Author Archives: weeklysift

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

Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us

October 17, 2011 – 1:03 pm

Last week I talked about the role of shame in maintaining an unjust system: A lot of people are losers in such a system, but who wants to identify with losers? The closer you are to the abyss, the stronger the temptation to deny that you bear any resemblance to the people who have already fallen in.

This week we got to see the slip side of the same phenomenon: how the rich and powerful take advantage of the legitimate pride many struggling people feel in the virtues that keep them afloat.

It started a week ago Wednesday with a cruel joke: Erick Erickson, founder of the right-wing blog Red State and recently a CNN commentator, started the We Are the 53% web site to parody the emotionally powerful We Are the 99% site I linked to last week. He posted a photo of himself disguised in a working-class t-shirt and holding up his story:

I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up, you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.

The “53%” are from a right-wing talking point that is debunked here and in more detail here: 47% of American households pay no net income tax, mostly because they don’t make enough money to qualify. (They pay plenty of other taxes, however, some at a higher percentage of their income than many rich people.) The point of “the 53%” is to evoke an image of a hard-working majority that pulls the weight of everyone else. It is part of the right-wing argument that minimum-wage-earners (and not the rich) should be paying more taxes.

And in Erickson’s case, it is ridiculous. His “jobs” consist of doing what he enjoys, and he could stop any time he wants. The only things he “sucks up” are money and fame, not abuse or anxiety. But one of the talents that puts Erickson firmly in the 1% is his understanding of working-class resentment and how to turn it against the weak rather than the powerful. So people with legitimate stories to tell have followed his example and posted to his site. Like this guy:


I am a former Marine. I work two jobs. I don’t have health insurance.

I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college. I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years.

But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53%. God bless the USA!

Minus the suck-it-up closing, this could be a 99% posting. This guy is a victim of the economy, but he doesn’t like being a victim, so he identifies with the lords rather than the serfs. Damn those whining serfs, for claiming to be like him.

A similar (if less in-your-face) story has been forwarded all over Facebook:

Like the ex-Marine, this woman (the fingers and handwriting look female to me) has virtues worth taking pride in: She’s talented enough to get a scholarship, hard-working, and with enough self-control to spend less than she makes. Her version of “Suck it up, you whiners” is less insulting, but just as distancing: “I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.”

Really? I don’t think so. We can all decide not to identify with the people who work more and more for less and less, but we can’t decide not to resemble them.

I picture this student sitting in her cheap apartment, maybe watching somebody’s cast-off picture-tube TV rather than going to the movies with her friends, eating something sensible that she cooked herself, planning to get back to her homework in another few minutes — and identifying with the 1%.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” she writes. She’s supposed to “work my @$$ off” for whatever she gets, and hope that she doesn’t get sick, and hope that when she picked her major she didn’t guess wrong about where the jobs would be. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing bounty of this rich planet goes to other people — many of whom aren’t as talented, didn’t scrimp and save, and don’t work their asses off.

That’s how it’s supposed to work?

It’s tempting to pour scorn on these two, but that’s just falling into Erickson’s divide-and-conquer trap. The 99% are supposed to fight each other. The field slaves are supposed to resent the house slaves, and vice versa.

So what is the right response? Max Udargo nailed it in Open Letter to that 53% Guy. It’s absolutely worth reading in its entirety (it has become the most shared post in the history of Daily Kos), but this is the key point:

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

… And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you. Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you? Are you ready to work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? Can you hold down four jobs? … And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

It would be one thing if life was just that hard, if producing enough for everybody to get by required everybody to work 70 hours a week and never make a wrong move. But that’s not true. We know it’s not, because things used to be different. Americans used to have secure 40-hour-a-week jobs that paid well enough to raise a family on one income. Per capita GDP has gone up considerably since then, but the surplus has all accumulated at the top.

That’s not natural; it didn’t happen to nearly the same extent in other countries. It happened here because the very wealthy got control of our political system and ran it for their own benefit. It happened because we changed the rules to reward financial sleight-of-hand over making things and serving people. It happened because we devalued the public sector — the schools, the roads, the parks, the safety net — and let our whole society get split into First Class and Coach.

Fixing that is what the 99% movement is about. It’s not about making talent and hard work and wise choices irrelevant. But how talented, how hard-working, how wise — and how lucky, never forget the role of luck in your success — should a person need to be to have a decent life? How unforgiving do we want to make our society?

If the 99% win and the system changes, the economic race will continue and some people will still outrun the others. Nobody grudges them that. But we don’t have to live in a society where the Devil takes the hindmost. And we can still have empathy for the people we pass. That’s a virtue too.

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A View from Dewey Square

October 17, 2011 – 12:48 pm

I doubt the world needs another occupation-protest eye-witness blog post. People much better known than me have already been there: Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, Rick Perlstein, and Jeffrey Sachs, just to name a few. And Pistols At Dawn already did the ordinary-person-checks-out-the-hype thing pretty well.

