Terrific column by Peter Oborne.

The decision to give Lady Thatcher what amounts to a state funeral will not lead to fascism. But it nevertheless badly damages the British system of representative democracy, and as such will lead to a series of debilitating practical problems. The most serious of them concerns damage to the reputation of the monarch for scrupulous impartiality. During her long reign, the Queen has avoided attending the funerals of all her prime ministers, apart from that of Churchill, who had led the national government of a united Britain in the great common struggle against Nazi Germany. This is why he was the sole exception to the rule that former prime ministers do not get state funerals.

So the question arises: what’s so special about Maggie Thatcher? Defenders of next week’s funeral arrangements say that she was a “transformational” prime minister. This is true. But so was Clement Attlee, who introduced the welfare system and the National Health Service, thus fundamentally changing the connection between state and individual. Yet the Queen did not attend Mr Attlee’s funeral, a quiet affair in Temple Church near Westminster. According to a 1967 report in Time magazine, “all the trappings of power were absent last week at the funeral of Earl Attlee … there were no honour guards or artillery caissons, no press or television, no crush of spectators. Only 150 friends and relatives gathered for a brief Anglican ceremony in honour of the man who had shaped the political destiny of post-war Britain.”

The decision to acknowledge Lady Thatcher, but not Attlee, makes the Queen appear partisan and is totally out of kilter with the traditional impartiality of the modern British monarchy.

Great, impassioned, supremely lucid lecture. His book — Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It is terrific also.

The title of the book picks up on a famous story about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 which gave birth to the United States. At the close of the Convention a lady asked Benjamin Franklin “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy.” Franklin replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.” Larry’s point is that the citizens of the new republic couldn’t keep it, and the reason they lost it was because the intrusion into electoral politics eventually became pathological.

Reading David Runciman’s absorbing review of David Graeber’s new book (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement), this paragraph leapt out at me:

To make his case that electoral democracy entirely stifles the expression of everyday experiences, Graeber provides a brief history of how we got into our present mess. This is where the book comes alive, because Graeber’s uncompromising approach, so wearying when applied to his personal history, is bracing when applied to the world at large. He believes it is no accident that the current political system protects the interests of the super-rich at the expense of almost everyone else. Our democracy is not some imperfect version of the real thing. It is the opposite of the real thing. Genuine democracy enables ordinary people to break free from the conventions that limit their capacity to lead fulfilling lives. In our democracy, the limitations are entrenched, because the conventions are all about protecting the power of money.

Or, to translate it into programmer-speak: the fallout from the banking catastrophe is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature. It’s what the system now does: privatises profit and socialises losses.

Terrific Esquire blog post by Charles Pierce, triggered by the news that Obama is having dinner with some of the more lunatic Republicans. “The president is having some congressional Republicans over for dinner again”, is how Pierce puts it, “so that he can conduct another seance for the purposes of getting their political souls to rise from the dead”. One of the invitees is Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia. “Isakson”, writes Pierce, “apparently, has been giving the president the impression that he may be the new leader of the Not Entirely Insane wing of his party’s congressional caucus, a position that has been open since Richard Lugar failed his annual carbon-14 dating test and was retired to an Indiana tree farm”.

And this is how the post ends:

Too often, the economic problems of this country are sold to its citizens as being far too complex for them to understand and, therefore, by clear implication, too complex for political democracy to handle. And the hell of it all is that most people are completely aware that this is happening to them. They see it in their own lives. It’s not as though the foreclosures, and the looted pensions, and the food-or-medicine decisions are happening in some Phantom Zone to other people.

What’s worse is that this is not being done by stealth, or by sharp practice, though sharp practices there are. It is being done deliberately and people are being encouraged by their government and by the courtier political media — and by the utterly corrupt financial media, especially on television — that their stagnant wages and the yawning gap in income inequality are both symptoms that the economy is getting better. A viable democracy is not sustainable within the economic model, and subject to the economic forces, that are prevailing now in our politics. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow. People are being asked to ignore the circumstances that are grinding them down, day by day, and being told that their economic pain is really for their own good. Who are you going to believe, after all, Maria Bartiromo or your own lying eyes?

Pierce is right. Soon or later, something’s going to blow.

Terrific Oped piece in the New York Times by Joe Stiglitz.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

Stiglitz argues that America’s skyrocketing inequality is economically as well as spiritually indefensible for four reasons:

1. The American middle class (funny how they never talk about the ‘working class’ in the US) is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven the country’s economic growth. “While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle — who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators — have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996”.

2. “The hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.”

3. The weakness of the middle class is reducing tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks. Lower tax receipts mean that “the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.”

4. Inequality is correlated with more frequent and volatile boom-and-bust economic cycles.

Worth reading in full.