The Weekly SiftCelebrate 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.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
In this week’s Sift:
One of the axioms of 21st-century political campaigns is: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
In other words: If the attack against you is simple, but the reason why it’s unfair is complicated, then you’re in trouble. Even if people listen to you long enough to understand your side of the story, you’ve lost valuable time that you could have spent spreading the vision of what you want to do when you get into office.
You saw lots of examples if you watched last Monday’s Republican debate, but my favorite was Michele Bachmann’s claim that “the Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs.” The Washington Post’s fact-checker explains:
In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)
So the CBO’s 800K has nothing to do with anybody getting fired or not finding a job. But it took a whole paragraph to explain why “Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs” is deceptive. Advantage Bachmann.
The two-step. Obamacare-kills-jobs is a fairly direct attack. But if you have the time and the resources, a sneakier way to take advantage of the explaining-is-losing effect is to build up your attack in layers. The two-step attack works like this: Over time, you turn vaguely-defined words into negative stereotypes. Then you attack by attaching the word to your opponent.
Example: Obama is a socialist.
Last summer, the Christian Science Monitor spent two on-line pages debunking that claim. I doubt it helped.
If, like the Monitor, you want to be rational about this, you notice that the full attack is actually a syllogism: “Obama is a socialist. Socialists are bad. Therefore Obama is bad.” In order for the syllogism to be valid, the word socialist has to carry the same definition all the way through. So the article examines the evidence that Obama promotes some bad kind of socialism, and finds that he doesn’t.
It explains, so it loses.
Worse, Obama himself can’t dispute either step without seeming to concede the other: If he argues that he’s not a socialist, he seems to concede that it’s bad to be one. If he argues that socialists aren’t bad, he seems to concede that he is one.
Either argument misses the real point, because socialist represents a stereotype, not a definition. The right-wing media has been heaping scorn upon socialist and socialism for decades, so that (at least for their audience) those words evoke Pavlovian responses in the glands rather than clear concepts in the mind. Obama is a socialist doesn’t make factual claims about anything Barack Obama has ever said or done or believed. It simply says: “You know that Pavlovian response we’ve trained you to feel when you hear the word socialist? You should attach that feeling to Obama.”
No parallel. No symmetry. Liberals are easily flustered by this kind of attack, because we have no experience with it. Attacks on President Bush, for example, usually stayed close to facts and actions: Bush ordered people tortured. He wiretapped Americans without warrants. He misled us about the reasons for invading Iraq.
Those are all statements about what Bush did, not what he is. Is-statements against Bush were usually shorthand that quickly led back to his actions. Charges that Bush is a criminal refer to specific actions that broke specific laws; it isn’t just liberals throwing around a bad word. Ditto for liar or torturer. Even people who claimed that Bush was a fascist often produced a definition of fascism in fairly short order, and went about connecting his deeds with its requirements. (Keith Olbermann defined fascism as “the seamless mutuality of government and big business” and used it in response to Bush demanding immunity for law-breaking the telephone companies did on his behalf.)
Three steps. In the same way that Caesar’s army spent peaceful intervals sharpening weapons and drilling troops, a modern propaganda machine spends the time between election campaigns sharpening its stereotypes and drilling its audience in their Pavlovian responses.
By now, there is even a three-step attack on Obama. The statement that he is something (anti-American, say), is backed not by references to specific statements or actions, but by generic summaries of the kind of thing he says or does: Obama “apologizes for America” — a charge that is based on more-or-less nothing. (The WaPo fact-checker awarded four Pinocchios, their lowest rating: “The apology tour never happened.” Nonetheless, when Mitt Romney titles his book No Apology, his target audience knows what he’s contrasting himself against.)
The more steps you can put between your attack and the facts, the harder it is for anyone else to root it out of the mind of your audience once you get it established. If people believe that Obama is bad because he is anti-American because he apologizes for America, what facts will change their minds? They might have to concede that Obama doesn’t apologize for America in this or that particular speech, but what about all the others? The generic summary floats above any particular events, and isn’t contradicted when some event turns out not to have been like that.
No arms race. Usually, when an article points out something that conservatives do more effectively than liberals, the proposed solution is that we raise our game to compete. But propaganda is an area where we have to be very careful, because our goals are different than our opponents’ goals. Propaganda can serve their goals in ways that it can’t serve ours.
In the liberal vision, government is a means for the people to look out for their common and collective interests. We want government to succeed at that mission. In order for that to happen, democracy has to work. The political process needs to be trusted and trustworthy.
Conservatives — at least the plutocrats who dominate the conservative movement today — don’t need that. They want government not to be trusted, so that billionaires and corporations will be free to do as they please. So anything that raises cynicism about the political process works to their advantage. When the public discourse devolves to our lies against their lies, they win.
Worse, they win when the public polarizes into camps that live in separate realities. Think about global warming. In order to get a cap-and-trade program passed, President Obama had to get a majority in the House and 60 senators to unite around a single plan. His opponents only needed to stop that from happening. Anything that raised fear and distrust worked to their advantage, because they were not trying to pass their own plan. They just needed to prevent the American people from using government to look out for their common interest.
