Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 31, 2012 – 6:27 am

It’s time for the Yearly Sift, when I go back and take the longer view of what I’ve been doing week-by-week in 2012. The Story of the Year, of course, was the election, and I’m going to claim that the Sift did a reasonably good job helping its readers pay attention to the right things and not freak out over every outlying poll or surge by the Republican candidate-of-the-week.

The Theme of the Year was privilege. It was all summed up by September’s “The Distress of the Privileged“, the Weekly Sift’s most popular post ever. But those ideas came together because they had been brewing all year long. And there were a few lesser themes, like religion and economics.

I’ll also list the 21 books the Sift either reviewed or recommended this year, with links to what I said about them. And I’ve collected all those pithy little quotes that have led off each week.

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No Sift on Christmas Eve

December 24, 2012 – 9:00 am

Celebrate whatever holiday makes you happy, then come back next Monday for the annual Yearly Sift, in which I almost always discover (retrospectively) that what I’ve been writing this year has a theme.

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Enough?

December 17, 2012 – 1:01 pm

As a country we have been through this too many times. 

— President Barack Obama responding to the Newtown school shooting

This week everybody was talking gun violence

We had two mass shootings: the Clackamas Town Center Mall shooting just outside of Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

I’m not going to compile my own account of either event; that’s something the mainstream media has done at great length. I do want to make a few one-step-back comments.

1. Don’t put too much stock in early accounts and explanations. A review of Dave Cullen’s book Columbine. observes:

Cullen goes into extensive detail about just how wrong the news reports were, not only in the immediate aftermath but for months and years afterward. … [M]ost of the inaccuracies sprung from the nature of on-the-spot, live, eyewitness reporting. The massacre itself lasted barely an hour, but news helicopters circled overhead with no information all day. That’s a lot of time to fill.

Already by Thursday, Slate’s William Saletan was debunking early Clackamas reports:

Thanks to mobile phones, Twitter, and instant publishing, you can read all about the latest mass shooting within minutes. But much of what you’re reading, even days afterward, is false.

There’s no shame in carrying a bunch of false information in your head. Everybody does. But before you use events like this to support your Big Theory of Everything, double-check that the details you’re relying on are real.

2. This is becoming normal.

The Nation lists 16 mass shootings in 2012, about one every three weeks. That list includes the Dark Knight massacre in Aurora, Colorado and the Sikh Temple massacre outside of Milwaukee. Mother Jones provides a map, the graph above, and a list going back 30 years.

3. “Let’s not politicize this tragedy” is itself partisan rhetoric.

This point became a separate post. (And Ezra Klein made the same point: “Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.”) Let me also combine it with the previous point: If we can’t discuss gun control in the wake of a shooting, and if shootings happen every three weeks, then we can never discuss it.

4. Gun violence isn’t just a legal problem, it’s a cultural problem.

Think about cigarettes. When I was a kid (in the Mad Men era), smoking had a glamorous, sophisticated image. Cigarettes never became illegal, but a considerable amount of effort went into making them unfashionable. It worked, and I think that has had a lot to do with smoking’s overall decline.

Now envision a future America where owning a military-grade arsenal isn’t considered manly. Even with the same laws, I’ll bet it would have a lot fewer guns and a lot less gun violence.

5. Gun violence is also a mental health issue.

Dave Cullen believes that about half of mass shooters have depression problems. (Literally true at Columbine: One shooter was a sociopath and the other depressed.) Screening high school students for depression and getting treatment for the ones who need it could prevent a lot of future violence.

Unfortunately, the cut-government-spending drumbeat pushes in exactly the opposite direction. Detecting and treating teen depression is easily branded a “nanny state” policy.

… and this is also is worth your attention

Jonathan Chait explains Why Republicans Can’t Propose Spending Cuts.

When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.

They need Obama to propose the cuts, so they can accuse him of protecting all the real waste, which their propaganda says has to exist.

How can a humor magazine cover tragedy? By telling the unvarnished truth that the rest of the media varnishes, as the Onion did after the recent mall shooting: “Fuck Everything, Nation Reports: Just Fuck It All To Hell“. How many people do you think had that thought this week? And did anyone else report it?

A humanist cadet resigned to protest the unconstitutional Christian evangelism that West Point condones.

Dan Froomkin: The media missed “the biggest story of the 2012 campaign”:

the [Republican] party’s most central campaign principles — that federal spending doesn’t create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit — willfully disregarded the truth.