Still, when I heard there was an Occupy Boston protest at Dewey Square (at the South Station T stop across from the Federal Reserve), I couldn’t resist taking a look. And having been there, I now can’t resist writing about it. But I’ll try to restrain myself from repeating what’s already been said hundreds of times.

Two things struck me about Occupy Boston. First, Dewey Square is tiny. I didn’t do a count, but Salon’s description of a “field … filled with hundreds of tents and tarps” is a vast exaggeration. We’re talking at most a few dozen small tents, and they totally fill the available space but for a walkway. Mayor Menino’s warning “you can’t tie up a city” is similarly absurd. Any occupation confined to Dewey Square isn’t even a mosquito bite on a city the size of Boston.

Second, the way conservatives try to make the Occupation movement sound scary is ludicrous. Eric Cantor’s talk about “mobs” and Glenn Beck’s warning that “They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you” — we’re in Fantasyland here. People who say things like this are just hoping you don’t bother to get any genuine information.

I was at Occupy Boston on Tuesday (the same day as The New Yorker; their photo shows about a third of the encampment). Monday the camp had tried to expand to the next park down the Greenway (for obvious reasons; they’re out of space), and police violently ejected them at 1:30 in the morning. The video got national attention, and not in a way that made the police look good. Veterans For Peace positioned itself between the police and the protesters, and the police manhandled them.

So if ever the Occupiers were going to be surly and vengeful, it would have been Tuesday.

But I didn’t run into anybody surly and vengeful. Annoyed, maybe.  Some of them were amazed (in that way educated white people get) to realize that police don’t necessarily act reasonably or even obey the law. But everyone seemed to understand that the Occupation is nonviolent by definition. If they get provoked to violence, they’ve lost the argument.

Two of the people I talked to were white-haired folks who reminisced about the Vietnam War protests of their youth. One had a Santa-Claus beard and was selling anarchist pamphlets, probably for less than it cost him to photo-copy them. (I bought one for 50 cents.) The other was a woman who was trying to figure out how to start an occupation in Cambridge.

A young man wearing a pink wig was holding a sign about police abuse, so I asked him about the previous night’s confrontation. He told the same basic story I eventually heard from just about everyone (each in their own words rather than rehearsed or programmed): The police were violent and the demonstrators peaceful.

The clean-cut 20-something geeks in the media tent told me the most outrageous Monday-night story: Someone had rented a hotel room overlooking the square and were broadcasing a live feed of the police raid, until the police came up and stopped them — on no particular grounds anybody could imagine.

But as in the famous John Gilmore quote, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” The geeks were excitedly processing all the Monday-night video they could get their hands on and posting it to the Web. That seemed to be all the revenge they needed.

The guy at the information table was collecting bail money. At the logistics tent they were hoping for donations of tents to replace the ones the police had thrown in a garbage truck Monday night.

Everybody was careful not to speak for the group. Future strategy was going to be a topic of that evening’s General Assembly, and nobody wanted to prejudge the outcome. (The Occupiers were proud of their democratic process, though they all admitted it was tedious.)

Anger? Not so much. There was stuff to do. Venting or riling each other up wasn’t going to get it done. No one seemed hurried or panicked, but many seemed focused.

Like so many middle-aged people who see an Occupation protest, I can’t resist making a sweeping generalization: I don’t think people my age appreciate the effect a lifetime of computer games has had on the rising generation. They are both more strategic and more relentless than we expect them to be.

So they did not experience Monday’s police raid as some primitive horror; it was just the new challenge that marked the Occupation’s progress to Level 2. It’s something else to overcome, like bad weather. So the Occupiers bail people out, get more tents, and keep going until they can find the door to Level 3.

[I haven’t been to Occupy Wall Street, but the way they met the weekend’s park-cleaning challenge sounded similar. This level has a new obstacle; how do we marshal our resources to overcome it?]

If the authorities think they’re going to get rid of these protests through slow escalation, they’d better think again. They’ll just be training the protesters to reach ever-higher levels of proficiency.

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Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes

October 17, 2011 – 12:41 pm

Whenever I listen to Elizabeth Warren and then try to repeat what she said to somebody else, it always comes out sounding like this parody:

The current Vanity Fair article about Warren is well worth reading, and it recalls a statement she made to Huffington Post a year and a half ago:

My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.

I think that’s the only attitude that’s going to get anywhere as the middle class battles to preserve itself against the plutocracy. Trying to play nice hasn’t worked so well.

Hunter on Daily Kos explains why Herman Cain’s healthcare experience as a multi-millionaire CEO has nothing to do with your healthcare — and why his most famous line about it is false:

Cain has said on numerous occasions that he would not have survived cancer had the Obama health care plan been in effect. He got excellent care, you see, and supposedly the new health care plan would have fouled that up in some unspecified way, probably involving “death panels” or the like. … There’s nothing in the health care plan that would affect Herman Cain’s ability to buy exceptional insurance, or to pay untold gobs of money towards his own care. Not a damn thing.  As a wealthy American, he will continue to receive substantially better care than other people simply because he can afford it

Cenk Uygur takes apart a right-wing group’s charge that Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic.