Liberals win when the public lives in one reality, and has a transparent discourse about that reality that reaches some kind of consensus. Our best chance to achieve that is to stay connected to facts. Stephen Colbert noticed the right correlation, but got the causality backwards: Liberals need to have a reality bias.
So when it comes to propaganda, we don’t need to raise our game. We need to raise the public’s game, so that they are less easily fooled. We need to spend our between-campaigns intervals tearing down stereotypes and educating the public, both about reality and about how propaganda works.
If we wait until the last few weeks before an election to explain that, then we really will be losing.
Several Sifts have led off with quotes from commentator Walter Lippmann, who could turn a phrase better than almost anybody else in the 20th century. Well, this longer quote from Drift and Mastery (1914) explains precisely what’s wrong with the Republican Medicare-privatization plan — and what’s wrong with their whole vision of individuals negotiating their own health-care purchases:
In our intricate civilization the purchaser can’t pit himself against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair one. By the time goods are ready for the ultimate consumer they have travelled hundreds of miles, passed through any number of wholesalers, jobbers, middlemen and what not. The simple act of buying has become a vast, impersonal thing which the ordinary man is quite incapable of performing without all sorts of organized aid. There are silly anarchists who talk as if such organization were a loss of freedom. They seem to imagine that they can “stand alone,” and judge each thing for themselves. They might try it. They would find that the purchase of eggs was such a stupendous task that no time would be left over for the purchase of beer or the pursuit of those higher freedoms for which they are fighting.
The old commercial theorists had some inkling of these difficulties. They knew that the consumer could not possibly make each purchase a deliberate and intelligent act. So they said that if only business men were left to compete they would stumble over each other to supply the consumer with the most satisfactory goods. It is hardly necessary to point out how complete has been the collapse of that romantic theory. There are a hundred ways of competing, to produce the highest quality at the lowest cost proved to be the most troublesome and least rewarding form of competition.
Remember, Lippmann is talking about the “intricate civilization” of 1914. It was already too much for the individual consumer to handle.
Fast forward to 2011, and let’s imagine the Republican ideal of individual health-care choice. People like my 89-year-old Dad would be deciding whether or not the cut-rate MRI shop on the edge of town is safe. (Or I’d be deciding for him from a thousand miles away.) If a profit-driven doctor recommends an expensive treatment, Dad would have to look at that suggestion as skeptically as he used to look at mechanics who wanted to replace his car’s transmission. And yes, insurance companies would compete for his business — with clever advertising, deceptive slogans, fast-talking telemarketers who call at all hours, and low-premium plans that seem to cover every illness except the ones you happen to get.
That’s market competition as it really exists in America today — not the Atlas-Shrugged fantasy of high-quality/low-cost competition.
Markets respond well when they have to satisfy well-informed consumers who have the time and ability to “make each purchase a deliberate and intelligent act”. That’s why I don’t need a government inspector to check that McDonalds’ french fries are crisp enough; I have all the information I need to make a good decision for myself. But how do I determine for myself whether the Filet-O-Fish sandwich contains mercury that will make me senile 15 years from now?
Unfortunately, a well-informed consumer is a corporation’s worst-case scenario. If it can hide the relevant data, distract or confuse the buyer, and sell the sizzle instead of the steak, it will.
And if someday we arrive at their free-market health-care utopia, which side will the Republicans be on? Will they insist on strong consumer-protection regulations that force corporations to collect and reveal the information people need to make wise choices? I’m guessing not.
This week we got another lesson on the consequences of elections: Back in April, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser won a close re-election that played out suspiciously, but apparently honestly. Tuesday he was the deciding vote in a 4-3 decision overturning a lower court’s ruling that the legislature violated Wisconsin’s open-meetings law when it passed Governor Walker’s union-busting bill.
The gist of the ruling, as I understand it, is not that the legislature followed the law, but that it is not up to the judiciary to say whether it did or not. It is a “separation of powers” issue, in which the legislature’s “failure to follow such procedural rules amounts to an implied ad hoc repeal of such rules.”
The dissenting judges found that the Court itself was engaging in an unusual process. Ordinarily, a court hears a case either originally or as an appeal from some other court, using the factual record established by the original court. In this case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court did something in between: It granted itself original jurisdiction on a case that had already been heard by a lower court, and then made its own findings-of-fact without gathering any new evidence beyond what was in the lower court’s record.
Justice Shirley Abrahamson minced no words in her dissent:
The order and Justice Prosser’s concurrence are based on errors of fact and law. They inappropriately use this court’s original jurisdiction, make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties’ arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891.
Other than that, it was all good.
Wisconsin public employee unions are now filing a suit in federal court, but I’ve got my doubts that it will go anywhere.
The other theater of action in Wisconsin is the recall elections of nine senators — six Republicans and three Democrats. Here also, the Republicans are engaging in an unusual process: They have filed dummy Democratic challengers to force a Democratic primary and delay the recall elections from July 19 to sometime in mid-August.
