Monthly Archives: March 2014

Fiendishly Rational

March 31, 2014 – 12:16 pm

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear April 13.

The record of thousands upon thousands of people arrested in this way is everywhere in the South. In the fall, when it was time to pick cotton, huge numbers of black people are arrested in all of the cotton-growing counties. There are surges in arrests in counties in Alabama in the days before, coincidentally, a labor agent from the coal mines in Birmingham is coming to town that day to pick up whichever county convicts are there. 

— Douglas Blackmon,
Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

And this system is one that I think in many ways needs to be understood as brutal in a social sense, but fiendishly rational in an economic sense. Because where else could one take a black worker and work them literally to death, after slavery? And when that worker died, one simply had to go and get another convict.

— Prof. Adam Green,  University of Chicago
quoted in Slavery By Another Name

This week’s featured articles are “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor” and “Not Primarily Students, Not Really Amateurs“.

This week lots of people were talking about the Supreme Court

The Court began hearing arguments in Hobby Lobby case testing the ObamaCare contraception mandate. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is pessimistic:

The rights of millions of women to preventive health care and workplace equality elicit almost no sign of sympathy or solicitude from the right wing of the bench today. Nor does the possibility that religious conscience objections may soon swallow up the civil rights laws protecting gay workers, women, and other minorities. Religious freedom trumps because we’re “only” talking about birth control.

In general, it’s a mistake to read too much into the questions the justices ask. When the constitutionality of the individual mandate was argued before the Court, I don’t remember anyone predicting that Chief Justice Roberts would save it.

and the ObamaCare deadline

Sort of. It was supposed to be today, but if you were in the process of applying and got hung up by the technical problems on the web site, you get to finish.

Administration officials … compare it to the Election Day practice of allowing people to vote if they are in line when the polls close.

According to the L.A. Times, 9.5 million previously uninsured Americans now have coverage: some directly through the ObamaCare marketplaces, some directly from insurance companies, some through the expansion of Medicaid, and some because the law allows more young people to stay on their parents insurance plans.

A series of ObamaCare horror stories have gotten national attention, mostly to be debunked later. But it’s about time that people start paying attention to the success stories.

It’s also time to make state-level Republicans pay the price for not expanding Medicaid. In an article on the Health Affairs blog, three public-health professors and a medical student run the numbers:

We estimate the number of deaths attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states at between 7,115 and 17,104.  Medicaid expansion in opt-out states would have resulted in 712,037 fewer persons screening positive for depression and 240,700 fewer individuals suffering catastrophic medical expenditures. Medicaid expansion in these states would have resulted in 422,553 more diabetics receiving medication for their illness, 195,492 more mammograms among women age 50-64 years and 443,677 more pap smears among women age 21-64. Expansion would have resulted in an additional 658,888 women in need of mammograms gaining insurance, as well as 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears.

and the Christie administration’s report on the bridge scandal

which came to the unsurprising conclusion that Governor Christie did nothing wrong. “Our findings today are a vindication of Gov. Christie,” said the report‘s author, Randy Maestro.

In response, all of Chris Christie’s critics said, “I’m glad that’s settled, let’s move on.”

No, seriously, Christie’s critics were appalled that he spent taxpayer money to produce such a self-serving report, and the word “whitewash” keeps cropping up. Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, who claims the administration withheld federal relief money from Hoboken after Hurricane Sandy to pressure her to approve a deal favoring Christie’s private-sector allies, said:

Randy Mastro could have written his report the day he was hired and saved the taxpayers the million dollars in fees he billed in generating this one-sided whitewash.

And the New York Times editorial page was equally unkind:

We can now add this expensive whitewash to the other evidence of trouble in Mr. Christie’s administration. If Mr. Christie really wants to win back public trust, he and his political allies can start by paying for this internal inquiry out of their own pockets. Then the governor and these lawyers can make all emails and any other crucial information available to federal and state investigators.

Investigations by the New Jersey legislature and the U.S. attorney will continue.

and (for some reason) a raft of sports-and-labor stories

beginning with the ruling that Northwestern’s football players are employees who can unionize. I cover this in “Not Primarily Students, Not Really Amateurs”

and you also might be interested in …

A federal appeals court in Texas found the state’s new regulations on abortion clinics constitutional, in spite of the fact that they have caused a third of the state’s abortion clinics to close and have little medical evidence supporting their value. The court found that living three hours away from the nearest clinic was not an undue burden on a woman’s right to have access to abortion services.

A similar law in Wisconsin has been found unconstitutional by that district’s appeals court. Since a law can’t be constitutional in one part of the country and unconstitutional in another, the Supreme Court will have to  resolve the difference.

Lately I’ve been on a reading jag centering on the Confederacy and the Reconstruction Era. (You’ll be hearing about it. Today’s book review is just the start.) I can’t help noticing the similarities between the current campaign against abortion rights and the South’s post-Reconstruction campaign against the rights former slaves were granted by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. In both cases, the strategy was to leave the rights on the books, but make them impossible to claim. The post-Reconstruction Supreme Court winked at that. We’ll see what this era’s Court does.

Sinister.

Once you convince yourself that sexuality is a choice, all sorts of otherwise innocent things start to look like advertising for the gay “option”. AlterNet’s Katie Halper collects the “10 Weirdest Things the Christian Right Thinks Will Turn Your Kids Gay“.

One that deserves special attention is a 4000-word screed on the “Well-Behaved Mormon Woman” blog, which decodes the gay message encrypted in the Disney movie Frozen, and particularly in its hit song “Let It Go”. (The movie clip isn’t YouTubed, but a great cover is here.)

I haven’t seen the movie, but in WBMW’s retelling the plot centers on a princess whose parents insist her socially-unacceptable magic power be hidden, and how she finds liberation. What could a hidden power symbolize, other than lesbianism?

Actually, it might symbolize sexual desire in general, as dancing does in Footloose. Or maybe creativity, like the color in Pleasantville. Or the symbolism might vary from one viewer to the next. Maybe you were a reader in an anti-intellectual family, a rationalist in a religious family, or even a religious seeker in a rationalist family. (In this season of The Americans, it’s been fun watching the KGB-mole parents freak out as their daughter explores Christianity.) If you made it out the other side of adolescence, probably at some point you wondered whether the world could accept what you were finding inside yourself.

For Harry Chapin, the magic power of music might be locked inside an ordinary taxi driver:

Oh, I’ve got something inside me
To drive a princess blind.
There’s a wild man wizard,
He’s hiding in me, illuminating my mind.
Oh, I’ve got something inside me,
Not what my life’s about.
‘Cause I’ve been letting my outside tide me
Over ’til my time, runs out.

But to WBMW, a hidden magic power must be homosexuality. Personally, I agree with the analysis in Tom Lehrer’s “Smut“: “filth … is in the mind of the beholder”.

When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz — there’s a dirty old man.

Defending the gay agenda since 1963.

One of her commenters wonders what WBMW will make of The Lego Movie, which I have seen. It really is propaganda in favor of a society that can reconfigure itself rather than be Krazy-glued into a single “ideal” arrangement. But then, if you squint really hard, Legos themselves are propaganda for that.

And I hope WBMW never takes a hard look at the mythology underlying the X-Men. You see, sometime in adolescence, previously normal kids discover that they’re “mutants” with special powers. Society is afraid of them and wants to kill them just for being what they are. So they stay hidden and band together secretly with other mutants.

How gay is that?

Whenever I’m tempted to complain about NYT conservative columnist Ross Douthat, I recall that he replaced Bill Kristol and count my blessings. Douthat’s columns often imply some outright falsehood or rely on an outrageous leap of logic, but do seem to represent an intelligent person trying to make sense of the world.