Another smear that I’m sure we’ll hear more and more often: the charge that George Soros is “behind” Occupy Wall Street. With standards of proof this loose, there is hardly anything that can’t be tied to Soros.

I tried to watch Wednesday’s Republican debate, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. As soon as Michele Bachmann started blaming the economic crash on affordable housing, and Newt Gingrich joined in with the claim that if anyone should go to jail for the crash, it’s Barney Frank, I couldn’t take it any more.

I leave you with fact checks from The Washington Post (which covers many falsehoods, including Bachmann’s, which it says has been “roundly discredited”) and PolitiFact.

I don’t mind watching people who disagree with me. I watched Ronald Reagan’s State of the Unions and read the transcripts of George W. Bush’s. But the 2012 Republican campaign has gone way beyond spin into a complete fantasy world.

As an aside, this is why I don’t expect the Herman Cain boom to last. The most advantageous position to be in right now is to have no one take you seriously enough to check your nonsense. That way you can say whatever sounds good to the base without worrying about whether it is true or matches what you said last month.

Once you reach the top of the polls, people look at you harder, and that has skewered one Republican after another. Here, Lawrence O’Donnell takes apart Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which is so simple that Cain can’t understand it himself.

While we’re fact checking, Media Matters lists Fox News’ ten biggest lies about the EPA.

Robert Reich exposes seven popular economic lies.

James Fallows describes exactly what happens when your cloud-based email account gets hacked.

Topeka really did it: They repealed their domestic battery law. But wife-beating is still a state offense, so they claim the cases will still get prosecuted. Unless they don’t. Whatever. It’s somebody else’s problem now.

If you think in terms of charts, this collection explains our economic inequality really well.

More charts: Mother Jones explains who the 1% are and what they own.

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Public Shamelessness

October 10, 2011 – 12:07 pm

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is. 

— Benjamin Franklin, Sayings of Poor Richard

In this week’s sift:

  • Turn the Shame Around. It took Herman Cain to teach me what Occupy Wall Street is about: casting off shame and putting it where it belongs. The Powers That Be would have us be ashamed that we weren’t good enough to crack the top 1%. But what is really shameful is an economy that only works for the top 1%.
  • What Kind of King Do You Want To Be? Wednesday I had to explain to a teen-ager why the news is important. I told him that in a democracy the People are King, and the children are in training to be King. Whatever we need to know to be a good King, that defines what news is. And when we’re a bad King, people die.
  • Palin’s Big Con and other short notes. Did Sarah Palin bluff running for president just to con money out of her fans? Jon Stewart thinks so. Stephen Colbert apologizes to a ham that looks like Karl Rove. The secret “kill list” for American citizens. Hank Williams Jr., Scott Brown, and Rick Perry deal with PR problems. Occupy Sesame Street. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. It was a slow week. For the second week in a row, the short notes were the top new post. The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street and other short notes garnered 127 views. Meanwhile, Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say (from September 19) got 193 views. At 67K, it has accounted for about half of the page views since this blog moved to weeklysift.com in July.
  • Expand Your Vocabulary. A new feature, which will alternate with This Week’s Challenge. This week I want to call your attention to the term composition fallacy: assuming that what works for one person will work if everybody does it. (The classic example is standing up to get a better view at a football game.) In politics, composition fallacies are used to make structural problems in the economy look like individual moral failings. One unemployed person can network and pound the pavement and retrain until he finds a new job. Does it follow that unemployment would go away if all the unemployed tried harder? No.
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Turn the Shame Around

October 10, 2011 – 12:03 pm

For the longest time I didn’t get Occupy Wall Street, but then Herman Cain helped me out: He said something so monumentally wrong that my reaction against it pointed me in the right direction.

Here’s Herman:

Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! … It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.

That’s when I got it. An unjust system’s first line of defense is shame. As long as we’re ashamed to admit that we’re victims, as long as we’re ashamed to identify with the other losers, we’re helpless.

It would be great to have a 10-point plan that solves everything. It would be great to have a party that endorses that plan and a get-out-the-vote movement to put that party into office. But none of that is going to happen until large numbers of us cast off our shame, until we turn the shame around: We need to stop being ashamed that we couldn’t crack the top 1%, and instead cast shame on an economic system that only works for 1%. The people who defend that immoral system and profit from it — they should be ashamed, not us.

That’s what Occupy Wall Street is about. OWS isn’t about plans and parties and votes. That all comes later. OWS is about casting off shame and learning to identify with the other losers.