FDL comments:
I’m a little surprised a registered Republican and a Republican county official can just run in a Democratic primary, but those are the rules in Wisconsin, apparently.
And there apparently is no concern about good government or right-and-wrong. Whatever you can get away with is what you should do.
ThinkProgress points out that the current ethical controversy around Clarence Thomas — namely, that he and his wife get expensive favors from a rich guy whose companies sometimes have an interest in cases before the Supreme Court — is pretty much identical to a scandal that caused LBJ-appointee Justice Abe Fortas to resign in the 1960s.
One of Thomas’ benefactors has even filed briefs in his Court since giving Thomas a $15,000 gift, and Thomas has not recused himself from each of these cases.
No one seriously expects Thomas to resign.
When I graduated from Michigan State in 1978, some congressman gave a commencement speech about farm policy. So how come another Big Ten school, Northwestern, just got Stephen Colbert?
Salon’s Steve Kornacki:
If nothing else, Monday’s Republican presidential debate made those commentators who have been touting Michele Bachmann as a serious threat to win the GOP presidential nomination look like prophets.
That would be me. Like me, Kornacki is not predicting that Bachmann will get the nomination, just that she’ll come a lot closer than the conventional wisdom suggests.
I think even Kornacki underestimates Bachmann, though, by comparing her to past religious-right candidates like Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee. Pat and Mike were religious candidates first, and sometimes gave the impression that they were making up their other positions on the fly. (Huck in particular raised fears among Club-for-Growth types that he might turn into a Sermon-on-the-Mount liberal if he took office.) But Bachmann sounds completely authentic rallying a Tea Party crowd on taxes and spending.
New evidence that life is not fair: Even in his mug shots, John Edwards looks better than I do.
Nicholas Kristof finds at least one American organization that embodies liberal principles like racial diversity, social mobility, single-payer health care, subsidized child care, educational opportunity, and keeping a lid on income inequality: the military.
But as we as a country grope for new directions in a difficult economic environment, the tendency has been to move toward a corporatist model that sees investments in people as woolly-minded sentimentalism or as unaffordable luxuries. That’s not the only model out there. So as the United States armed forces try to pull Iraqi and Afghan societies into the 21st century, maybe they could do the same for America’s.
When it passed its famous anti-immigrant law SB 1070 last year, Arizona made its bid to be America’s most racist state. But Alabama is not giving up the crown without a fight.
Salon lists some of the Arabic words that are staples of anti-Muslim rhetoric, how they’re used, and what they mean to people who actually know Islam or Arabic.
There’s a fine line between making something illegal and putting so many restrictions on it that it becomes impractical. AlterNet’s Amanda Marcotte examines 10 States Where Abortion Is Virtually Illegal for Some Women.
Last week I pointed out that the NYT had published an op-ed denouncing clean energy by someone from a Koch front-group. Mike Casey gives more details:
I’m not even expecting that the Times actually demand a factual grounding for the opinion pieces it runs. That seems to have gone out of style awhile ago. … But Bryce got away with something much more preventable: pretending he’s some sort of intellectually honest thinker when his organization has ties to dirty energy money that no one bothered to note.
And then he makes a good suggestion:
Why not have a standard for all opinion pages for papers over a certain basic level of readership requiring opinion page submission finalists to disclose financial conflicts, direct or indirect, on the subject on which they have written? … it might inject just a little bit of honesty into what is now an all-too-frequent stream of enabled propaganda.
Why don’t young people vote? I don’t know, let’s ask one.
The biggest climate-change denier in the Minnesota Senate turns out to have been lying about having any scientific background at all.
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
There are those in our own country too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made. In the life of every nation, at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat, then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival on what is expedient, to look the other way. Only … the answer to that is: Survival as what?
— Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood,
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
In this week’s Sift:
Every now and then, a real person becomes a fictional character. It happens. A nice-looking girl named Norma Jean turns into the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe. Four guys from Liverpool become the greatest rock stars ever.
Some people say mythic or legendary instead of fictional, but it comes down to the same thing: Your real life gets swamped under the stories about you.
I’m told such people continue to be real, even after they turn fictional. But I can’t say for sure. I assume you could have sat around the pool with Marilyn and worked on your tans together. It might still be possible to have Paul or Ringo over to play some Beatles Rock Band. But personally, the only rock stars or Hollywood goddesses I have ever known were fictional.
The only Osama bin Laden I ever knew was fictional too. Once, I’m told, he was just a rich kid from Saudi Arabia. But I never met that guy. Long ago he became the fictional Master of Evil, the God of Terror who stalked my country, the Bogeyman.
Now he’s dead.
If you want to know how I feel about that, you’ll have to specify whether we’re talking about the Saudi rich kid or the Bogeyman. The real Saudi guy … well, I believe in human rights, and I suspect his DNA tests as human. So I would rather we had put him on trial, because that’s the American way.