A Unitarian Universalist minister responds to Lindsey Graham’s insistence that same-sex marriage should require a constitutional amendment:

The Constitution does not state that anyone has a right to marry. … Men and women have been marrying each other in this country for over 200 years without the Constitution saying a word about their right to do so.

… and finally

If you have a tradition of giving money away during the holidays, think about adding journalism to your list of good causes. I’m planning to send a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, whose Wikipedia I use many times every day. Also Grist, where most of the Sift’s environmental coverage comes from.

Journalism’s broken business model means that a lot of advertising-accepting publications are essentially charities now, even if they look like businesses. The Nation is a consistent money-loser that couldn’t survive without Nation Builders, a voluntary association of its readers. Mother Jones is published by the Foundation for National Progress and accepts donations.

DailyKos, the largest liberal online community, is free to use and accepts advertising, but would also like to get voluntary subscriptions or donations.

If you want to promote a possible future for journalism, take a look at the Banyan Project, which was started by my friend (and former editor) Tom Stites.

The Weekly Sift itself falls on the hobby side of the job/hobby line I defined last spring, so I’m not looking for donations. It just costs me time, and I enjoy doing it.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask

December 17, 2012 – 11:11 am

Holiday gatherings bring together people of all political persuasions, so you’re likely to hear a variety of Fox News talking points. If you’re unprepared, you usually wind up with a choice between keeping silent and starting a screaming argument. So it’s a good idea to have some calm answers ready.

A complete list is impossible, I know, but these are two answers I have ready. Use the comments to add your own questions and answers.

If Warren Buffett thinks his taxes are too low, why can’t he just write a check to the Treasury?

Sometimes you need to answer a question with a question: What problem do you think that check would solve?

Background: Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett has often made the point that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. This seems wrong to him, and so his name has gotten attached to the so-called Buffett Rule.

So anyway, if the problem is just that Buffett feels guilty about his tiny (in a relative sense) tax bill, then presumably a voluntary contribution to the Treasury would make him feel better. But I haven’t seen any indication that Buffett feels guilty. He follows the rules. What’s to feel guilty about?

Buffett brings up his personal situation because he sees it as a symptom of a larger problem: In our tax system, the super-rich pay lower rates than many middle-class people. It’s a systemic injustice, not some personal injustice that Buffett does to his secretary or to the government.

So Buffett writing a check to the Treasury wouldn’t solve the problem. The Buffett Rule would.

Why do liberals want to punish job creators?

This question comes up whenever we talk about raising income tax rates on the wealthy back to what they were under President Clinton.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with punish. In general, taxes are not punishments. A state sales tax, for example, is not an attempt to punish people for buying things. Your local property tax is probably intended to fund public schools, not punish people for living somewhere. Ditto for the income tax.

Plus, it takes a real stretch of the imagination to look at the situation of rich people in the Clinton Era and describe it as punishment. Even at a Clintonesque tax rate, people will still want to be rich.

Next, consider want. Do liberals want to tax people? Not really. What we want is for our nation and our communities to have nice things — smooth roads, good schools, attractive parks, and so forth. We also want to put a safety net under people, so that lives aren’t ruined by the kinds of misfortunes that could happen to anyone. And we want every child, no matter whether they’re born to a wealthy family or a poor one, to have a legitimate chance to succeed.

If we could get all that out of a magic lamp, we would. But in non-magical reality, it takes money. That’s why we support taxes.

Next, why tax rich people at a higher rate than everybody else? Again, it’s not because we hate them or want to do them harm. Obviously, that’s where the real money is, and (if someone has to give up something) we’d rather see the rich go without a vacation home than see middle-class families decide not to send their kids to college or poor people scrimp on medicine or food.

But the deep reason is that it is fair for the rich to pay more. They are the people who are winning this game; the burden of keeping the game going should fall more to them.

Finally, job creators. In conservative rhetoric, every employer is a job creator, and it takes money to be an employer. “I never got a job from a poor person,” as the saying goes. So: more rich people with more money equals more jobs.

If only.

We could talk about the statistics, which show that as inequality increases, there is less job growth, but instead let’s run a thought experiment on a specific guy: John Schnatter, the founder and CEO of Papa John’s Pizza. Wikipedia claims that Papa John’s employs about 16,000 people. So, did Schnatter create those jobs?

Let me ask that a different way: What happens if Schnatter goes Galt? He folds his company, converts all his assets into gold, and disappears into some secret enclave in the Rockies. Does the economy really have 16,000 fewer jobs?