I didn’t get OWS because (like a lot of other people) I kept trying to fit it into the wrong model. It’s not the 20th-century labor movement, marching for a minimum wage and a 40-hour week. It’s not Rosa Parks demanding her seat on the bus. It’s not last spring’s occupation of the state capitol in Madison, demanding  the restoration of collective bargaining rights, a reversal of education cuts, and maybe even the recall of Gov. Walker.

Those were fine movements, but they’re not this movement. This is more like feminism in the late 60s or gay rights in the 80s.  Specific demands will play their role eventually, but consciousness-raising has to come first.

Remember what we were told in those days? Feminists were women who had to work because they were too ugly to get a man. Gays were perverts too limp-wristed to defend themselves. They were losers. If you resembled them or sympathized with them, you were supposed to be ashamed.

Somebody had to be the first to go out in public and absorb that scorn. I remember my shock the first time I saw Dykes on Bikes, or a troop of guys in drag chanting “We’re here. We’re queer.” I remember trying to imagine how much courage that took, and what else must be possible if this was possible.

But other than a vague sense that they ought to be treated more like human beings, I don’t remember their demands. I wonder if they remember.

Now go look at the pictures at We Are the 99%. One person after another is saying, “Look at me. I’m losing in this economy, and I’m not ashamed who knows it.”

That’s powerful. I think everybody who looks at those pictures feels a little bit of their own shame melt.

Maybe the economic story you’re ashamed to tell is no great shakes compared to people who have lost their homes or got sick without insurance or had to move back in with Mom and Dad. But you probably have one.

Saturday night at dinner, talking about OWS led an old friend to admit to me that he had taken a pay cut. He’s got a job; he’s surviving. But still — a pay cut — that’s not the image of himself he wants a lot of people to see.

Here’s the story I don’t tell: After things started going south, I was gullible enough to believe the bankers who said they had it under control. I put a chunk of my retirement savings into Citicorp and lost it. I’m not going to be eating cat food any time soon, but the story shows me being a sucker, so I don’t tell anybody. I don’t like being a sucker. I want to project an image of the 1%, not the 99%.

That’s got to change. Just about all of us — around 99%, I figure — are losers these days. We need to stop being ashamed of it. We need to tell our stories, and when we hear each other’s stories we need to embrace them, not distance ourselves.

Most of all, we need to turn the shame around. The bankers who stole a bunch of our money and lost the rest — they should be ashamed. The CEOs who have corrupted our political system so that it serves their interests instead of the people’s — they should be ashamed. The politicians who take the billionaires’ money, rig the economy in their favor, and then tell the rest of us it’s our own fault we’re not rich — they should be ashamed.

You don’t have to tell me: Change requires more than just consciousness-raising. I know.

The old rules still apply. We’re going to need policies. We’re going to need agendas and lists of demands. We’re going to need leaders to represent us and armies of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls and write letters to the editor. We’re going to have to register millions of voters and get them to the polls. None of that is going to happen automatically just because people lose their shame about being victims of an economy run by and for the 1%.

But I don’t believe that stuff is going to happen at all — not on the scale we need — until people lose their shame about being victims and losers. It’s just a first step, but I don’t think we can skip it.

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What Kind of King Do You Want to Be?

October 10, 2011 – 11:48 am

Whenever I teach something, I always start with the same question: Why should you care? Because I hate being an authoritarian and demanding that people learn things they don’t want to know.

Wednesday I started teaching current events to a bright, home-schooled 13-year-old. So that’s where I had to begin: Why should he care about the news? Why should anybody?

Lots of people don’t, and they get by just fine. Lots of people who do, do it so badly that they probably shouldn’t. The news is just one more reason to get depressed or angry or to feel superior to the uninformed masses. They get mad at President Obama instead of their boss, or worry more about some missing girl in Wyoming than about their own kids. Maybe the news is just an addiction, a bad habit like smoking. Why should a teen-ager start?

Here’s why: In a democracy, the People are sovereign — the People have replaced the King. That means that each of us, in our own small way, is King. All of our children are heirs to the throne. “So that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I’m training you to be King. What kind of King do you want to be? What information will you need if you’re going to be that kind of King? That’s what news is.”

You can’t explain it with economics: There’s no profit in news unless you’re a politician or a journalist or a stock trader. Homo economicus doesn’t bother with news. He doesn’t vote, either. The personal gain doesn’t justify the investment of time and effort.

And while the news can be fascinating or engaging, let’s face it: Hard news, the kind of stuff kings need to know, is never going to compete with gossip and sensation. What gets human brain chemistry stirring? Charlie Sheen’s latest rant? Britney Spears going out without underwear? Or the collateral damage of some Predator drone strike on the other side of the world? You tell me.

No, the right reason to care about news isn’t profit or even interest. It’s because we have responsibilities. When we screw up our job as King of the most powerful nation on Earth, people die.

Look at Iraq. After 9-11, We the People of the United States were scared and shaken and angry. Collectively, we wanted to kick somebody’s butt. We wanted to show the world that we were still top dog, that we couldn’t be poked in the eye like this without somebody paying for it.

