The Weekly Sift

In this week's Sift:

• Connecting the Dots: Economy, Anger, Racism, Policy. A labor leader's speech at Harvard does a rare job of pulling it all together.
• The Sift Bookshelf: Two Books on Social Justice. Unjust Deserts explains what's wrong with the it's-my-money argument against taxation. The Moral Underground reveals how middle-class people subvert the system when they see the reality of life among the working poor.
• Thanks, Everybody. My April 15 message about how I benefit personally from tax-supported programs. Probably you do too.
• The Doublethink Network. Learn from Bill O'Reilly: If people catch you making up facts, make up some more facts to prove them wrong.
• Short Notes. Why airliners avoid ash clouds. The short supply of first-rate sociopaths. Who covers rural stories? Confederate History Month. Could Protestants be locked out of the Supreme Court? And more. 

[F]or a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.

Naturally, he says, people are angry about the results of this misguided policy — lack of jobs, stagnant wages, unpayable debts, lack of opportunity for hard-working people. For similar reasons people were angry during the Depression, both here and in Germany. The question then was how that anger would be expressed: in violence against each other, or in united action to fix problems through the democratic process. 

Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.

This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.

In a good speech, you identify a problem and describe what people-in-general have to do to solve it. In a great speech, you bring it home. You look your audience in the eye and tell them what they have to do. You don't want people walking up the aisles in clumps saying, “What a good speech!” You want individuals staring at the carpet silently, thinking “What am I doing?”

• Our economic system is unjust. What individuals receive has very little to do with what they earn as individuals. 
• The injustice becomes undeniable when you look at the lives of the working poor. 
• When middle class people have to deal with the working poor, many of them start subverting the system to mitigate that injustice.

The books are Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly and The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson. Each is about 200 pages and easy to read, but both have deep roots in academic research.

And that raises the moral and political question discussed in the second half of Unjust Deserts: If this productive economic system is our common inheritance, what justifies extreme inequalities of wealth? Yes, people deserve to receive the value they personally create through their work and talent, but why should a few people also get the lion's share of the common inheritance?

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money.

Cocktail Party Physics explains why airliners can't fly through volcanic ash clouds: A jet engine's combustion chamber melts the ash particles, which then stick to its turbine blades. Eventually the engine stops. (In addition to an ash cloud, the Iceland eruption is producing some great pictures.)

KFC's new Double Down — two chicken patties surrounding cheese and bacon — sounds like the unhealthiest sandwich ever, but it can't hold a fat-dripping candle to Wendy's Triple Baconator.

the CEOs of the world largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1 to 3 percent of [people] are sociopaths– people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. 

The other skills a CEO needs are rare enough, but when you add in sociopathy it becomes a hard slot to fill.

Rick Perlstein's piece on the Tea Party is worth a read. This “spontaneous grass-roots anger” shows up like clockwork every time a Democratic administration takes office.

John Paul Stevens is the only Protestant on the Supreme Court, serving with six Catholics and two Jews.

The death toll at Big Branch Mine is only twice the daily national average of workplace deaths.