the Republicans a majority of only say 10 or 15 seats in the House and leave the Senate split 52-48 or so. The Democrats would have one house of Congress, the Republicans the others, and the opposition in each chamber would have all the tools past oppositions have left them… filibusters, nomination holds, and a host of other things unimagined in the Constitution… to gum up the works.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind elections every two years during which every seat in the House and a third of those in the Senate would be up for grabs. (At the moment that means 468 seats are actually "in play.") But with our system for determining congressional districts and campaign finance rules and election laws firmly in the hands of the two established parties and really just in the hands of elites within those parties, the system has been made deeply, profoundly resistant to change. That those parties are heavily dependent on Wall Street and corporate funding ensures the resistance across society is self-reinforcing. (Yes, the Chamber of Commerce is on the side of the Republicans this year, Obama was elected with the biggest wave of Wall Street support in history — and most businesses give in both directions as it suits their momentary needs. Why not? The rules allow and indeed, encourage them to hedge their bets.)

The result no matter what comes out of the mouths of pundits or politicians is that the one thing that you definitely can’t believe in is change in this system. The most powerful force in American politics, as Henry Kissinger once observed about Washington’s policy process, is inertia. Therefore, watch Fox or watch MSNBC or close your eyes and hope it will all go away, but the one sure winner in next week’s elections is going to be that very inertia. And as we all know in our hearts, the problem with that is that it’s actually the less things change the more they stay the same.