Bin Laden had vanished into the wind. We chased the Taliban out of Kabul, and then they vanished into the wind too. Nobody had paid yet, or they hadn’t paid enough.

And there was Saddam Hussein. He’d been thumbing his nose at us for years. He was vaguely a Muslim and vaguely in the same part of the world. You can say Bush fooled us, but all he did was encourage us to believe what we wanted: that Saddam was behind 9-11.

So we fought an unnecessary war. You can blame it on Bush if you want. You can blame it on Congress and on Democrats who didn’t have the courage to take an unpopular stand. But kings can always blame a bad decision on their advisors.

Really it was us. We could have stopped it. The truth was there for anybody who wanted to see it, but we couldn’t be bothered. We wanted to hit somebody.

So people died for no good reason. Four thousand of our troops. Tens of thousands of insurgents. And ordinary Iraqi civilians — God knows how many. Maybe hundreds of thousands, who can say? Millions had to leave their homes and go to Jordan or Syria or some other part of Iraq. Picture it: Picking up and leaving your friends because you had to go to Canada or Mexico or Alaska to feel safe. Millions of people.

That’s what happens when we screw up.

Right now we’re screwing up our economy. Millions of Americans want to work but can’t find jobs. So they’re losing their homes, their kids aren’t going to college, and if they get sick they have no insurance.

That’s what happens when we screw up.

I know what you’re thinking: If being King is such a hard job and we’re that bad at it, we should just abdicate. Let somebody smarter do it.

That turns out to be even worse. All of human history proves it.

The power doesn’t go away just because you don’t want it. Somebody else gets it. Occasionally it’s somebody good and responsible, but that never lasts very long. Eventually power winds up in the hands of somebody who is good at seizing power.

People like that run the country for their own benefit. If you have something they want, they take it. If they want you to do something, you do it or you go to jail. If you try to take the power back from them, they kill you.

That’s why our ancestors decided to take on the responsibility of being King in the first place — because all the alternatives were worse. All over the world now, ordinary people are trying to take on kingship because they’ve seen what happens otherwise. Just this year, hundreds of thousands of people showed up in public squares in Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, and a bunch of other cities all over the Middle East.  “You don’t dare kill all of us,” they were saying to their rulers. “If you give the order, the soldiers won’t do it.”

Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they weren’t.

That took a lot of courage. And the reason they did it was that they wanted the chance — the chance! it might not even work! — to be a King like you and me.

So what kind of King do you want to be? The kind who can’t be bothered to keep track of the kingdom? The kind who lets unscrupulous advisors run things for their own benefit? The kind who is easily manipulated with lies? Who is impulsive and acts without thinking? Who is easily distracted by ginned-up controversies that don’t really matter?

I’m hoping not. I’m going to try to convince you to be a good King. And if you’re going to be a good King, there are things you need to know and understand.

That’s what news is.

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Palin’s Big Con and other short notes

October 10, 2011 – 11:30 am

I told you almost a year ago why it was obvious Sarah Palin wasn’t running: She was clearly working to build the fan/hater base of an entertainer like Rush Limbaugh rather than the majority coalition of a successful candidate.

Wednesday she finally broke the news to her fans. It was time: The filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary was coming up, and she had already milked her supporters for end-of-the-quarter gifts to SarahPAC.

Jon Stewart makes the case that this was all an intentional con: A lot of SarahPAC money ultimately comes around to benefit Palin personally. Bristol Palin said in June that Sarah had already decided. And yet the September fund-raising letter made it sound as if her candidacy depended on how much money she could raise. “That,” says Stewart, “puts us in Nigerian prince territory.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Stephen Colbert worries that he might have offended Karl Rove by suggesting that Rove’s PACs, whose design makes money-laundering possible, might actually be laundering money. “I have hurt Karl Rove,” Stephen laments. “Legends say you need an elvish blade to do that.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Last week I reacted to the drone attack that killed unindicted American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. This week we began to hear about the process for putting Americans on the government’s “kill list”.

According to Reuters, a “secretive panel of government officials” assembles the list.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

I feel safer already, especially knowing that this process is authorized by a secret memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. But why rant, when Glenn Greenwald does it so much better than I do?

I’m starting to get annoyed by all the people who talk reverently about the Constitution without having the faintest idea what it says. Witness Hank Williams Jr., who lost his gig introducing Monday Night Football when his Hitler/Obama analogy was too much even for the hosts of Fox & Friends, and he clarified by referring to President Obama as “the enemy”.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether ABC over-reacted, but Williams’ sacking has nothing to do with his “First Amendment freedom of speech” as he claimed in an indignant public statement.

If the government tried to punish Williams for his statement, that would be a First Amendment issue. But this is just free enterprise. When you’re the public face of a popular product, you have to stay out of controversy to avoid tainting the product with your issues. That’s why you don’t see Tiger Woods in commercials nearly as often as you used to.