For example, Sunday’s “The Christian Penumbra” — his two cents on “religious freedom”. He makes a point that I first heard in Robert Putnam’s American Grace: The benefits of religion come not from belief or even faith, but from practice and community. He goes on to blame the dysfunctionality of the Bible belt (high divorce rates, high teen pregnancy, high sexually transmitted diseases) on non-practicing believers. And then he completely loses me by arriving at some conclusion about Hobby-Lobby-style religious freedom.

Oh well, it’s better that whatever Bill Kristol would have written.

ThinkProgress argues with the people who think Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series is ignoring creationism. He’s not saying the word, but the things he’s choosing to talk about are strongly influenced by the claims of creationists. I think this what Joseph Campbell meant by his term “invisible counterplayer”.

and let’s end with something amazing

If you’ve got the will to rock, it doesn’t matter that you only have two cellos and it’s the 18th century.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor

March 31, 2014 – 10:28 am

One of the trick questions American History teachers ask their classes is: “When did slavery end?”

The answer that is both obvious and wrong is: with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which you might count either as 1862 (when it was announced) or 1863 (when it went into effect).

It’s a trick question because the Emancipation Proclamation by itself freed almost nobody. It only applied to the Confederate states (not the slave-holding border states that stayed in the Union), and those were precisely the places where no one was paying attention to President Lincoln’s proclamations. Those states had their own president, and he thought slavery was just fine.

The answer the teacher is probably looking for is: with the 13th Amendment, which (as the Lincoln movie dramatized) passed Congress in early 1865. The amendment is short and gets right to the point:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

It became part of the Constitution that December, when newly reconstructed Georgia became the 27th state to ratify it.

But in his 2008 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name, (which in 2012 PBS made into a documentary that you can watch free online) Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon came a different conclusion:

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn’t end until 1945 — well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age.

The loophole. The reason slavery was able to last so long is that the 13th Amendment has a loophole. (Did you notice it? It went right past me.) The loophole is “except except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. So if you can rig the local laws and get the cooperation of the local law enforcement and court system, you can convict people of “crimes” pretty much whenever you want. Then they can be sentenced to hard labor, and the  state or county can auction them off to the highest bidder until their sentence (or their useful working life) is up.

That’s what happened across the South when whites regained control of state governments after Reconstruction. Vaguely worded laws created crimes like “vagrancy”, enforced almost exclusively against blacks. For other crimes like petty larceny or disorderly conduct, the say-so of a law-enforcement officer or a white “victim” was sufficient to convict, particularly after blacks were disenfranchised and banned from juries. For minor crimes, justices of the peace were empowered to assess fines without a jury, and when inflated court costs were added to a misdemeanor fine, the total was often far beyond any amount that a black worker could raise. He could then be sentenced to forced labor until the state or county recouped the debt through the “rent” paid by an employer. In this way, even a minor offense could result in months or even years of forced labor without pay, under whatever conditions the employer chose.

Instead of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure.

In the PBS documentary, Blackmon says the convict market was driven by demand, not supply:

In the fall, when it was time to pick cotton, huge numbers of black people are arrested in all of the cotton-growing counties. There are surges in arrests in counties in Alabama in the days before, coincidentally, a labor agent from the coal mines in Birmingham is coming to town that day to pick up whichever county convicts are there.

Industrial slavery. One of the arguments made by apologists for slavery — it goes back at least to John Calhoun’s 1837 speech to the Senate, “Slavery a Positive Good“, and you can still hear it occasionally today — is that the black slaves on Southern plantations were in fact treated better than the immigrant industrial workers of the North, whose bosses did not live side-by-side with them or care about them in the personal way that, say, Scarlett O’Hara cared about Mammy.

Reading Blackmon’s book, in which slaves are used in the mines and furnaces of Birmingham’s growing steel industry, you see that (to the extent that there is anything to it at all) this observation tells you more about the difference between agrarian and industrial society than about slavery. When you compare apples to apples, the evil of slavery is undiminished: Hired field hands in the North were treated better than plantation slaves in the South, and industrial slaves in the South were treated worse than free industrial workers in the North.

That was true even under the Confederacy, but post-Reconstruction industrial slavery was far worse: The slave was rented rather than owned, and so was treated as renters typically treat property. As historian Adam Green says in the PBS documentary: a leased convict could be “worked literally to death. … when [one] worker died, one simply had to go and get another convict.”

Green Cottenham. To give his story a face, Blackmon focuses on Green Cottenham, a Alabaman arrested for vagrancy in 1908 and sentenced to work for a subsidiary of U. S. Steel in the Pratt mines outside of Birmingham.

There he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every working hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of  other miners — many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. … Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

Cottenham died of disease before his sentence was up and was buried in an unmarked grave near the mine.

Tip of the iceberg. It’s tempting to compare Blackmon’s 100,000-200,000 estimate to the four million slaves held at the start of the Civil War and see at least some progress. But leased convicts were just the extreme edge of a more general slavery.

Another common practice was for wealthy whites to pay the misdemeanor fines of able-bodied blacks, in exchange for a “contract” pledging to work for a specified period of time. Once “employed”, they were chained and subject to the whip. Often they were kept beyond their contract period, because they had no way to claim their freedom.

One level removed from this were the sharecroppers, who by contract could only sell their crop to their landlord, for whatever price he named. Typically they borrowed from the landlord to buy seed, and never got out of debt. Bankruptcy laws did not apply to them, and running out on a debt was illegal — and could result in being sold to work the mines in Birmingham. Similarly, if you worked as a house servant or in a shop, the name of your white employer was your only defense should the sheriff come looking for “vagrants” he could sell to U.S. Steel.

Freedom was largely an illusion, not just for the leased convicts, but for all blacks.

False dawn. All this was clearly against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, but the Supreme Court held in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 that Congress had no authority to overrule state laws in this way. Effectively, the states could do as they liked, as long as they didn’t call it slavery.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a U. S. attorney in Alabama who naively decided to enforce federal laws against “peonage” — slavery for debt. A federal judge took his indictments seriously, and a handful of whites were put on trial. But as it became clear that these were not isolated cases, and that truly enforcing the law would disrupt the entire economy of the South, the Justice Department lost its nerve. The attorney was re-assigned, the attorney general got another job, and the main defendant was pardoned without ever spending time in prison.

Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. entered World War II, the Franklin Roosevelt administration realized that the continued existence of involuntary servitude in the South undermined the propaganda war against the Axis. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive to all federal prosecutors instructing them to prosecute cases of “involuntary servitude and slavery”. Finally, the law would be enforced.

It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities.

Significance today. Taking this story seriously reframes the Civil Rights movement and the entire history of race in America. Those who marched with Martin Luther King were not just the grandchildren of slaves; some had probably been slaves themselves. Likewise, when the Supreme Court demanded the desegregation of schools in 1954 or President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the South was not a century past slavery, but only a few years.

In my previous posts about race, I have often run into comments about the long history of black crime, or comparisons to the Chinese, many of whom were also brought to America under forced-labor conditions in the 1800s. But that “long history” evaporates if the original post-slavery “crime wave” was actually instigated by whites seeking to re-enslave African Americans.

And no American race or ethnic group faced anything remotely resembling the black experience. Whatever hardships the Chinese or the Irish or any other immigrant group faced, once things turned around, they turned around. Only blacks experienced multiple false dawns, where rights were granted only to be later taken back or ignored. When today’s blacks look skeptically at authority or seem paranoid about the hidden intentions of whites, they are not reacting to the slavery experiences of great-great-grandparents they never met, but possibly of the parents who raised them.