But like everybody else, I’m glad the Bogeyman is dead. How could I not be? Some of my friends found it unseemly to celebrate Bin Laden’s death, but I didn’t. The Death of the Bogeyman is one of the great old holidays. It doesn’t get celebrated every year, like the Birth of the Savior does, but that’s all the more reason to do it up right.
Just remember, though: The Bogeyman always reincarnates. I mean, Hitler died. So did Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot. Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam Hussein. Evil just kept right on rolling. President Bush pledged to “rid the world of evil-doers“, but (short of annihilating the human race) that’s not going to happen. The Bogeyman will reincarnate. Soon, probably.
Consequences. Eliminating the Bogeyman always has unexpected effects. Saddam’s capture made the war harder for America, not easier. Until then, Iraqis worried that Saddam would come back if the U. S. failed. But with Saddam out of the picture, Iraqis could focus on a new question: Why is my country full of foreign infidels? The U.S. lost 486 soldiers in 2003, the year that ended in Saddam’s capture. But we lost more than 800 soldiers every year from 2004 to 2007.
Many people are predicting a similarly perverse effect of bin Laden’s death: Support for the Afghanistan War will dry up. So although President Obama has seen a medium-sized jump in his popularity this week, the pendulum could swing against him if he doesn’t start extricating us from Afghanistan, especially if his 2012 opponent can promote a vague Nixon-like peace-with-honor plan.
Alternet’s Adele Stan speculates that Bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad might further destabilize Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons.
The operational consequences for Al Qaeda are probably small. Communicating only by monthly courier, Bin Laden couldn’t have been a hands-on leader. So his significance to Al Qaeda must also have been largely as a fictional character — the Man America Can’t Catch, maybe because Allah hides him. His death will mostly just hurt their recruitment and morale.
New Era? Personally, I hope Bin Laden’s death marks the end of the nasty and dismal era that began with 9-11. I think we all feel the change, but no one knows quite what it means yet. We’ll be arguing about it at least through the 2012 elections.
We have an opportunity now to re-open a lot of conversations: Guantanamo, torture, warrantless wiretaps, and the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. If we play our cards right, those things could join the Fugitive Slave Act, the Japanese internment, and mutually assured destruction as relics of the bad old days, when we were all crazy.
It can be a new era for the Muslim world as well. The revolutions of the last few months had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and Bin Laden posters were nowhere to be seen during the Cairo demonstrations. Bin Laden’s big idea was that the dictatorships of the Middle East could not be toppled one-by-one as long as America stood behind them. His strategy was to go after America first, making us yank our hands out of the backs of our pseudo-Muslim puppets. That view seems irrelevant now.
No one can say exactly how things are going to play out in Egypt or Tunisia or Yemen or even Syria. But none of those stories fit into the Bush vs. Bin Laden narrative of the last decade. I never liked that narrative, so I have hopes for the new one.
I took this opportunity to review Terrorist Strategy 101: a Quiz, which was one of my first blog posts to get any attention. (It was on the front page of Daily Kos shortly after the 2004 elections.) While a few of the predictions are off-base, I think the logic holds up pretty well.
One of the stranger ideas to float around in right-wing circles is that we should have desecrated Bin Laden’s body.
On the other side, some claim burial at sea is not in accordance with sharia, though others note various exceptions that might apply to Bin Laden.
BTW, I notice that Muslims say “sharia” or “Islamic law” while anti-Muslims say “sharia law”. I don’t know whether “sharia law’ is one of those intentionally offensive phrases like “Democrat Party” or just a clueless redundancy like “Rio Grande River”. If you know, comment on the blog or send me email.
A possible replacement Bogeyman is running into trouble. The Guardian reports:
Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).
Witch trials — it looks like the modernization of Iran has reached the 17th century.
Disinformation watch. Did torture produce the information that found Bin Laden? Nope, and nope, and again nope. Did the Dalai Lama really say that killing Bin Laden was OK? No, he didn’t. Was Rush Limbaugh serious when he said, “Thank God for President Obama”? No, he wasn’t.
On the Fox Business channel, waterboarding is a big joke.
Abbottabad turns out to fit perfectly into the Muppet Show theme song.
Jon Stewart’s reaction: “Abbottabad sounds like the name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden.”
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If Bin Laden had been captured rather than killed, we’d be hearing about how wimpy Obama is. But now John Yoo says killing Bin Laden was wimpy — Obama should have tortured him for intelligence.
I think Osama fantasized for a decade about staying true to Allah while being tortured for intelligence. For him, it would have been better than 72 virgins.
Some of the same people who thought Bush’s mission-accomplished stunt was brilliant also think that Obama has “pounded his chest too much” about Bin Laden. Like gorillas do, I guess.
You’d think Obama would know: Black heroes are supposed to be humble like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, not uppity like Jack Johnson and Muhammed Ali.
Once in a while, it helps to go outside the polarized American system of Left/Right, Republican/Democrat, and get a view from somebody who on occasion will either please or annoy either side — like the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.
De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital is an icon among conservatives, because it outlines a capitalistic path for third-world development, one that focuses on establishing the rule of law and the transparency of markets. If you’ve ever said, “They don’t need our money, they need to follow our example”, then you’re likely to be a de Soto fan. That’s why he won prizes named after Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.