Another guy with his foot in his mouth was Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. I’ll let the Boston.com tell the story:

Brown was responding to a crack [Senate challenger Elizabeth] Warren made in Tuesday’s debate, when the Democrat was asked about Scott Brown using his centerfold spread in Cosmopolitan magazine decades ago to pay for college. Warren said “I didn’t take my clothes off” to pay for school.

Asked by the WZLX disc jockey for a response, Brown said “Thank God,” eliciting laughter from the DJs.

Where to start? (1) For what it’s worth, my hunch is that Elizabeth Warren looked pretty good when she was in college. (2) If Warren had posed nude, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because she couldn’t be in politics. (3) While no individual male deserves the blame for society’s double standards, at a minimum we ought to be apologetic about taking advantage of them.

All of which leads to (4) Scott Brown is a jerk.

Here’s what I found disappointing in Rick Perry’s response to the Niggerhead Ranch controversy: I’m a little younger than Perry and grew up in a slightly less conservative region (rural Illinois rather than west Texas), but it’s clear in my memory that we were racists. All but a few whites were racists in those days. We said nigger and told nigger-jokes. It was the culture; you breathed it in like oxygen. (I wrote about this in more detail in 2007.)

So why not just admit it? Perry could say: “I grew up in a different era. I had a lot to learn about race and I’ve worked hard to learn it.” Is that too much to ask?

One more thing: Despite what some right-wing commentators are claiming, this has gotten nowhere near the coverage that the Obama/Jeremiah Wright story got in 2008.

The headlines say alarming things like Topeka Considers De-Criminalizing Domestic Violence, but the truth is only slightly better: City and county officials are playing chicken over who is going to prosecute misdemeanor domestic battery. Both think somebody should prosecute it, but they’re both threatening not to, and the side that blinks last will save money.

This is more of that “government waste” you hear so much about. Threatening to let wife-beaters walk is so much better than making rich people pay taxes.

More than half of what looks like investment in the official stats is really consumption in disguise: new houses, home improvements, and more places to shop.

Ezra Klein wrote a great piece on the early economic decisions of the Obama administration. Economists were slow to realize just how extreme the late-2008 collapse had been. That meant that the stimulus was too small and the predictions of the unemployment rate it would produce were too rosy. So it was easy for Republicans to claim the stimulus had failed and to block further stimulus.

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Changing the System

October 3, 2011 – 1:30 pm

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

— attributed to Emma Goldman
(but I’m having a hard time sourcing it)

In this week’s Sift:

  • ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground? In the current money-dominated system, neither the liberal nor the conservative grass roots can pass any kind of fundamental change through the bottleneck of Congress. What if the two sides could trust each other long enough to reform our democracy, and then have the kind of democratic struggle the Founders envisioned?
  • Execution Without Trial. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who supported al Qaeda and may have been actively plotting to kill Americans. Friday he was killed by a drone missile, despite never having been indicted or convicted of any crime. How should we feel about that?
  • The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street, and other short notes. Does it make sense to have a protest movement but no demands? More poor, poor bigots. You still don’t know how bad paperless voting machines are. 85K Americans died last year because they weren’t French. Christians face the failure of abstinence. Plus more depressing stuff, leading to baby pandas. Because who doesn’t like baby pandas?
  • Last Week’s Most Popular Post. At 146 views, Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes was the first short-notes post ever to out-draw the week’s longer articles. Everything I posted last week ran well behind Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say from September 12 (438 views last week, 67,000 total).
  • This Week’s Challenge. A college teacher says civics education has gotten so bad we all need to work on it: “Each one of us who does know how the system works, who votes, who has strong feelings about democracy and justice, has a responsibility to teach someone who as of yet doesn’t know this.” That means you, right?
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ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground?

October 3, 2011 – 12:58 pm

I think the fundamental problem in American politics is the corruption of our political system. It’s a corruption that makes it impossible for the Left to get what the Left wants and the Right to get what the Right wants. — Lawrence Lessig to Cenk Uygur at the ConConCon

Left and Right alike have proposals that poll well, but never make it through Congress: taxing the rich and a public option for health care on the Left, a balanced budget amendment and (in some polls) harsher immigration policies on the Right. The grass roots on both sides object to corporate personhood (79% in one survey) and were appalled when their government responded to the 2008 financial collapse by dishing out money to the same bankers who had screwed things up.

Originally designed to be the People’s voice, Congress has become a bottleneck controlled by special interests. Consequently, Left/Right political competition has only a limited amount of meaning. No matter how many seats either party wins, we won’t see single-payer healthcare (Left) or a flat tax (Right).