In short: Slavery is a much fresher wound than most of us have been led to believe.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (36)

The Monday Morning Teaser

March 31, 2014 – 9:21 am

This week’s main article will be a review of Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery By Another Name, which tells the story of how involuntary servitude was re-established in the South after Reconstruction and lasted until World War II.

I’m kind of amazed that I didn’t hear about this book when it came out in 2008, or when it won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2009, or even when PBS made a documentary from it in 2012. (As I tell my friends about it, I’ve been waiting for somebody to say, “Where have you been? Everybody knows about that.” So far nobody has.) I think it’s an important piece of American history to understand, and it throws a whole new light on the story of race in America. We’re used to thinking about the blacks who marched with Martin Luther King as the grandchildren of slaves. But probably some of them had been slaves themselves, except that it wasn’t called “slavery” by then.

Another article will talk about recent labor developments in sports, especially the surprising ruling that Northwestern’s football players are employees who have the right to form a union. Also worth knowing about: the lawsuit the Raiderette cheerleaders have filed against the Oakland Raiders, and why there’s likely to be another baseball strike in 2016. (Due to a screw-up on my part — I thought I posted the teaser hours ago — this is already up.)

In the weekly summary, today is the ObamaCare deadline (sort of), which has inspired a variety of how-is-it-working stories. The Supreme Court heard arguments about ObamaCare’s contraception mandate and how it conflicts with corporations’ freedom of religion. The Christie administration’s Bridgegate investigation concluded that Gov. Christie has done nothing wrong. An appeals court found Texas’ new abortion restrictions constitutional, contradicting another appeals court and setting up a Supreme Court case. The Religious Right has decided Disney’s Frozen is gay propaganda. And a bunch of other stuff.

The sports-labor article will be first, within the hour. The book review still needs some work, so I’m not putting a time on that. And then the weekly summary.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Not Primarily Students, Not Really Amateurs

March 31, 2014 – 8:08 am

A labor ruling knocks the wind out of the fantasy of the amateur athlete. The Raiderettes sue. And we’re heading towards another baseball strike.

For some reason I kept running into stories about sports and labor this week. The big one was that Northwestern University’s football players are a step closer to unionizing. A ruling by National Labor Relations Board regional director Peter Sung Ohr says:

In sum, based on the entire record in this case, I find that [Northwestern University]’s football players who receive scholarships fall squarely within the [National Labor Relations] Act’s broad definition of “employee” when one considers the common law definition of “employee.”

Previous rulings (against graduate-student teaching and research assistants unionizing at Brown in 2004) don’t apply because the football players “are not primarily students”. Northwestern says it will appeal to the full NLRB, and from there I’d be surprised if the courts didn’t get involved. This probably won’t be resolved for years.

Citizen Kain

It sounds weird to think of “amateur” athletes organizing. But it’s hard to argue with the claim that a college football player is there to play football, not to be a student. When I was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago in the 1980s, I had come there to be a graduate student and was teaching to defray the cost. But football players come to Northwestern to play football, and take classes primarily to maintain their football eligibility.

To me, the players don’t resemble amateurs as much as interns. They work very hard in a business that makes an enormous profit, but pays them no salary. Many submit to this deal because they’re building a resume towards a salary-paying job they hope to get later in the NFL. Most of them won’t get that job.

The best thing I saw on the issue was a clip from ESPN’s Outside the Lines, which focused on the ringleader of the unionization movement, Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter. (Colter exhausted his NCAA eligibility this season, and is hoping to catch on with the NFL as a receiver. CBS Sports rates Colter as the 48th best receiver in the draft, or the 393rd best overall prospect. In other words, his goal of playing in the NFL is improbable but not completely absurd.) (Northwestern is fighting this, but I’d put Colter on the cover of my pamphlet: Northwestern shapes leaders who change the world.)

OTL traces Colter’s radicalization to the experience of his uncle, former All-American defensive back Cleveland Colter, who injured his knee in his junior year and was never drafted by the NFL. Cleveland continues to have knee issues to this day, but his medical coverage from USC ended with his playing career. This is not uncommon: A player never does make money from football, but has lifelong expenses related to the wear-and-tear on his body.

Meanwhile, the NCAA and the school can market the player’s name and image, but the player can’t. (Quarterback Johnny Manziel was suspended for half a game this season on the charge that he signed football memorabilia for money.) This system is being challenged in court by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon.

Often the player doesn’t even get a degree. In that respect, Northwestern behaves better than most universities. BleacherReport says it has the highest graduation rate: 97%, compared to 47% at third-worst Oklahoma. But even at Northwestern, the time commitment of football prevents athletes from receiving the kind of education Northwestern offers its typical student. (The findings in Ohr’s ruling indicate that football is the first commitment of a scholarship athlete; he can only take classes that don’t conflict with football practice.)

ESPN’s Jay Bilas comments on the claims that recognizing players’ rights would kill NCAA sports:

It’s amazing how the rest of us can operate in a free-market system and the world doesn’t spin off its axis, but if athletes got it, boy we’d be in trouble. … People who support the NCAA structure as is, including some politicians, say it’s going to change fundamentally, all those [non-revenue-generating] sports are going to go away, we’re just going to have football and basketball. That’s a doomsday scenario scare tactic, and really it’s shameful because it’s just not true. … But even if it were, we lay all the responsibility on the athlete: If those greedy athletes who may ask for more than a scholarship were to get what they want, all this would go away. We don’t say that about coaches who are making $8 million a year. And we don’t say that about administrators who are making millions. … Nobody says, “Hey, the wrestling program’s going to go away if we pay you this much money.”

U-N-I-O-N

Meanwhile, the Raiderettes could use a union (though they probably won’t get one), because the Oakland Raiders aren’t treating their cheerleaders very well. Several sued the team in January, charging that their $1250 annual salary works out to less than $5 an hour even before hair-and-make-up expenses (which the team demands but doesn’t pay for), and that they are subject to “fines” for offenses like bringing the wrong pom-poms to practice.

Forbes has estimated the value of the Raiders at $825 million. They made $19.1 million in 2012, which is low compared to most NFL teams.

And expect a baseball strike when the current contract with the players’ union expires after the 2015 season. As stupendous as those nine-figure superstar contracts sound, the players as a whole are making an ever-smaller percentage of the league’s revenues; 40% at last count. That’s down from 56% in 2002 and still falling. Hardball Times writes:

Most other major sports leagues have salaries close to half of league revenues, and baseball players were actually doing slightly better than until the last 10 years, when suddenly they started getting a smaller share.

Expect the union to want to turn this situation around, while baseball owners have consistently been the most pig-headed owners of any major league sport. If we lose less than the whole 2016 season, I’ll be surprised.

And revenue is only part of the story of a baseball franchise. As a capital asset, a major league baseball team has been one of the best investments around. After all, it’s a collectors item, one of a limited edition of 30. And Nate Silver points out one of the consequences of rising inequality: As the rich get richer, more people can afford to bid on a baseball team.

Denouncing overpaid players is a crowd-pleasing tactic, but at least the players do something for their money. What exactly do the owners add to the game? They have become the private custodians of a city’s civic pride, and they collect a massive rent on that. They profit from an antitrust exemption that allows them to limit their competition and to decide which cities can and can’t have major-league teams. (If you started a new team, the major league teams would refuse to schedule games with you at any price, which in every other industry would be an illegal restraint of trade.) Most of the teams’ wealth was actually created by government, not by their owners’ entrepreneurial creativity.

Do the owners provide any value for their billions? Back in 1979, Allan Jacobs published a story in Harper’s, “The Civil-Service Giants“, in which San Francisco took over its baseball team under eminent domain. It was intended to be humorous, but if such a takeover really happened, if every team wound up being owned by its city, who would know the difference?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (2)

Drifting Towards Oligarchy

March 24, 2014 – 12:10 pm

The risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism

— Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century

This week’s featured post: “The Real Politics of Envy“.