But de Soto has one decided drawback as a right-wing hero: He really means it. De Soto-ism is not just a compassionate veneer to slap onto a policy of plutocratic class warfare. He really wants a legal/economic system that is lawful and transparent. What’s more, he believes that the first world would do well to practice what it preaches to the third world.
So de Soto’s view of the 2008 economic collapse is not likely to win him another Friedman award.
One basic idea runs through all de Soto’s writings: Markets work well when everybody knows what they’re buying and selling, but they work badly when doubts creep in. (Maybe what you’re buying doesn’t really exist, maybe the guy selling it to you doesn’t really own it, maybe owning the thing entails drawbacks and restrictions you don’t know about, and so on.) When there is no trustworthy way to dispel such doubts, even an honest seller can’t get what his property is worth. And sometimes doubt gets so extreme that the market just breaks down, the way credit markets broke down in 2008.
When he looks at third-world poverty through this lens (in The Mystery of Capital), de Soto sees that a lot of the urban poor are not destitute, but everything they own or control is either off the books or otherwise ambiguous. They can use it, but they can’t take it to a bank and get a loan. So they can’t start family businesses or send their kids to college, or do any of the other things that people with recognized property do. De Soto wants to get poor people’s unofficial property into a lawful transparent system, so that they can use it as capital.
But when he turns that lens to the 2008 financial collapse, de Soto sees that the first world had the kind of system he wants for Latin American, until we threw it away by de-regulating.
It is the business of government, de Soto argues, to create and enforce standards that allow people to know what they’re buying. The great achievement of the West was the creation of “public memory systems” that standardized and kept track of who owned what, who owed what, and who was responsible for what risks. These systems replaced informal relationships and handshake commitments with publicly verifiable facts.
Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. … The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for “trust”) continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted.
… When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the “troubled assets” held by the world’s financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived. Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.
De Soto understands that there is no “free” market, if by free we mean unregulated. Markets are created by regulation.
Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government’s role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind’s greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.
To avoid another 2008 collapse, he argues, we need to re-regulate finance. Governments should standardize and keep records on all the new financial instruments, and insist on accounting standards that make corporate risks transparent again. Otherwise, how can investors know whether they are buying a piece of the next AIG?
And if they can’t know, why will they invest at all?
April’s best satire. Exporting Democracy Has Led to Shortages of it in U.S., Expert Say.
a new study commissioned by the University of Minnesota … predicts that if the U.S. continues to export democracy at its current pace it may completely run out of it at home by the year 2015.
House Speaker Boehner recommends we deal with the shortage by exploring “alternative forms of government, such as oligarchy or plutocracy.”
Friday Rachel Maddow did one of the most powerful TV interviews I’ve ever seen: As the NRA convention was happening downtown, she got a driving tour of PIttsburgh’s gun-infested Homewood neighborhood from its councilman, Rev. Ricky Burgess.
Earlier on the same show, she used quotes from the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina to make an important point that no one else is making so clearly: The party’s libertarian small-government rhetoric doesn’t match its meddling big-government social policies — exemplified by a new Florida law about how low students can wear their pants.
Tuesday she was on Jon Stewart’s show.
Speaking of Jon Stewart, Tuesday’s show also had his royal wedding coverage. The royal family banned satire and comedy shows from using the news footage — which they can do in the UK. Jon decided not to take that lying down.
In 2007, the possible presidential candidates who were making appearances in early primary states went ahead to run, while the ones who weren’t, didn’t. Using that criterion, Nate Silver says:
the 2012 Republican field is far more defined than most people think, with Mr. Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Mr. Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Mr. Romney as likely’s and Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Trump and Mr. Paul as maybe’s.
According to Frank Lunz’s focus group, the big winner of Thursday’s debate was Godfather’s Pizza founder Herman Cain — despite the fact that he doesn’t have an Afghanistan policy and doesn’t expect to have one until he takes office.
The first rule of political web design has to be: Get control of all the URLs for your candidate’s name. Republican congressional candidate Jane Corwin must have missed that class. Her web site is JaneCorwin.com, and a devastating parody (with all the same photos — you have to see it) is now at JaneCorwin.org.
She says: “Together we can build a bright future that is lit with prosperity and opportunity.” The parody says: “Together we can make delicious soup from the bones of the poor.”
Can’t decide which baseball team to root for? Follow this flow chart.
If you ever think about writing a letter to the editor, try it this week. If you send one in, feel free to leave the text as a comment at the Sift. If you get published, leave another comment with the link.
Thursday, I published this letter in my local paper, the Nashua Telegraph. Over the last 30 years, I’ve published a lot of letters, in everything from the NYT and Time to one of those free papers for shoppers.
Here are my tips for getting a letter published.
If your letter doesn’t get printed, don’t get discouraged — it still gets counted. Sheer numbers will push a paper to print more letters on a topic. So if you see another letter making a point similar to yours, you may have helped get that one printed.
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.