On the other hand, some ideas with little-to-no public support get through Congress easily. Lessig’s favorite example is the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998, which extended the life of copyrights issued since 1923 — keeping valuable characters like Mickey Mouse and Superman out of the public domain. Copyright is a temporary monopoly that the government grants to encourage creativity, but extending the copyright of works that already exist serves no public purpose whatsoever. (“No matter what the US Congress does with current law,” Lessig observes, “George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.”) The extension, amounted to a gift from Congress to Disney and Time Warner, who lobbied for it like 10-year-olds in December.

So who gets what they want out of Congress? Lessig calls them “the Funders” — the entities that finance political campaigns. And how can the People change the system to regain control of their government? By getting Congress to pass new laws or Constitutional amendments?

Good luck with that.

That’s the origin of this idea: Without minimizing the significance of their philosophical differences, can grass roots from the Left and Right come together in a campaign to make democracy meaningful again?

Tea Party? Lessig’s Rootstrikers organization explored this idea by getting together with Mark Meckler’s right-wing Tea Party Patriots to co-sponsor a discussion of a way to end-run Congress and fix the system another way: via a constitutional convention called by the States. Hence the Conference on the Constitutional Convention held in late September at Harvard Law School. (I “attended” via the live feed on the Web. I had hoped video of the sessions would be posted by now, but they aren’t. Consequently, all quotes are from memory or my hastily scribbled notes.)

I find that whenever I mention this co-sponsorship, people jump to the conclusion that the goal must be to generate some kind of homogenized, centrist agenda. To explain, I came up with this metaphor: Imagine two swordsmen dueling over a great prize. While they swashbuckle their way around the arena, focused on each other, somebody else walks past them, calmly stuffs the prize into a sack, and walks out.

The duel is real, but it becomes pointless if the swordsmen can’t ally to protect the prize.

The Civics of Article V. The possibility of a constitutional convention is embedded in the Constitution itself.

on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments

Once proposed by the convention, amendments would follow the same ratification path as constitutional amendments approved by Congress: They’d have to be ratified by 3/4ths of the states — 38 of the current 50. So any 13 states could block any of the convention’s amendments.

Because this would be an orderly process authorized by the current Constitution, speakers began referring to it as an “Article V convention” rather than a general constitutional convention that could spring from nowhere and make up its own rules. (The hallowed convention that produced our current constitution was unauthorized by the Articles of Confederation that it replaced. In particular, the Articles said that any change had to be approved by all 13 states. But the new constitution wrote its own rules and said it would go into effect if only 9 states ratified it.)

Article V is about as vague as the rest of the Constitution. But since no such convention has ever been called, Article V has two centuries of rust on it rather than the reams of precedent and case law that interprets most constitutional provisions. So there are a lot of open questions, which the ConConCon’s legal panel spelled out:

  • How do 2/3rds of the states “apply” for a convention? Every now and then, some legislature passes a call for a convention to consider such-and-such an amendment. If you total all those up, we’ve already had calls from more than 2/3rds of the states. But the general opinion is that the state’s applications have to be similar in some way; they have to be calling for the same convention, not just a convention. How similar do they need to be? Lessig proposes that states pass similar wordings that call for a convention in general, and then (in a second clause) urge the convention to consider the particular amendments popular in that state.
  • What if Congress ignores the applications? A lot of the Constitution assumes that people will act in good faith, and doesn’t specify what happens if they don’t. For example, the 12th Amendment specifies that (in the presence of Congress) the President of the Senate counts the votes of the Electoral College — the final step in electing a president. What if Senate President counts the votes wrong and declares himself president? All Hell breaks loose, I think.
    Similarly, what if Congress looks at the States’ applications for a constitutional convention and says, “Not gonna happen”? Or calls a convention under rules that make it unworkable? It’s not clear that anything other than public furor keeps Congress in line.
  • How do the conventioneers get chosen? Maybe that’s defined in Congress’ call. If not, nobody knows.
  • What if the convention breaks the rules set out in Congress’ call? Again, we’ve got a good-faith issue. Probably nothing happens; if 3/4ths of the states go ahead and ratify the amendments anyway, they become part of the Constitution.

Runaway conventions. The big question everybody asks is: What if a “runaway” convention goes wild and designs some whole new country for us? What it declares a socialist republic or a Christian theocracy or something?

The simple answer is that 13 states refuse to ratify it and the whole plan goes into the dustbin of history. There are at least 13 blue states and 13 red states, so nothing could pass without bipartisan support.

This only gets tricky if the convention does what the original convention did: writes new ratification rules for itself. (Example: What if the new constitution says it will be ratified by majority vote in a national referendum?) Then you get into the fuzzier question of legitimacy: At some point the country just ignores the process and the old government continues.

What a convention could do. The consensus of the legal panel was that constitutional amendments should be about the mechanics of government, and that more specific proposals (like Prohibition) are better left to legislation that can be easily repealed if it doesn’t work.

But the Supreme Court has boxed us into a situation where the corruption of our system can’t be rooted out without constitutional changes. So we should be looking for structural changes that make legislative change possible.