These last two weeks everybody has been talking about the missing airliner

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has become the very model of the news stories I try to avoid covering. It fits perfectly into the distraction/obsession/hype trap I outlined three years ago in “A Hard Week to Sift“.

  • Most articles and TV segments on the story reveal nothing new. (Or at least nothing new that also happens to be true.)
  • Unless you know someone on the flight, the story has no relevance to your life.
  • Even if you do take an interest, there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing you learn about Flight 370 is going to change either your behavior or your worldview.

So 99% of the coverage is what The Guardian‘s Michael Wolff has labelled “anti-journalism”. He explains: “Journalism exists to provide information.” But anti-journalism promotes “obsessive interest in the unknowable.” (The fate of Flight 370 may eventually become knowable, but right now it isn’t.)

Last Monday the NYT quoted an anonymous CNN executive shamelessly crowing about Flight 370 as “a tremendous story that is completely in our wheelhouse.” Hunter on DailyKos responded with this priceless piece of snark:

Little actual information to be conveyed? Check. New “facts” constantly being trotted forth, only to be retracted as false a few hours or days later? We got that. Rampant uninformed speculation, often by people with absolutely eff-all expertise in anything remotely resembling the actual topic at hand? Oh yeah. (Why Rep. Peter King in specific has needed to weigh in on multiple occasions on multiple networks in order to say that he knows exactly the same amount of jack-squat that any person off the street might, now that is a topic all its own, and ought to be seen as evidence of just how inexplicably invested both Peter King and the national media are in putting Peter King on the teevee as an authority on things. As opposed to, say, not doing that.)

If you entertain the possibility that Bill O’Reilly might actually be doing performance art rather than commentary, this is genius also: Network news is focusing on the Flight 370 story because they don’t want to cover “important stories like the IRS and Benghazi.” [links added]

Eugene Robinson got it right:

when we don’t know the answer, we should just say so — and then shut up.

So what should CNN be doing? It should limit itself to a chyron, which it could run below all the other stories it could cover with the airtime it was reclaiming: “Still nothing definite on Flight 370.”

and Crimea

Occasionally the networks managed to devote a minute or two to the Russian takeover of Crimea, which (even if you’re not Crimean or Russian or Ukrainian) ought to interest you because it might mark the start of a new Cold (or even hot) War.

Briefly: Crimea had its referendum on joining Russia. It won, though it’s not clear whether it would have made any difference if it had lost, since “stay with Ukraine” was not on the ballot. That’s probably why the Tatar minority (and probably a bunch of Ukrainians) boycotted the referendum, which consequently got 95% of the vote.

Russia followed up by seizing a Ukrainian naval base on the Black Sea. Ukraine has subsequently decided to abandon its military bases in Crimea, even though it officially holds that Crimea is still part of Ukraine.

It’s always problematic to make Hitler comparisons, since I don’t want to claim that death camps and genocide are on Putin’s agenda. But Hillary Clinton was basically right: There is a resemblance to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938. Then, Hitler identified an ethnically German region of Czechoslovakia that bordered his Reich. He encouraged local leaders to protest against the Czech government and claimed they were being persecuted and needed his protection.

The claim that one nation is the global protector of an ethnic group, even members outside its borders, is inherently dangerous. And if you take on that role, it’s one thing to provide a refuge (as Israel does for persecuted Jews), but quite another to claim sovereignty over a region because your compatriots live there.

As for what the United States or NATO can do, even Iraq-War-architect Paul Wolfowitz acknowledges that “we’re not going to get Putin out of Crimea” and the point is to make the economic price high enough that he won’t seize more Russian-majority territory in eastern Ukraine.

I keep looking at the Tatars, whose roots go back to the Mongol invasions, and who are scattered throughout the former Soviet Union because Stalin expelled them from Crimea. Isn’t Putin creating the new Chechens? And isn’t this a good time for the original Chechens to demand the kind of referendum the Crimeans just got?

and Paul Ryan

In the last Sift I read between the lines of Paul Ryan’s report on federal poverty programs. Later that week, he made close reading unnecessary and went straight for racial dog whistles:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

In support of that view, he referenced the work of Charles Murray, who may not be quite the white supremacist some would claim he is, but certainly has that reputation. So if you happen to be a white supremacist who thinks poverty is all about lazy blacks who don’t deserve any help, you listened to Ryan and said, “Hell yeah!” Meanwhile, he gets to deny that’s what he intended. (“There was nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all — it had nothing to do with race.”) That’s how dog whistles work.

Charles Blow responds:

By suggesting that laziness is more concentrated among the poor, inner city or not, we shift our moral obligation to deal forthrightly with poverty. When we insinuate that poverty is the outgrowth of stunted culture, that it is almost always invited and never inflicted, we avert the gaze from the structural features that help maintain and perpetuate poverty — discrimination, mass incarceration, low wages, educational inequities — while simultaneously degrading and dehumanizing those who find themselves trapped by it.

And Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t willing to give progressives a pass on this issue either.

Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past and the historical vestiges of which still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies—though not race-specific policies—that address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life, whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust.

There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself. Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable society. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are.

I wish more people were connecting the dots on corruption

Now that casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is raising money for him, Senator Lindsey Graham is taking an interest in banning internet gambling.

In other corruption news, the Keystone XL Pipeline would connect the Canadian oil sands to the world market. You know who two of the foremost owners of those sands are? The Koch brothers, who are spending near-limitless money to elect a Republican Senate majority that will support building the pipeline. But don’t worry about their motives: Senator David Vitter assures us that the Kochs are “two of the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth”. Money can’t buy praise like that … or maybe it just did.

and you also might be interested in …

During my week off from the Sift, I gave a sermon-length answer to a critical comment on “The Distress of the Privileged“.

I thought this was classy. When Westboro Baptist Church went on its first protest after the death of founder Fred Phelps, counter-protesters modeled the civilized behavior we’d like to see from the Phelps-ites.

Justin Lee, executive director of The Gay Christian Network, also stayed classy:

The words and actions of Fred Phelps have hurt countless people. As a Christian, I’m angry about that, and I’m angry about how he tarnished the reputation of the faith I love so much. But as a Christian, I also believe in showing love to my enemies and treating people with grace even when they don’t deserve it. I pray for his soul and his family just as I pray for those he harmed. It’s easy for me to love someone who treats me kindly. It’s hard for me to love Fred Phelps. To me, that’s the whole point of grace.

Religion is easy when you can say “My enemies are God’s enemies, and God hates all the same people I do.” But religion shouldn’t be that easy.

In honor of the fourth anniversary of ObamaCare, Think Progress’ Igor Volsky goes blow-by-blow through the full Republican effort to repeal, disrupt, or otherwise sabotage the law. And TPM notes that there’s still no Republican replacement bill on the horizon. They float an occasional vague idea, or occasionally maybe even the framework of a proposal, but nothing they’re willing to spell out, bring to the floor, and vote on.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is pushing a new ObamaCare horror story. Many similar stories have proved to be bogus in the past. Let’s see what happens to this one.

Funny or Die presents a brief message from Comcast, in which it responds to your concerns about its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable: “From the people who answer our phones to the people who write our TV shows, we do not give a f**k. … Hey America, go f**k yourselves.”

Ebola is back. 59 people are dead in West Africa.

I haven’t finished Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century yet. But Paul Krugman has.