— President Andrew Jackson, vetoing reincorporation of the Second Bank of the United States (1832)
In this week’s Sift:
If you haven’t watched to or read the speech President Obama gave Wednesday on the deficit, you should. It’s a reminder that on occasion our political leaders can be factual and sensible. I had the same reaction as Salon’s Joan Walsh: “That’s the president I voted for.”
Obama defended a lot of basic American values that conservatives often attack and liberals often leave undefended:
He told the often-forgotten story of how the deficit got this big: “America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. … But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts. … When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.”
He faced facts about the budget: “Around two-thirds of our budget — two-thirds — is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Two-thirds. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20 percent. What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else … education, clean energy, medical research, transportation, our national parks, food safety, keeping our air and water clean.”
He nailed the Ryan deficit plan: “I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. … [I]f that [Medicare] voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. … It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.” (Hunter elaborates on this “staggeringly bleak vision“.)
And he tells us who many of those 50 Medicaid recipients are (Ezra Klein illustrates): old people in nursing homes, poor children, children with autism or Downs syndrome or other disabilities that may require constant care. “These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”
And thank God somebody finally rejected — on moral grounds! — the idea that the rich need more tax cuts: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right.” (Cartoonist Clay Bennett doesn’t think so either.)
Finally, we get the President’s deficit plan. It’s typical Obama. No magic bullets, we have to do a little bit of everything: cut the kinds of discretionary spending we’ve already been cutting, but also let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, cut defense, reduce health care spending by raising the efficiency of care rather than by making the old and poor do without, and limit tax deductions for both individuals and corporations.
He claims that adds up to $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years. I’m sure somebody reputable will check those calculations, and when I find that analysis, I’ll link to it.
Usually the if-we-do-nothing scenario is a horror show that is supposed to goad us into action. But if we do nothing, it turns out that the deficit pretty much gets under control: The Bush tax cuts go away, Obamacare starts to control health-care costs, and so on.
Jargon watch: Conservatives have begun referring to entitlements as “welfare”. Examples: Paul Ryan has equated Medicaid reform with welfare reform. (Matt Yglesias debunks this.) And David Brooks starts out talking about a European-style “welfare state”, but then shortens it to just “welfare”, as in “Obama, meanwhile, does not believe the current welfare arrangements are structurally unsustainable.” and “Every few years, Republicans try to reform the welfare delivery systems to make them more marketlike.” In both of these lines, “welfare” means entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
So the millions of Social Security beneficiaries are “on welfare”. This narrative has been building at least since August, when Alan Simpson referred to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million teats.”
Paul Ryan isn’t lying when he says his plan doesn’t change Medicare for those over 55, but you need to think another step ahead: After Ryan’s plan passes, the generational warfare can start. Conservatives will tell young people that they pay crushing taxes to support welfare-queen baby-boom seniors. How long can that last?
About that theory that Keynes was wrong and the government should cut spending before the job market is back to normal: The United Kingdom is already trying it, and it’s not working. Cutting government spending lowers demand, which kills jobs — just like Keynes said it would
The Willamette Week reveals 9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes. And Nicholas Kristof adds this bit of common sense:
it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton.
A week and a half ago, Rep. Bill Posey (R-Florida) mocked the people who think oil companies should pay higher taxes. It’s pointless, he argued, to tax corporations:
Let’s say we tax those evil oil companies another dollar a gallon. They’re not going to write the check. We know what’s going to happen; they’re going to raise the price a dollar a gallon. Or, given the corporate greed we sometimes see, round it off to two dollars. Corporations don’t pay taxes. Corporations collect taxes. They collect taxes from consumers who ultimately pay the tax.
This is an example of the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic I called out two weeks ago. In any other context, conservatives tell us how competitive and efficient the free market is. But now, when it’s convenient, the price of gas is not bound by the market and can be whatever the oil companies want it to be. So we’d better not make them mad by asking them to pay taxes.
Suppose Exxon really could respond to a higher corporate income tax (it paid no U.S. corporate income tax in 2009) by raising its price to make up the lost profit. Then someone needs to explain this: Why isn’t Exxon already charging the higher price?
Corporations are (as I have explained before) sociopaths. They are not interested in charging a fair price and making a fair profit, because the whole concept of fairness does not register with them. So at all times — tax or no tax — they are trying to charge the highest price the market will bear and make as much money as they can.
In short: Exxon is already charging the highest price the market will bear. That price will go up or down in response to changes in the market, but subtracting an income tax from their maximized profit doesn’t change the calculation. Corporations can pay taxes if politicians have the courage to tax them.
In the Bush years, the individual civil-liberties case that summed everything up was Jose Padilla: an American citizen arrested in Chicago and held in a military brig for 3 1/2 years without charges or trial, in abusive conditions that ultimately destroyed him as a person. (Padilla was eventually convicted on a vague conspiracy charge unrelated to what he was originally suspected of. During his trial Padilla appeared to root for the government and against his own defense.)