I don’t think so. I believe people who want pizzas just buy them somewhere else, and other pizza-makers expand to fulfill the demand. Probably they have to hire something like 16,000 more people. In short, I don’t think Schnatter creates any jobs. Demand for pizzas creates jobs. Schnatter is an easily replaced middleman.

The most successful entrepreneurs are those who destroy jobs. Putting aside the vulture-capitalism stories about Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, his big success story is Staples, a healthy business with around 50,000 employees. But before Staples, businesses got their office supplies from a variety of smaller shops and firms, most of which are gone now. Who employed more people — Staples or the companies it drove out of business? It would be tough to calculate the exact number, but I am confident the results would say that (when you net it all out) Staples destroyed jobs.

You know what really does create jobs? Infrastructure: highways, airports, reliable electricity. And nobody does infrastructure better than the government — if it can collect taxes.

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Four Books to Ask Santa For

December 17, 2012 – 10:30 am

1. Wrong and Dangerous: ten right-wing myths about our constitution

by Garrett Epps

Tea Partiers have the same attitude towards the Constitution that Christian fundamentalists have towards the Bible: They speak of it with awe and reverence, but they interpret it according to their own inner sense of what it must be saying. In practice, they end up projecting their own desires onto the document.

Liberals usually answer populist nonsense with academic research, which is a bad political strategy. Again and again — global warming denial and “creation science” pop to mind — ridiculous ideas circulate (in the part of the population that doesn’t read Scientific American) without an effective answer from the experts in the field. We lack direct, everyday-language books and articles that take on know-nothing myths.

Epps’ book fills that hole for the Constitution. He provides easy-to-understand-and-remember labels for the kinds of fallacies  conservatives use when they “prove” their points about the Constitution, and then shows how ten conservative articles-of-faith about what the Constitution says are just flat wrong.

Myth 1, “the Right is originalist”, prepares the way for the rest. The myth is that only right-wingers care about the literal text of the Constitution or what the Founders meant when they wrote it, while liberals are just making law up as we go along. The problem is that right-wingers also believe they are the only ones who know what the Founders meant, and the result is that crazy right-wing theories about history become crazy right-wing theories about law.

From there, Epps takes on myths about states’ rights, international law, the Commerce clause, separation of church and state, and many others you will quickly recognize. My absolute favorite line comes out of his chapter on Myth 6: “The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten the Government”.

If good government actually came from a violent, armed population, then Somalia would be the best-governed place on earth.

2. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
by John Barry

If conservatives are going to make saints out of America’s founders, liberals need to learn about our own colonial heroes. Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island after escaping with his life from the Massachusetts Bay Colony theocracy, is a good candidate.

You know where the image of a “wall of separation between church and state” comes from? Not Jefferson, though he used it. In 1644, Williams wrote:

When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hathe ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse, as at this day.

Barry summarizes: “When one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.”

3. Sacred Ground: pluralism, prejudice, and the promise of America
by Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and the author of Acts of Faith, a highly acclaimed memoir about finding his identity as both a Muslim and an American.

Patel is one of those people who got his name into the Big Rolodex at an early age. He could easily spend the next 30 years playing riffs on the same themes: interfaith cooperation, young people will grow past the prejudices of their elders, Muslims can be pluralists, and so on. I’m not going to name names, but it’s not hard to look around and see Big-Rolodex people who do just that. They have nice, pleasant careers giving talks at conferences, writing an occasional book saying the same things as their other books, and being a TV talking-head whenever their issues come up in the news.

That’s what makes Sacred Ground such a remarkable book. On the surface, it’s about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and all the anti-Muslim bigotry that rose up around it. But it ends up revolving around an unexpected question Christiane Amanpour asks Patel on CNN. She beats him to the punch by quoting all the rising-religious-prejudice statistics he had been using on other shows, and then jumps to: “So what has all your work done?”

Patel dodges that question on the air — that’s his description — but later it gets under his skin: The promise of his Interfaith Youth Core was that young people of every faith would get experience working side-by-side with young people of every other faith on issues of common concern, and so develop mutual respect that would make religious bigotry a thing of the past in a single generation.

It’s not happening, is it?

So Patel has a business-consultant/friend look into why it isn’t happening, and the friend comes back with a blunt and unwelcome answer: The problem is you. You like running all over the world giving inspirational talks and presenting your Big Idea as the universal answer to every problem, but you haven’t bothered to figure out what those inspired people in your audience are supposed to do. Your organization reflects that; it does everything and nothing.

From there, Patel studies how a Big Idea becomes real change, and where IFYC needs to focus. And then the Ground Zero Mosque becomes a teaching moment for him: What kind of people did the community need and not have, who could have kept this issue from getting so out of hand? How could IFYC help make sure that such people will be there next time?