No, I don’t think creationists are going to get equal time on Cosmos. At least not until scientists get equal time on The 700 Club. Or maybe they already are getting equal time — in the alternate universe where the evidence supports their views.

and let’s close with something fun

Mitch McConnell’s campaign released some wordless video of their candidate, apparently for the “independent” SuperPACs his campaign isn’t supposed to be coordinating with. But now that it’s out there, Jon Stewart has pointed out that anybody can add their own soundtrack. He’s even given this new art form a name and a hashtag: #mcconnelling.

Stewart provided a few soundtracks to get the idea across. (“Behind Blue Eyes” is my favorite.) But it’s gone a long way from there. This one’s pretty good:

Or you could go for a compilation:

I think “Wrecking Ball” is the best one there.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

The Real Politics of Envy

March 24, 2014 – 9:20 am

Whose message is actually capitalizing on envy and resentment?

Tuesday, Politico reported the latest example of — this is happening so often we need to give it a name — Plutocrat Persecution Psychosis:

“I hope it’s not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

Yes, Langone is echoing fellow PPP sufferer Tom Perkins, who recently warned in The Wall Street Journal that a “Progressive Kristallnact” against the 1% is on its way. (Apparently, only being allowed to vote once — in spite of all his money — chafes on Perkins. Those of us free from the burden of vast wealth can barely hope to imagine what other persecutions he suffers.)

I could sympathize if some terrorist group were burning down mansions, or assassinating “malefactors of great wealth” as Teddy Roosevelt used to call them. But no, this Nazi-like persecution seems to consist mainly of calls to raise our low taxes on the very wealthy (and their corporations), to insist that they pay their employees a somewhat higher minimum wage, and a few rhetorical flourishes that fall far short of having the President of the United States refer to you as a malefactor of great wealth (or, as Teddy’s cousin Franklin put it a few years later “unscrupulous money changers“).

But let’s ignore the over-the-top Hitler reference — many others have taken Langone to task for that — and focus on Langone’s underlying points:

  • There is a growing politics of envy in America.
  • Liberal rhetoric about inequality is based on that envy.
  • The primary push towards envy and resentment in our politics comes from the Left.

I figure this is the venom that is supposed to stay in the public’s bloodstream after the Hitler-barb is plucked out. That’s how these things work: If Langone had compared your moustache to Hitler’s, and you denied it without calling sufficient attention to the fact that you don’t have a moustache, what would stick in the public mind is the vague sense that your moustache is probably more like Stalin’s, or maybe Ming the Merciless’.

Before addressing any of that, let’s spiff up the terminology a little: envy here is actually short for envy-based resentment. By itself, envy is just wishing that some aspect of another person’s life could be part of my life, and it isn’t necessarily destructive. (If I envy a friend’s ability to speak French, maybe I’ll go take a class.) Consumer capitalism couldn’t function without this non-destructive kind of envy. If Americans looked at the neighbor’s fancy new car and just said, “Good for him!” the economy would probably collapse or something

Resentment, on the other hand, wishes others harm, and envy-based resentment means wishing people harm because they have some advantage I wish I had. (Somebody ought to give that fancy new car a dent or two.) So, for example, as a writer I envy Stephen King’s ability to fill a complicated plot with interesting characters. But that’s benign, because I don’t resent him — I don’t wish bad things would happen to him to even the score between us. (If good things would cause him to finish his next novel faster, I’m all for them.)

This distinction is important because of course the rest of us envy the rich. (Think of all the places I would have gone if traveling were as simple as telling my pilot to fire up the jet.) But whether we resent them, and whether that resentment motivates our politics, is another matter entirely.

It’s an article of faith among the very rich that liberal policies (like progressive taxation and regulations that sometimes block the most direct path towards amassing even greater fortunes) are primarily motivated by resentment: We lesser mortals want the government to even the score a little by inflicting some pain on the lords of wealth. Part of Mitt Romney’s core message (said in almost the same words in interviews here and 11 months later here) was: “If one’s priority is to punish highly-successful people, then vote for the Democrats.” And CPAC front-runner Rand Paul echoed that sentiment in his 2014 State of the Union response:

If we allow ourselves to succumb to the politics of envy, we miss the fact that money and jobs flow to where they are welcome. If you punish successful business men and women, their companies and the jobs these companies create will go overseas.

The idea that you might just want to raise revenue by getting it from the people who would miss it the least; or that even though you have nothing against the rich personally, you think that a vast and growing gap between rich and poor is unhealthy for society … that just doesn’t figure. The only conceivable reason you might support a policy the rich don’t like is because you are burning with resentment and want to see them punished for having more than you do.

Jonathan Chait examined this claim and could find no supporting evidence — not even in columns promoting it. (That’s why Langone had to specify “with different words”. You can’t defend his point if you restrict yourself to what people are actually saying.) Politicians, no matter how liberal, are not promising to wreak vengeance on the 1%.

In practice, the politics of class emerge from the context of budgetary choices, where Democrats have positioned themselves against low taxes for the rich for the sole reason that it would come at the expense of more important fiscal priorities. … Gore, Kerry, and Obama were all making the exact same point: Clinton-era tax rates for the rich needed to stay in place not because the rich needed to be punished, but because cutting those rates would create more painful alternatives, like higher structural deficits or cuts to necessary programs.

But does that mean that resentment isn’t a factor in politics or that no one is trying to fan that flame? No, it doesn’t, because resentment-stoking is a constant drumbeat from the Right. Consider, for example, this ad that the Club for Growth ran in Wisconsin in 2011 during Governor Scott Walker’s successful campaign to bust the state employees’ unions.

All across Wisconsin, people are making sacrifices to keep their jobs. Frozen wages. Pay cuts. And paying more for health care. But state workers haven’t had to sacrifice. … It’s not fair. … It’s time state employees paid their fair share, just like the rest of us.

The ad doesn’t promise that anything good will happen to “the rest of us” if the unions are broken. You could imagine an argument similar to the Gore/Kerry/Obama point about taxes: “We’re sorry that we can’t fully fund the pensions of our hard-working teachers and other state employees, but something has to give and we’d rather keep taxes low and spend our limited resources on other priorities.” But instead, this ad is about punishing the state employees, because their unions have shielded them from the kind of employer aggression that has victimized private-sector workers; so let’s bust their union and make them suffer the way other working people suffer.

That’s pure resentment, a political movement very directly trying to “encourage and thrive on envy”. If someone knows of anything nearly that explicit coming from the Left, I’d like to see it.

Or recall the Right’s campaign against Sandra Fluke, when she had the audacity to defend ObamaCare’s contraception mandate. (Rush Limbaugh became the face of this campaign, but he was far from alone, as this timeline makes clear.) Limbaugh’s focus wasn’t that his listeners would benefit from cancelling the mandate. (That would be a hard case to make, since it’s possible that the prevented pregnancies save insurance companies more money than the contraception costs.) Instead, he pounded on the notion that Fluke is a slut: She’s having so much sex she can’t afford her contraception (as if the pill worked that way). He painted a picture in which Fluke has the kind of sex life Limbaugh’s older male listeners can only wish for, so they should want to screw that up for her.

Resentment.

Or consider the way the Right campaigns against the poor. Remember the “lucky duckies” who don’t have to pay income tax (because they’re too poor)? Or the way that Fox News made one lobster-eating surfer a symbol of all Food Stamp recipients? (Jon Stewart’s take-down of this whole campaign is priceless.) Somewhere, “America’s poor are actually living the good life” as a promo for Fox’s “Entitlement Nation” special put it — and all without working like you do. Don’t you wish you could get by without working? Don’t you want to screw the people who (you imagine) do? Take something away from them? Maybe harass them with drug tests that cost more than they save? Because the point isn’t to save money — or to do you any good at all — it’s to inflict harm on people who might be getting away with something you daydream about.

That’s the primary way the politics of resentment affects our economic debate. It’s not directed at the rich by the Left, but at the poor by the Right.