President Obama was supposed to change all that. But though he has softened the Bush regime a little, overall not much is different. The Bush administration’s interpretation of the Constitution could have gone on to justify more-or-less any abuse a president could imagine — a John Yoo memo from 2001 claimed that the President’s role as commander-in-chief allows him “to take whatever actions he deems appropriate” to fight terrorism — so we’re well rid of those guys. But most of the actual civil-liberties abuses under Bush continue and are being defended by the Obama administration.
The individual case that sums it all up now is Bradley Manning. Manning is widely believed to be the source of a vast trove of documents that have been made public by WikiLeaks. So he’s either the greatest whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsberg (as Ellsberg himself believes) or a traitor to the United States or both.
But (like Padilla during the worst of his ordeal) Manning is still just a suspect, not a convict. And yet he is being held in conditions that constitute punishment, not detention. He sees no other prisoners and very few visitors. (Ellsberg, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture have all been refused permission to see him.) He is allowed to pace in a large room for an hour a day, but otherwise does not leave his cell. At times his clothes have been taken away, Abu-Ghraib-style. He is allowed to have one book at a time.
Individually, all these conditions are allowed in military brigs for short time periods in response to specific risks like escape or suicide. None of this applies to Manning; he is simply being punished for what he is suspected to have done. In the long term, this level of isolation is known to be debilitating, as it was to Padilla. Nearly 300 legal scholars — including Obama’s teacher Lawrence Tribe — have signed a letter charging that this is cruel and unusual punishment banned by the Eighth Amendment.
In short, our government is literally driving a man insane — an American citizen who has been convicted of nothing, and who some Americans consider to be a hero.
If you find it curious that anyone could make a hero of Manning, look at what Marcy Wheeler learned from the WikiLeaks cables: the extent to which our foreign policy is shaped by Monsanto. As in the Pentagon Papers, many of the secrets in the WikiLeaks cables are not being kept from foreign governments, they’re being kept from the American people.
And if you’re wondering how a low-ranking enlisted man was able to get his hands on that much sensitive information, Marcy is on that question too.
What do the Koch brothers get in exchange for funding the campaigns of Wisconsin Governor Walker and Supreme Court Justice Prosser? Their company gets to keep dumping phosphorus into Wisconsin rivers. Not a bad return on investment.
The NYT points out that this is a theme among the new Tea Party governors: “cut budgets and personnel at regulatory agencies, prevent the issuing of new regulations, roll back land conservation and, if possible, eliminate planning boards that monitor, restrict or permit building development.”
Whether these environment-bashing policies create any jobs (other than in cancer care 20 years from now) is debatable, but they definitely create profits for the Tea Party’s financial backers.
Fox News scorecard: Pumping up the phony New-Black-Panther-Party scandal: 95 segments lasting 8 hours. Covering the Justice Department OPR report debunking it: two segments lasting 88 seconds.
The rise of Donald Trump in Republican presidential polls is great news for President Obama. All the Republican front-runners are damaged in one way or another, so the party’s only real chance in 2012 is for a presidential-stature candidate to come out of nowhere. Dark horses like Tim Pawlenty or Mitch Daniels hope to be that guy, but the more oxygen Trump sucks out of the room, the fainter their voices get.
Are you a woman who worries that corporate rights keep growing while women’s rights keep shrinking? The ACLU of Florida has the solution: incorporate your uterus.
Arizona’s anti-immigrant law is working its way up the court system. An appeals court just backed up the district court’s injunction against enforcing the law, on the grounds that the federal government seems likely to win its claim. The opinion is boring and technical, but boils down to this: Federal law takes precedence over state law, especially on issues that the Constitution explicitly assigns to the feds.
You can quote Catholic League President Bill Donohue, but you can’t parody him. Consider last Monday’s full-page ad Straight Talk About the Catholic Church in the Boston Globe.
What did he “talk straight” about? How overblown the whole priest-sexual-abuse thing is. After a bunch of whining and excuse-making — “rape” is an exaggeration; most victims were just molested — Donohue’s punch line explains why priests are “singled out” even though all kinds of people abuse children:
Let’s face it: if [the Catholic Church’s] teachings were pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-women clergy, the dogs would have been called off years ago.
OK, I’m not president of the Catholic League, but I think I have a better explanation: Maybe the furor has more to do with the claiming-to-represent-God-on-Earth thing. For some weird reason, that always makes people judge you by a higher standard.
Equal time for Catholics who pay attention to the teachings of Jesus: Franciscan nuns are going to the Goldman Sachs annual meeting to protest the sinful level of executive compensation. I hope they bring their rulers.
Heads I win, tales you lose: Planned Parenthood has to be defunded because money is fungible; no matter what accounting controls exist, any money the government gives them might get spent on abortions. But public money given to faith-based groups is not fungible; we can be sure — somehow — that the government isn’t unconstitutionally funding religious proselytization.
Probably the Left will have this kind of fund-raiser to itself for a while: Buy your green sex toys at Babeland and the environmental news site Grist gets 10%. What makes a sex toy “green”? Babeland explains: rechargeable batteries, non-toxic materials, and so on. (Probably no animal testing either, though I’m trying not to picture that.)