It doesn’t come to a sound-bite conclusion. Sacred Ground isn’t a finished book, but that’s because Patel himself is a work in progress. That’s what makes him fascinating.

4. Bet the Farm: how food stopped being food
by Frederick Kaufman

Bet the Farm is a vicarious journey: What if you started with a question that puzzled you, and had the kind of access that let you go wherever you needed to go and talk to whoever you needed to talk to?

Kaufman is a journalist who has been writing about the food system for decades. He starts with the question: “Why doesn’t everybody get the food they need?” and follows the answer wherever it goes. It takes him to the giant food marketers like Domino’s Pizza; to the giant enterprises that produce the components of pizza: tomato sauce, mozzarella, and pepperoni; to the data-crunchers who are trying to produce a measurable “sustainability index” for food production; to the engineers who are trying to produce better seeds for better crops; to the international technocrats putting together development strategies for the U. N.; to the grain futures market and the monied interests who profit from it.

Best observation: The market for food is the exact opposite of a “free” market, because every person in the world has to participate in it on penalty of death.

The overall message of the book is that hunger is a question not of food production or even economics, but of power. Power comes from profit, and profit comes from keeping prices low for the farmer and high for the eater. So that’s what our current food system is set up to do. Don’t be surprised when it succeeds.

Posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

“Don’t politicize tragedy” is itself partisan rhetoric

December 17, 2012 – 9:16 am

Some lines in our political dialog sound non-partisan, but they only come up in a one-sided way. Once the media habit gets established, those unwritten usage rules are very hard to change.

For years now, liberals have been trying to turn judicial activism back against conservatives. But no matter how many Citizens United or Bush v Gore decisions right-wing judges write, judicial activism only has glue on its left side; it won’t stick to the Right.

We shouldn’t politicize this tragedy is similarly one-sided. It is only said in two situations:

  1. To stop liberals from talking about gun control after a mass shooting.
  2. To stop liberals from talking about worker safety after a mine disaster, factory fire, or some other big industrial accident.

It never limits conservatives, who routinely score political points in the wake of tragedy without even a sense of hypocrisy. The possibility that don’t politicize tragedy could apply to them just doesn’t register.

So Fox News’ Megyn Kelly can guiltlessly respond to the Newtown School shooting by asking a security expert:

I have two kids. Now I suddenly want to see an armed police officer in the school. I mean, I never even thought of that prior to now, but what would that take, to have an armed police officer in every school?

Kelly reaching for a more-guns solution is fine, but imagining fewer guns — as Bob Costas did two weeks before — politicizes tragedy.

In any other situation, major loss of life leads to action. The Patriot Act was signed six weeks after 9-11. I don’t recall anyone saying we shouldn’t politicize the tragedy. And as Chris Hayes observed Saturday,

If yesterday we had found out that the shooter’s name was Abdulmutallab and that he had been attending a mosque in Connecticut, everything about the response would be different.

One difference: No one would be shutting down the Islamophobes for politicizing the tragedy.*

The most predictably outrageous politicization of tragedy always comes from the Religious Right. Who can forget Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming 9-11 on

the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America

Falwell is dead, but his blame-the-secularists game continues. Thursday, when a Fox News anchor suggested to Mike Huckabee that people might ask “How could God let this happen?”, Huckabee responded by denouncing separation of church and state:

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability — that we’re not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.

So suggesting any limitation to Second Amendment rights politicizes the tragedy, but it’s fine for Huckabee to advocate against our First Amendment right to be free from an establishment of religion.

Huckabee was not alone. Bryan Fischer also started with “Where was God?”and went the same place with it:

Here’s the bottom line: God is not going to go where He’s not wanted. Now we have spent — since 1962, we’re 50 years into this now — we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost.

He then went through a litany First Amendment cases that limit Christian establishment before concluding:

We’ve kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us: “Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first.”

I’m sure the Amish parents of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania wonder how exactly they banished God from their schoolhouse before five of their daughters were gunned down in 2006. But apparently Fischer’s God** is subject to the same rule as vampires: Even if He wants to help, He’s stuck on the threshold until somebody invites Him in.

In short, liberals: Don’t be cowed by people who tell you not to politicize a mass shooting or a mine cave-in. The don’t-politicize rule applies only to you. Whenever conservatives can spin a tragedy to their advantage, they will, and the self-appointed umpires who criticize you now will be completely silent.