Across the board, one side is trying to encourage and thrive on envy and jealousy: It’s the Right, not the Left.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (4)

The Monday Morning Teaser

March 24, 2014 – 7:53 am

This week I couldn’t stay away from Ken Langone’s ridiculous comparison between liberal rhetoric about the 1% and “what Hitler was saying” in 1933, though “with different words”. I mean, he’s right: If you change all the words, the two are exactly the same. How can you argue with something like that?

Since that part is logically unassailable, I decided to focus on the part of Langone’s statement that has content: “You don’t survive as a society if you encourage or thrive on envy or jealousy.” I figure that’s the venom that supposed to stay in the public’s system after the Hitler-barb gets pulled out: the Left’s message is all about envy and resentment. (It’s as if he said your moustache resembles Hitler’s, and then you denied it, but forgot to mention that you don’t have a moustache. The public is likely to come out thinking that your moustache is probably more like Stalin’s, or maybe Ming the Merciless.)

So “The Real Politics of Envy” pays attention to whose message is actually raising and capitalizing on resentment: the Right’s. That’s a constant background refrain whenever they campaign against unionized workers, or sexually active young people, or the poor: Somebody’s getting away with something you wish you could have gotten away with, so don’t you want to see them punished? Nothing the Left says about the rich is remotely comparable.

That should be out in about an hour and a half. Later this morning, the weekly summary will snark about the news networks’ 24/7 coverage of the missing airliner, which has exemplified just about everything that’s wrong with contemporary journalism. I’ll also link you to stuff written by people who understand Crimea, Russia, and Ukraine better than I do; point out some of the classy ways people reacted to the death of Fred God-Hates-Fags Phelps; mark ObamaCare’s fourth anniversary; and call your attention to some hilarious examples of the new Internet art form “McConnelling”.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

False Choices

March 10, 2014 – 12:02 pm

The Left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.

— Paul Ryan at CPAC, 3-6-2014

No Sift March 17

I’ll be spending the week working on the talk “Recovery From Privilege” that I’m giving Sunday at First Parish Church in Billerica, MA, and preparing to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary on Tuesday.

In other Sift news, “What Should Racism Mean?” became the third Weekly Sift post to get more than 25,000 page views. (And started another run yesterday. My thanks to the unknown Facebook bellwether who got it started.) Largely because of the new readers that post attracted, the number of people who subscribe to the Sift via WordPress went over 1,000 for the first time.

The next set of articles will appear March 24.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Russia appears set to annex Crimea, and may get away with it. On Sunday, Crimeans will vote on a referendum to join Russia. Crimea has an ethnic-Russian majority and was part of Russia until 1954. Russian and/or pro-Russian troops currently control the country, including Crimean television stations, and access to Ukrainian TV has been blocked. So the join-Russia side has a distinct advantage.

Ukraine says the referendum is illegal. Russia counters that the ouster of Ukrainian President Yanukovych (currently in Russia) and the election to replace him on May 25 are also illegal, so claims based on the Ukrainian Constitution are specious.

Some political observers are portraying this as some kind of masterstroke for Russian President Putin, but those who take a more economic view are skeptical: The Russian stock market has plunged, the ruble is down 10%, and the Russian central bank has had to raise interest rates to 7% (from and already-high 5.5%) to keep Russian currency from devaluing further. The Russian economy was not in great shape to begin with, so an interest-rate spike is likely to cause a serious recession. All that is prior to any economic sanctions that might come from the EU or the United States.

So one of the things being tested here is how much economic pain Putin is willing and able to impose on the Russian people. Maybe the surge of nationalistic pride in regaining Crimea balances that, or maybe it doesn’t.

Another consequence of Crimea leaving Ukraine would be to take a bunch of pro-Russian voters out of the Ukrainian political system, thereby guaranteeing that the remainder of Ukraine will shift towards the European Union.

I’ve occasionally channel-scanned through the RT (Russia Today) network, and I think I’ve probably even linked to it sometime or other. Most days, it looks like just any other cable news network, and not the government-funded vehicle it is. But apparently RT has been laying it on a bit thick as the Ukrainian crisis developed, leading this American reporter to resign on the air.

You’ve got to think somebody in the production booth could have pulled the plug and didn’t. I wonder how his or her career is going.

With the propaganda flying as thick as it is, everyone is looking for their own authentic sources on the ground. I got a comment last week from Fedor Manin, author of the Fourteen Flowers and a Manatee blog. He has translated a post “On the Brink of War” from the blog of a Russian-speaking Crimean woman, Svetlana Panina.

Please, everyone who loves Crimea, everyone who loves Russians in Crimea. Help me carry this thought through to every heart. The Russians in Crimea didn’t ask Russian soldiers to come to our homes! No one attacked us! We were living quietly and well! We were waiting for our summer guests from Russia and Ukraine, and from other countries all over the world, after all, Crimea is a gem that belongs to the whole planet.

She takes a train (with what appear to be a bunch of Ukrainian women and children escaping Crimea) from Crimea to Kiev, and reports the wild rumors flying around each place about what is happening (or about to happen) in the other.

Someone from my church has a friend in Yalta, and forwarded an email he had gotten from her. She reports that Crimean Russians, especially the older generation, are eager to join Russia and believe that the new Ukrainian government contains a neo-Nazi element that wants “to exterminate all Russians living in Ukraine”. If I believed extermination was a possibility, I’d see Putin as the Russians’ protector and support the referendum too.

All this makes me wonder about the timing of the Crimean referendum: Maybe Putin needs it to happen before the panic has a chance to settle down.

and CPAC

One media mystery is why the annual Conservative Political Action Conference gets so much national coverage, while gatherings of liberal activists (like, say, Netroots Nation) don’t. I suspect it’s that far-right activists have much more influence in the Republican Party than far-left activists have among the Democrats, but Josh Marshall offers another reason:

In recent years, especially since Obama became President, CPAC’s wild press popularity and attention has been driven by what we might call a tacit conspiracy of derp between the event organizers and the people who cover it. You be outrageous; we’ll be outraged. And everyone will be happy. (After all, crap like this doesn’t happen by accident.) This has become even more the case as the contemporary Conservative Movement has become less a matter of ideology than a sort of performance art.

Rand Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll, getting 31% to Ted Cruz’ 11%. Paul’s vote was up from the 25% he got last year. Marco Rubio’s support collapsed from 23% last year to 6%. (Rubio made the mistake of trying to pass a law rather than just posture about ideology. His subsequent decision to oppose his own immigration bill didn’t win back his CPAC fans.) Chris Christie’s support was up to 8% (from 7% in 2013) because he’s having such a good year.

To understand the significance of Paul’s victory, I looked up the 2010 CPAC straw poll: Rand’s Dad Ron Paul also got 31% (to Mitt Romney’s 22%), and as we all know, went on to win the 2012 Republican nomination and become president.

I’m trying not to obsess about 2016 already, but I will say this: Rand Paul is not a threat. Put him on a debate stage and Ted Cruz will eat his lunch. Rand just isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, or as his Dad was. He hasn’t really thought through the implications of his libertarian beliefs. And that gets him sidetracked into arguments he can’t win, like defending a restauranteur’s right to run a segregated lunch counter.

Paul Ryan only managed 3% in the straw poll, but he was responsible for the video clip liberals most love to hate, which has got to count for something.

What [the Left is] offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. … This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. … She once met a young boy from a very poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag, just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the Left doesn’t understand. … People don’t just want a life of comfort, they want a life of dignity.