In particular, Lessig wants public funding of campaigns, through a voucher system similar to the one Ackerman and Ayres proposed in Voting With Dollars.

Fear of democracy. Lessig argues that the fear of a runaway convention results from an underlying fear of democracy and fear of each other, which the Powers That Be encourage and profit from. This is backwards, he argues: The Powers That Be (and not our fellow citizens) have proven that they’re not to be trusted.

We are used to a managed democracy, where the People only choose after the options have been very tightly scripted. (As Cake put it: “Some people drink Pepsi, some people drink Coke. The wacky morning DJ says democracy’s a joke.”) A constitutional convention would be deliberative, not managed. The conventioneers would have real responsibility, and a chance to shape the questions rather than choose from a prepared list of answers.

Lessig has faith in the deliberative powers of ordinary people, and supports Sandy Levinson‘s idea that the best way to choose conventioneers would be randomly, as juries are chosen. (The one jury I’ve served on supports his case; we rose to the occasion and did a good job.)

You got a better idea? Even Lessig is not wild about a ConCon. He’s been driven to it by the failure of everything else. Would it work? Or would it be taken over the same forces that distort the rest of our political system? Would it all come to nothing or produce some crisis of legitimacy?

He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t think we can keep doing what we’re doing.

Lessig’s keynote address was one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the most inspiring part was in the question session, which that link doesn’t include. I’ll try to fill in from my notes and from a similar talk elsewhere.

This is how he answered the will-this-work question. First, he admitted that it probably wouldn’t. But then he asked:

If a doctor told you that your child had terminal brain cancer and there was nothing you could do, would you really do nothing? Just look at the doctor and say OK?

No you wouldn’t do nothing, because that’s what it means to love: to have the willingness to act compassionately for something, even if it seems impossible.

I am acting on the faith that all over America there are people who have this kind of love of country.

It is very rare to hear a liberal grab hold of the patriotism theme like this, and to attach it to having the courage to trust each other rather than the vicarious “courage” to send soldiers into somebody else’s country. I got shivers. It’s a powerful emotional argument.

But it also makes sense. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t be a democracy. Where does that kind of thinking lead?

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Execution Without Trial

October 3, 2011 – 12:44 pm

Anwar al-Awlaki is dead. Good news? Bad news? It’s complicated.

Al-Awlaki was a major figure in Al Qaeda in Yemen, where he was killed on Friday by a missile fired from an American drone aircraft. But he was also born in America and still held American citizenship.

He was a radical Muslim cleric whose followers might have included Major Nidal Malik Hassan (who killed 13 people in the Fort Hood Massacre of 2009) and Faisal Shahzad (who unsuccessfully planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010). Maybe. At least, we know Major Hassan regularly corresponded with al-Awlaki and Shahzad found his writings inspiring.

And that points to the second complication: Al-Awlaki was an idea guy, a religious leader whose teachings inspired and justified the violent actions of others. An anonymous American official said, “We’ve been looking at his important operational role.” But looking is not exactly finding, much less proving. Glenn Greenwald comments:

Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.

In short: Al-Awlaki is dead because the President signed a piece of paper saying that he was a bad man. I suspect he probably was a bad man, so it’s hard to be all that broken up about his death. But in theory, the President (or some future president) could sign a piece of paper saying that I’m a bad man too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some due process about that?

Because drone-fired missiles are a crude way to kill people, we also killed some of al-Awlaki’s bodyguards, plus Samir Khan, described by the NYT as “an American citizen of Pakistani origin who was the editor of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language Internet magazine.” Was Khan a bad guy? Maybe. Did he have an operational role too, or did he just Inspire the wrong people?

Rachel Maddow, in a piece Wednesday about the death penalty and prisoner abuse in American jails, summed up the political problem like this (around the 7 minute mark):

This is why it’s hard for anybody to make political hay, to get political traction, out of alleged bad treatment of allegedly bad guys. … The political defense against claims that you are badly treating criminals or suspects or protesters or prisoners has always been to point at those people and say: “You’re taking these guys’ side? These are the bad guys. You’re going to take their side?”

If that’s true for domestic criminals, how much more does it apply to suspected terrorists? If they really did what they’re suspected of doing, then yes, they are the bad guys. If al-Awlaki really was trying to figure out how to park car bombs in Times Square, then who can be sad that he isn’t doing it any more?

I think I’ll let Thomas Paine answer that one. He concluded his Dissertations on First Principles of Government (1795) with this:

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

If Anwar al-Awlaki can be executed without trial, in a place nowhere near a battlefield, in a country with which we are not at war, then so can I and so can you. It’s that simple.

“But President Obama would never do that to you or me,” I imagine you thinking. And you’re almost certainly right. But I don’t want my life to depend on the President being a nice guy or believing that I’m a nice guy. I want to have rights that are defined by law rather than by the good will of government officials.

I don’t see how to claim those rights without granting that Anwar al-Awlaki has them too.

Or at least he did until Friday.

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