*The same people who blame Islam for any crime by a guy with a Arab name — they twisted themselves into pretzels denying Christianity’s responsibility for Anders Breivik’s mass murder of liberal children in Norway (even though Breivik styled himself as a defender of Christendom). “No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder,” Bill O’Reilly declared.

If you would laugh at a Muslim who said that about believers in Allah, you should laugh at O’Reilly too.

**In some ways conservative Christians preachers are a special case, because their flocks do ask “Where was God?” and the ministers have no answer. The question points to a hole in their theology: If the Universe were governed by the God they describe (all-powerful, loving, good, and personally involved), these things would not happen. It’s that simple. It’s not a paradox or a mystery, it’s just a contradiction.

They can’t admit that, so they have to deflect blame onto someone else.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 17, 2012 – 7:38 am

Like the week, the Sift will be dominated by talk about guns and murders. Sorry if you’re already sick of it; that’s just what’s up. I promise not to rehash the details of this week’s two shootings or speculate on things that are still unknown about the shooters, like their motives and their general psychological conditions. There’s already way too much of that.

Instead, I’ll make a few one-step-back points about our overall reaction to gun violence and the unhealthy state of our political discourse. Most of that is the weekly summary (titled “Enough?”), but one point demanded to be a separate post: “Don’t politicize tragedy is itself partisan rhetoric.”

In addition, this week has two holiday-themed articles: “Books to Ask Santa For” and “Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask”.

Unless some unexpected inspiration strikes and refuses to be aside, I’m taking Christmas Eve off. So (probably) no Sift next week. In two weeks, I’ll do my traditional Yearly Sift.

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Radical

December 10, 2012 – 2:52 pm

People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.

— Thomas Piketty

This week everybody was still talking about the fiscal cliff

Personally, I’m bored with the conversation. I know the outcome is important, but the process is happening behind closed doors, so we don’t really know anything about it. Unfortunately, you can’t fill a news cycle with: “It’s important, but we don’t know anything”, even if that’s the Truth. So instead we’re treated to endless speculation and tea-leaf reading.

Ezra Klein thinks he can project the outlines of a deal. Paul Krugman hopes he’s wrong, because Obama ought to be able to do better than that. They’re both smart guys that I respect a lot, but neither of them actually knows anything about the negotiations.

I’m much more fascinated by something that’s not being talked about. If you watched Chris Hayes’ discussion of energy policy Saturday morning on Up — which was a whole lot more interesting and informative than a TV-talk-show discussion of energy policy has any right to be — you heard energy experts say this: Everybody in the industry takes for granted that eventually the government will put a price on carbon, either through a carbon tax or some kind of cap-and-trade system. (It makes sense: Climate change has very real costs — like storm damage — that you aren’t paying for when you buy gas or get electricity from a coal-fired plant. If you had to pay the real costs of fossil fuels rather than just the costs of mining, refining, and shipping, you’d see that renewable energy is actually cheaper.)

So: The government needs more long-term revenue. And a major market is working inefficiently because some of its products are unrealistically inexpensive. This is the perfect time to start phasing in a carbon tax.

But that’s not on either party’s wish list.

… and the debt ceiling

which isn’t technically part of the fiscal cliff, but winds up in the same conversation because it’s another part of the overall fiscal struggle between President Obama and the House Republican majority. The fiscal cliff was created by the agreement that resolved the debt ceiling stand-off in 2011.

The current debt ceiling will probably be sufficient until March or so, at which point House Republicans can hold the world economy hostage again.

I don’t think they’ve thought this out very well. The 2011 crisis wounded everybody involved. Obama, Congress — everybody’s poll numbers went down. Undoubtedly the public’s reaction will be even worse if it happens a second time. But here’s the difference: Obama never has to face the voters again.  He’s worrying about the judgment of history at this point, not the polls. Republicans who want to be re-elected in 2016 will blink first.

The most fun part of the debt ceiling speculation involves all the ways that Obama could try to defy the debt limit, including the trillion-dollar-coin gambit. Chris Hayes explains:

… and the Robot Menace

A series of posts about technological unemployment erupted on the liberal blogosphere, for not much apparent reason. I mean, it’s an important topic, but it’s not really … topical. Anyway, I summarize and add my two cents in Two Observations on the Robot Menace.

… and Republican reform

which really isn’t happening, no matter how many pundits wish it would. The example that sums it all up is the Senate’s rejection of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Crazy grass-roots groups fabricated death-panel-like theories to stampede their members to pressure their senators. 38 Republican senators gave in to the pressure, so the treaty didn’t get the 2/3 majority it needed for ratification. See: Repainting the Bubble.