Never mind that the story is mis-attributed. (Chris Hayes interviews the woman who really played the Eloise role.) Or that key elements have been fudged. (The government wasn’t involved.) That’s in the fine tradition of Ronald Reagan and John McCain. Expecting politicians to check their touching anecdotes is like expecting Bostonians to stop at red lights when there’s no traffic.

Liberals around the country objected to an implication that may or may not have been there: that poor kids don’t have parents who care about them.

A better objection is that this is the usual conservative sleight-of-hand: It makes the Best the enemy of the Good, as if the Best will appear by magic as soon as the Good is eliminated. Specifically, how is emptying stomachs going to fill souls?

If that imagined child doesn’t already have a caring parent, how is taking away his lunch going to give him one? It’s like when  Newt Gingrich said “the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Taking away someone’s food stamps isn’t going to get her a job. So yes, people want lives of dignity — liberals understand that quite well. But we also understand that inflicting discomfort on them is not going to help them get it.

Ryan is also performing a second standard conservative sleight-of-hand: severing the moral connection between the people who pay taxes and the people who receive benefits. Free school lunches exist because Americans do care about poor kids. The government isn’t some soulless black hole that sucks up taxes in one universe and regurgitates benefits in another. The government is a structure through which We the People manifest our desire to help each other.

So if Eloise actually had met such a boy, here’s what she should have said: “You have this lunch because people do care about you. All over the country, people have pictured kids like you going without a lunch and decided they want to pay taxes so that you won’t have to be hungry. I pay taxes, and let me tell you, this is exactly what I had in mind.”

and you also might be interested in …

Edwin Lyngar posted a touching article “I Lost My Dad to Fox News” on Salon.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it.

What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. … I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. … To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.

A less extreme version of the same thing happened to my parents in their 80s. They continued to identify as New Deal Democrats and knew Fox was slanted, but for some reason they watched anyway. CNN bored them, MSNBC wasn’t part of basic cable, and they found hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity reassuring and comfortable. I think even if MSNBC had been an option, Chris Hayes and Steve Kornacki would have seemed like smart-alec kids to them, and I doubt they’d have gotten past their surface impressions of an intense black woman like Melissa Harris-Perry or an unrepentant lesbian like Rachel Maddow.

If you are old and white, Fox News may produce long-term anxiety, but it sneaks up on you. The immediate optics of MSNBC are far more challenging, and my parents watched cable news for companionship, not challenge.

Fox never changed my parents’ philosophy, but little-by-little it shaped their perceptions. They wondered why the Democrats couldn’t find any good leaders — not realizing that everything they saw about Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Joe Biden was selected and edited to make them look silly and unappealing. They wondered why President Obama always emphasized the wrong issues and couldn’t come up with any persuasive messages — never able to compensate for the fact that they only saw Obama through the eyes of his enemies. The important issues — the ACORN videos, the Tea Party protests, ObamaCare’s death panels — left Democrats with nothing much to say. And what made today’s liberals so hostile to Christianity?

The New Hampshire’s Republican-majority Senate finally accepted a plan to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. According to The Concord Monitor:

The bill goes next to the House Finance Committee on Monday. The Democratic majority there is supportive of the bill, as is Gov. Maggie Hassan

I’m sure our minimum-wage workers and our hospital administrators are breathing easier. If we get this done, and if the plan of Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett passes, then Maine will be the only holdout in the Northeast. Campaign on that, Gov. LePage.

It will soon no longer be a felony for married couples to have oral or anal sex in Virginia.

The Daily Show’s Aasiv Mandvi destroys the claim that “America has the best health care system in the world.”

Not everyone who agrees with Ayn Rand’s politics is a sociopath, but the underlying worldview is sociopathic.

For those of you waiting for Game of Thrones to get going again, here’s where the Dothraki language came from.

and let’s end with something funny

Jimmy Kimmel puts together the National Teachers’ Day message a lot of teachers probably wish they could send the country.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

Does Paul Ryan Care About Poverty Now?

March 10, 2014 – 10:40 am

Ryan’s new report obscures a broad consensus about the government’s role in helping the poor.

UMP COVER.pagesOn the surface, poverty appears to be one of America’s most polarizing issues. Liberals contend that people are poor because our economy doesn’t provide enough opportunities to get ahead. Conservatives argue that people are poor for personal reasons, because they are too lazy or feckless or drug-addicted to take advantage of the opportunities the system offers (or could offer if not for government interference).

Both sides can find examples to back their case. No matter how hard it might be to get out of poverty, some people muster heroic efforts and make it, while others confound every attempt to help them. In between are the people who jump at the brass ring, but somehow don’t manage to jump high enough. Maybe the ring could be lower, maybe they could jump higher — you can frame it either way. You could look at almost any failing individual and say, “He could be doing more.” But you can also find plenty of poor people whose struggles make you ask “Why does it have to be this hard?”

The partisan debate obscures something important: Underneath the polarized opinions about poor people in the abstract, Americans share a broad consensus about the kinds of people who need help and the kinds of things that should be done to help them. For example, just about everyone believes that the best way out of poverty is to get a good-paying job. Conservatives sometimes try to claim this position as their own, but in fact it’s pretty much universal. (Liberals disagree about how to create good jobs, not the value of getting one if you’re poor.)

That get-out-of-poverty-by-working plan might fail for one of four reasons:

  • There are no jobs for people like you.
  • The jobs you can get don’t pay enough to keep you out of poverty.
  • There are good-paying jobs available, but you don’t have the skills to get them.
  • There are jobs you could get if you wanted them, but you’d rather not work.

There’s even a broad public consensus about the appropriate government role in each case:

  • If there really is no job for you, the government should either create a job (by say, funding a WPA-style public works program or subsidizing jobs in the private sector) or support you directly at some level consistent with human dignity (through old-age pensions, disability payments, or long-term unemployment insurance during deep recessions).
  • If you are working at the only kind of job available, the government should provide (or make your employer provide) the extra little nudge you need to stay out of poverty. (Hence the minimum wage, the earned income tax credit, and a variety of supplemental programs like Food Stamps.)
  • If all you need to prosper is training, the government should help you get it. (Free public schools, inexpensive community colleges, job training programs, student grants and loans, and so on.)
  • But if you just don’t want to work, the government shouldn’t help you at all. You need to learn to take responsibility for yourself.

A few people would argue with each of those positions, but not anywhere near a majority. Our substantive political arguments over poverty aren’t about what to do with the people in each category, but rather which category is typical and how well government programs target the people in the category they’re supposed to help.

So liberal rhetoric focuses on people in the first three categories, who are legitimately seeking the help that Americans are proud to provide for each other. (Some other countries may let good people starve in the streets, but that’s not who we are.) Conservative rhetoric focuses on people in the fourth category who nonetheless get benefits because they masquerade as people in one of the first three categories: They aren’t really disabled, they are getting by fine without assistance (and so blow their Food Stamps on luxuries), and they aren’t really looking for a job or training for one. They’re just soaking up government benefits because they can. If those benefits went away, they’d realize that they have to get off their butts and work.

Few seriously dispute that both kinds of people exist: those who need and deserve government help, and those who get it even though they shouldn’t. The argument is more about the number of people in each group and (more subtly) something I’ve called the mercy/severity balance: How many people who need and deserve your help are you willing to leave to fend for themselves in order to prevent one lazy guy from cashing his government check and laughing at you?

For example: The USDA estimates that about 1% of Food Stamps are illegally sold for cash, while 3% of benefits are overpayments to people who either don’t qualify or shouldn’t get as much as they got. Does this strike you as a huge scandal that brings the legitimacy of whole program into question? Or do you focus instead on the good done for families who qualify for Food Stamps legitimately and use them as they were intended?

If somebody came up with an auditing program that would eliminate this waste and fraud, but would cost more (because paying auditors is expensive) than it saved, would you be for it or against it? What if it cost double what it saved? Ten times? A hundred?

From the conservative focus on the fourth category comes the conservative anti-poverty plan: If the way out of poverty is to take jobs that are readily available, and if the possibility of conning the government is keeping people from taking those jobs, then the way to reduce poverty is to cut government anti-poverty programs. Of course this means that some number of people who need and deserve help won’t get it, but that’s collateral damage.

Now you’re in a position to understand The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later, a report put out last Monday by the staff of the Republican majority of the House Budget Committee, i.e., Paul Ryan’s staff. In particular, you understand its conclusion:

Today, the poverty rate is stuck at 15 percent — the highest in a generation. And the trends are not encouraging. Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse.

The report looks extremely well supported — it has 683 footnotes, most of which reference reports by academic or government researchers (sometimes inaccurately). But looks are deceiving. For example, you’d think a statement like “Federal programs … are making it worse” would be footnoted to death. It’s not. Instead, what you’ll see if you go through the report’s review of nearly 100 government programs, is a lot of “results were not demonstrated” (said about the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) or “The program’s costs outweigh its benefits to society” (Job Corps) or “the program didn’t have any performance metrics or targets for the level of performance.” (Emergency Food and Shelter Program). I quit after reviewing about half the programs, but I didn’t find a single “Poor people would be better off without this program” with a footnote to a study proving that point.

That’s typical. The ten-page Overview at the front of the report seems to float freely above the evidence collected in subsequent sections. A lot of the evidence presented in the overview is of the correlation-is-not-causation variety. For example:

The Brookings Institution’s Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill point out that if a person works full time, gets a high-school education, and waits until he or she is married to have children, the chances of being poor are just 2 percent.

Of course, a lot of things are probably already going right in your life if you’re able finish high school, find a full-time job, and attract someone you’d want to marry. It’s not any great surprise that you’re not poor, and I’m not sure what there is to learn from that fact.

Only 2.7 percent of Americans above the age of 16 who worked full time year-round were in poverty, even in 2007 — before the Great Recession had taken firm hold.

Since recessions increase poverty by raising unemployment, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that people who kept their jobs didn’t get poorer. And what really should grab our attention is: There are people who work full time year-round and are still poor! Why isn’t that rate zero?

Another substantive claim of the overview is:

since the beginning of the War on Poverty … male labor-force participation has fallen dramatically. In 1965, it was approximately 80 percent. Today, it has fallen to a record low of below 70 percent. Since 2009 alone, male labor-force participation has fallen 3.3 percentage points. Among working-age men, the labor-force participation rate has fallen from 97 percent in 1965 to 88 percent in 2013. In recent years, female labor-force participation has also declined. Since it reached its record high of 60.3 percent in 2000, female labor-force participation has fallen to 56.9 percent — declining 2.5 percentage points since 2009. And among working-age women, the labor-force participation rate has fallen from 77 percent to 74 percent from 2000 to 2013.

But again, what’s the cause? The War on Poverty has coincided with a long-term reduction in male labor-force participation, but is there some reason to believe that’s anything more than a coincidence?

The implication is that anti-poverty programs encourage laziness, particularly in men. To conservatives, I’m sure this conjures up images of able-bodied 20-somethings choosing to hang around on street corners rather than look for work. (Liberals are more likely to picture multinational corporations shipping jobs overseas.) But if you get into the discussions of specific programs that the report claims discourage work, you get a different picture. For example:

[E]xpansions of the [earned income tax credit] are associated with a reduction in labor market participation by married mothers.

In other words, in poor households where both parents work, mothers are likely to cut back their hours (and spend more time at home with the kids) if the family is better able to get by on what the father makes. Another example:

SSI reduces the labor supply of likely SSI participants aged 62–64. A $100 increase in SSI benefits is associated with a 5 percent reduction in the employment rate.

In other words, people who are limping towards retirement with disabilities will retire sooner if they can afford to. That’s not exactly strapping young dudes hanging out on street corners, is it? (Maybe one of those young guys will get the job that the guy with the bad back retired from.)

So when you get down to details, the overview-level statements are less convincing than they sound. And that connects to a third point:

Congress has taken a haphazard approach to this problem; it has expanded programs and created new ones with little regard to how these changes fit into the larger effort. Rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate.

Imagine what Republicans might say if Congress had taken a unified approach. Wait, we don’t have to imagine, because the Affordable Care Act was a unified program with a comprehensive vision of increasing access to health care. Republicans complained about its mammoth size and invented all kinds of scary stories about what might be hidden in that enormous law.

That’s why there are hundreds of anti-poverty programs. If liberals presented one unified program to help the poor, we’d hear about this incredible octopus that had its tentacles in everything and was thousands of pages long and had an unimaginable cost. Every story of someone abusing a poverty program would be an argument against the whole thing. So instead, we have $65 million going to a separate “Education for Homeless Children and Youth” program and $11.5 million for “Job Placement and Training” for American Indians. If you want to cut them, you have to explain why you don’t want to educate homeless children and youth, or find jobs for Indians.

This is the basic dichotomy of American politics: In the abstract, voters will tell you that government spends too much. But the vast majority of things that the government spends money on are popular. No one would be happier than liberals if we could create a unified vision of how to help the poor, and then fund that vision. But I doubt that’s what Ryan is talking about, and I fear that he wants to unify the anti-poverty hydra so that there is only one throat to cut.

In short, it would be wonderful if Ryan’s report represented an honest attempt to examine what works and what doesn’t, and to assemble a unified program to do what the broad consensus of Americans want done: support the unemployable, find a job for everybody who wants one, make sure that people who work full time stay out of poverty, train people who have the talent and desire to move up to skilled labor or the professions — and keep lazy people from abusing the system.

I wish I could believe it did.

An interesting side-debate raised in the footnotes of the report is whether the War on Poverty is failing at all. The report references “Winning the War: Poverty from the Great Society to the Great Recession” by Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of Notre Dame. They propose measuring poverty by consumption rather than income, and they adjust for inflation differently. I can’t judge whether they’re right or not, but they show a different story than the official poverty rate. Their measure of poverty starts far higher 50 years ago and drops far lower today.

Another side-debate could happen over what success means. The report says:

The true measure of success is the number of people who get off these programs and get out of poverty.

And certainly everyone should agree that when a government program helps a poor person get a good job and join the middle class, that’s a success story. But limiting the suffering of the poor is a worthy goal in itself, and sometimes a government program succeeds simply by keeping things from getting worse.

For example: The United States has a terrible rate of what public-health professionals call “amenable mortality” — people who die of treatable conditions because they don’t get appropriate medical care. If the subsidies in ObamaCare bring that rate down, I’ll count that as a success.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

March 10, 2014 – 7:36 am

Two things happened this week that involve Paul Ryan: The Republican majority of the House Budget Committee (which he chairs) issued The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later, and possible 2016 presidential candidates auditioned for the Republican base at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Ryan didn’t do well in the CPAC straw poll and the cheers at his speech were tepid, but he did succeed in annoying liberals with a phony story about a poor kid and his government-provided lunch. Congratulations, Paul. Mission accomplished.

The poverty report is fascinating because of what it obscures: the general consensus in America about how the government should help people who need help. I’ll lay out what I think that consensus is and how Ryan’s smokescreen works in “Does Paul Ryan Care About Poverty Now?”

The weekly summary will discuss the Ukraine/Crimea situation and CPAC, and link to various other interesting things I found this week, including Edwin Lyngar’s “I Lost My Dad to Fox News”, before ending with Jimmy Kimmel’s vision of what America’s teachers would really like to say to parents.

Hard to predict when the posts will appear; I still need to look some things up.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)