… and Jim DeMint

DeMint resigned from the Senate, even though he has four more years on his term and is popular in his home state. He isn’t facing a scandal or a health problem. He isn’t even claiming that he needs to spend more time with his family. He just got a better offer: President of the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem to make any sense. It’s like resigning from the School Board to become president of the local PTA. You had a position of power, and you give it up for an outside position where you either support or nag people with power.

But it does make sense, and the sense it makes points out how big money has changed our political system: Elected office has become only part of a politician’s career path, the way the glass of orange juice is only part of the complete breakfast in the Cocoa Puffs commercials. Consequently, the voters are only one of the special interests a politician needs to please.

If you ever wonder why it’s so hard to pass laws that polls say are popular (like, say, taxing the rich), that’s the reason. If a congressman votes against what his constituents want, possibly money from rich special interests will get him re-elected anyway. And even if it doesn’t, he’ll just move on to the next (and more lucrative) phase of his career.

But if he votes against the big-money interests, he’ll face a well-financed primary opponent in the next election cycle. And after losing, his career won’t have a next phase. The million-dollar jobs in think tanks and lobbying firms won’t be available any more.

This has been true for a while, but DeMint’s move shows that the game reached a new level: Even senators are just pawns now. Steve Kornacki lays it out:

What DeMint has apparently figured out is that in today’s Republican universe there’s less of a relationship than ever between holding office and holding power. This is what the rise of insular conservative media has done. News is interpreted, talking points are developed and agendas are set on Fox News, talk radio and in the right-wing blogosphere. Republican members of Congress, by and large, take their cues from conservative media, rather than shaping it.

If they all met in the same room, which conservatives do you think would be calling the shots: officeholders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner? or people who never face the voters, like Rupert Murdoch, David Koch, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and Rush Limbaugh?

DeMint is trying to move up in the real power structure, the one with no visible org chart. And that means leaving the Senate behind.

… and you might find this interesting

Beyond parody: Mitch McConnell just filibustered himself.

The same nonsense I talked about in Repainting the Bubble inspired AlterNet to compile The 5 Dumbest UN “Conspiracies”.

An open video-letter to President Obama about the high school physics curriculum.

Great moments in propaganda: The 2001 Heritage Foundation study predicting that if the Bush tax cuts were passed “the national debt would effectively be paid off by FY 2010.”

Thailand has the best anti-smoking ad ever:

Tis the season to celebrate the re-birth of Crist.

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Repainting the Bubble: Republican reform isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

December 10, 2012 – 2:27 pm

If you believe the respectable conservative pundits in the New York Times, the Republican Party is well on its way to learning the lessons of 2012 and setting itself right. David Brooks writes:

Over the past month, the Republican Party has changed far more than I expected.

Exhibit A is supposed to be Tuesday night’s Jack Kemp Foundation banquet, where both Mario Rubio and Paul Ryan spoke. They unveiled no new ideas or policies, but according the NYT columnist Ross Douhat, Rubio

[spoke] frankly about problems that too many Republicans have ignored these last four years — the “opportunity gap” opening between the well educated and the rest, the barriers to upward mobility, the struggles of the poor.

He also used the phrase “middle class” over and over, proving that Republican focus has shifted away from the very rich. And Brooks says

[Paul Ryan] didn’t abandon any of his fundamental beliefs, but he framed those beliefs in a more welcoming way and opened up room for growth and new thinking.

Problem solved.

Does anybody remember 2008? Republicans got an even worse drubbing then, so bad that they rebranded the party completely. The extreme Right stopped calling itself “Republican” and became “the Tea Party”. Did any ideas change? Well, no. If anything, the Party just got more extreme. The message was “You know that crazy-ass shit voters rejected in 2008? Well, we really mean it this time.”

The only lasting result of 2008 for Republicans was that George W. Bush became an un-person. He wasn’t at the 2012 convention, he didn’t campaign for anybody — it was like those eight years never happened.

Presumably Mitt Romney will have a similar fate. All those people who told us what a wonderful president he would be and how proud they were to have him on their ticket … they’ll just never speak his name again.

Because the future belongs to the re-re-branded Republican Party of Rubio and Ryan.

Unfortunately, Republicans who don’t work for the NYT seem not to have gotten the message. The Republicans who control state governments, for example, can’t move fast enough to defund contraception, make abortions even harder to get, and break unions.

But the real evidence that nothing has changed came Tuesday in the Senate when 38 Republicans (and zero Democrats) blocked ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities treaty Tuesday.

This is the kind of vote that used to be a bipartisan no-brainer. The point of the CRPD is to bring all countries up to the level of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which President Bush I signed in 1990 after the Senate had passed it 91-6. Since we are the model for the treaty, it would not change American law. By ratifying it, all we would be doing is approving of the world modeling its disabilities policies after ours. Bob Dole came to the Senate in his wheelchair to urge ratification.

Usually somebody makes at least a fig leaf of a rational argument before rejecting something like this. This time nobody did. Instead, a variety of organizations floated “ten problems with the CRPD“. They actually come from Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, but they were reposted by a variety of right-wing special-interest groups as if they were their own talking points. (Here is an identical post from ParentalRights.org.) The gist of the complaint is that the treaty would put the U.N. in charge of all sorts of areas of American life.

  • “every home owner would have to make their own home fully accessible to those with disabilities”
  • “the legal standard for the number of handicapped spaces required for parking at your church will be established by the UN”
  • “Article 7(2) means that the government—acting under UN directives—gets to determine for all children with disabilities what the government thinks is best.”
  • “spanking will be banned entirely in the United States”
  • “this convention is nothing less than the complete eradication of parental rights regarding the education of children with disabilities.”

The most prominent voice against the CRPD was Rick Santorum, who did his best to make opposition seem reasonable:

CRPD gives too much power to the U.N., and the unelected, unaccountable committee tasked with overseeing its implementation, while taking power and responsibility away from our elected representatives and, more important, from parents and caregivers of disabled persons.

I read the treaty. (It’s boring, but not that difficult.) The committee in question is the Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, described in articles 34-39. The treaty gives the Committee the awesome power to demand that member countries send it reports every two years, and to comment on those reports. In other words, if the Awesome U.N. Committee doesn’t like something about U.S. law, it can say so. That’s it’s whole power. Scary!

Any legislation to implement the treaty would have to be passed by Congress. Any legal challenge based on the treaty would go through American courts. The whole U.N. thing is a complete red herring.

In short, this is Death Panels all over again.

A second layer of paranoia comes from imagining what Congress could do to implement the treaty. The ten-problems document says:

This gives Congress total authority to legislate on all matters regarding disability law—a power that is substantially limited today.

Limited by what, you might ask? In reality, by nothing. Anything Congress could do after ratifying CRPD is stuff it could do now. But if you subscribe to bizarre right-wing constitutional theories that no one else believes, then the fact that no specific line in the Constitution says “Congress shall have the power to make laws concerning disabled persons” means that it can’t.

So how did Congress pass the ADA to begin with? Well, the ADA is unconstitutional under this theory, just like Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

The truly scary thing is that none of the senators who voted against CRPD had any better arguments than the ones the home-schooling group was passing around. The NYT even made the treaty the subject of its Room For Debate series. They couldn’t get any legitimate people to argue against the treaty, so they were stuck with this guy, who among other ridiculous statements repeated this often-debunked myth:

When many nations (not including the U.S.) ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, they had no way of knowing that the U.N. would declare Mothers Day to be illegal

Where is that supposed to have happened? Belarus. The Monkey Cage explains: A committee similar to the one the CRPD would establish got a report from Belarus, and commented on it, criticizing Belarus for “continuing prevalence of sex-role stereotypes and by the reintroduction of such symbols as a Mothers’ Day and a Mothers’ Award, which it sees as encouraging women’s traditional roles.” This criticism had no legal effect on Belarus, where Mothers’ Day continues, because these committees don’t have that kind of power.

This is the kind of conspiracy-theory thinking that swayed 38 of the 47 Republican senators.

In short, the lunatics are still in charge of the asylum in the GOP. There are no grown-ups who can tell the kids to go to bed. There are only a handful of grown-ups who will even try to tell the kids to go to bed.

Facts don’t matter. People on the Right believe what they want to believe, and their leaders either give in to them or actively pander to them. Come 2015, a new set of presidential candidates will start campaigning for these crazy people’s votes, and will say whatever folks want to hear. Then they’ll have to take those positions into the 2016 fall election, just like Mitt Romney did.

Nobody has learned anything.

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Two Observations on the Robot Menace

December 10, 2012 – 11:02 am

Not what I’m talking about

No, I don’t mean the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. I’m talking about what the economists call technological unemployment, i.e., there are no jobs because machines do everything. Or, as Keynes defined it:

unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.

Now, this is not a new idea, so it’s something of a mystery why so many people started talking about it this week. I think the original impetus was the news that Apple is planning to move some of its Mac production back to the U.S. This validates the predictions of a rebound in American manufacturing that have been bouncing around for a while now, and fits with the “insourcing” trend identified in the current issue of Atlantic.

After the initial cheering died down, people started envisioning those new manufacturing jobs: Probably there won’t be many of them, because even minimum-wage Americans make a lot more than Chinese factory workers. So any large-scale new American manufacturing plant only makes sense if most of the work is done by entities not covered under minimum-wage laws or represented by unions: robots, in other words. (Another workerless manufacturing technology is 3D printing. It’s going to be huge someday, but it doesn’t seem to be news on any particular day.)

So the complete story is: High-paying unionized factory jobs in the Rust Belt get replaced by low-paying non-unionized factory jobs in China, which in turn get replaced gradually by robots in China, until eventually there’s no reason not to have those robots work in the U.S., closer to the buyer.

As more robots are built, largely by other robots, “assembly can be done here as well as anywhere else,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst based in San Jose, Calif., who has been following the computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. “That will replace most of the workers, though you will need a few people to manage the robots.”

So if the “insourcing boom” isn’t going to be a jobs boom, where will the jobs of the future come from? That was the theme of Race Against the Machine and The Lights in the Tunnel, two books I already told you about last year. But this week the topic got hot again. Kevin Drum worried about it. And Matt Yglesias said, basically: No problem, when the robots do all the manufacturing, we’ll still have jobs taking care of old people, an answer that Drum, in turn, derided as “our bedpan and canasta future“. Paul Krugman also weighed in, twice, three times.

Krugman’s insight was the most interesting: Moving jobs to China (or back) just replaces labor with other labor. But robots and other automations replace labor with capital. (Or, if you want to use Marxist terminology that Krugman avoids: It replaces living labor with dead labor, since capital is just the residue of labor done in the past.) This could be why the corporate-profit share of the economy is surging while labor’s share of the economy is falling.

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents.

Kevin Drum plays this vision out:

the owners of capital will automate more and more, putting more and more people out of work. Liberals will continue to think that perhaps this can be solved with better education. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn’t be coddled. The lucky owners of capital won’t care. Their numbers will decline, but the ones who remain will get richer and richer. The rest of us will have no jobs, and even with all this lovely automation, our government-supplied welfare checks will be meager enough that our lives will be miserable.

I don’t have an answer, either to jobs or inequality, but there are two general observations you need to keep in mind when you think about this stuff:

First, technological unemployment is fundamentally a social problem, not an economic problem. For comparison, think about all the automation that has replaced “jobs” inside a parallel social system, the family. Our ancestors used to spend an enormous amount of time walking down to the creek and carrying back buckets of water (which get damn heavy after a few steps). Modern plumbing delivers that water to your kitchen with the turn of a tap. Is that a problem? No. Within the family, replacing work with leisure is a pure benefit.

The problem only shows up in the money economy, where “leisure” becomes “unemployment”. In a world of robot-produced abundance, our system for distributing the abundant goods gets screwed up. The economy no longer needs human workers to produce goods, but we individual humans still need jobs to justify our claim to receive those goods. An outside observer might wonder: Couldn’t those goods just be given to the people who need or want them? Answer: Not without screwing up our motivational systems and our ideas about personal worth and identity.

It’s a social problem.

(As an aside, this is why supply-side economics looks at things exactly backwards: Increasingly, supply is not the problem. Demand is the problem. How do we give people permission to consume the goods we can so easily produce? Agriculture, where technological unemployment started, is a prime example: The world produces plenty of food and could produce a lot more. But hungry people have no money; that’s another way of saying that our economic system can’t justify distributing our abundant food to the people who need it.)

Second, whenever you visualize this process, you can’t forget the time dimension. Economists love to talk about how this all works out in the long run: When you no longer need to spend your time hauling water, you realize that you’ve always wanted to see Paris. As the old goods become producible with little labor, desires for new goods arise, creating new jobs — airline attendants, tour guides, museum curators, waiters in sidewalk cafes. My water-hauling ancestors had no use for such people, but I do.

The real problem, as Keynes already knew in 1930, is pace. It’s not that there will never again be anything of economic value for humans to do. But will new desires arise and new markets develop as fast as automation replaces current jobs? Keynes’ most famous (and most inappropriately quoted) line is “In the long run we are all dead.” He was making precisely this point about time: Don’t give me your steady-state model and claim that the real economy will “eventually” converge to it. If you’re not worrying about the timing, you’re not working on the real problem.

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