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the charts: Taxes are low in the United States, both compared to other countries and compared to U.S. taxes in the past. The Republican talking point says: “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” But in the real world, we have a revenue problem.
Matt Yglesias imagines how income tax could work: The IRS could sum up all the income reported to it, compare to your personal information from last year, and send you a bill. If you had additional information to offer or claims to make, you could file a return. Otherwise, just send a check or claim your refund.
Downside? H. R. Block’s lobbyists would hate it, and conservatives want you to find taxes annoying.
Yglesias also calls BS on the claim that a flat tax would be simpler. If you do your own taxes, you understand why: “What’s complicated is the definition of taxable income”, not the tax rates. The only thing a flat tax simplifies (by a line or two) is the computer program that produces the tax tables.
Flat-taxers argue that they also want to do away with deductions, which would simplify things. But we could eliminate deductions and still tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor. The two ideas are unrelated.
Having hit my 20-article monthly limit, I bit the bullet and got a digital subscription to the New York Times. The Times is far from perfect, but it does journalism that nobody else is doing. Good reporting doesn’t happen by magic; somebody has to pay for it. If not the readers, then who?
I have no idea whether anything written on the Sarah, Proud and Tall blog is true or not. (You have to wonder about “Dispatches from the Shady Pines Home for the Violently Senile.”) Sarah Howard claims to be 92 years old and tells a lot of unverifiable (and perhaps unlikely) stories about famous people. This one is about Ayn Rand, and if isn’t true, it ought to be.
There’s an online petition to free Bradley Manning, which I haven’t signed because I think it goes a little too far. Civil disobedience ought to have a price. But FireDogLake has a petition asking the government to stop restricting official visits to Manning. That seems like the least we can do. Take a look and see if you can sign it in good conscience.
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The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.
— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, (1793)
In this week’s Sift:
Last week I argued that the current battles over state and federal budgets are part of a long-term conservative plan to destroy the public sector by “starving the beast“. Last September (in a review of Thomas Geoghegan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?) I claimed that a society with a large public sector — public schools, public parks, public healthcare, public pensions — is a nicer place to live for the large majority of its citizens.
But even someone who granted me all those points might still say: “Yes, but the public sector is unjust. It relies on the government taking money from the people who earn it and spending it on people who didn’t earn it.”
Conservative rhetoric is the mirror image of Marxist rhetoric on this issue. To conservatives, you’re a parasite if you flip burgers for minimum wage, pay little-to-no tax, and nonetheless expect the government to spend somebody else’s taxes on your daughter’s chemotherapy. To Marxists, you’re a parasite if you expect burger-flippers to work for minimum wage so that dividends from your McDonalds stock can pay your country club membership.
Who’s right?
If you look at things on the small scale, the conservative argument looks compelling: There’s a big number at the top of your paycheck, and a considerably smaller number at the bottom that you get to take home. The idea that you “earned” the big number, but the government “stole” a chunk of it — it looks right.
If you pull back to a larger scale, though, the Marxists have a point (especially if you express their ideas in religious terms that Marx would have hated). Pre-tax earnings (both yours and Warren Buffett’s) reflect the outcome of a rigged game, because they’re based on a property system that is fundamentally unjust.
Think it through from the beginning: For whose benefit did God create the world? Everybody’s? Or just for the people who have their names on deeds? Babies are born into a world in which every object of value is already the property of someone else — how can that be just? What did those babies do to lose their share of the inheritance of the world?
As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in Unjust Desserts, and I’ve echoed on my religious blog, the same ideas apply more widely than just to land and other natural resources. Whether you’re a capitalist, a worker, or something in between, the bounty of the world economy has little to do with your efforts.
You can think of the economy as an enormous lever that magnifies the results of the effort we put into it. When we work, we pull that lever and move the world. But how did the lever get there? Why is our labor so much more productive than the efforts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?
In a word, the answer is knowledge. Not just the insights reflected in patents and copyrights, but the deep knowledge that is embedded in the system as a whole: language, the wheel, metallurgy, and many subsequent advances made by people who are long dead. A huge slice of today’s economic pie is due to them, not to us. To us it may look like a wage, but it’s really an inheritance too.
So who should get the benefit of that inheritance? Lately we have been operating the American economy under the assumption that capital-owners are the sole heirs; the lever belongs to them, and they graciously let the rest of us use it. That’s reflected in the fact that wages have stagnated even as productivity increases. The lever of accumulated human knowledge continues to get longer and longer, but the benefit of its use no longer percolates down to everyone.
These observations are not new. The people who built the philosophical foundations of modern society knew that there was an original injustice at the root of the property system. When John Locke justified private property in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), he set the stage like this:
The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And tho’ all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man.
That means of “appropriation” — privatizing, in our language — was labor. If someone gathered acorns, the acorns became his or her private property through the effort of gathering. Similarly, land became property through the labor of cultivation:
God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.
And there’s the rub: After your labor makes a bucket of acorns or a piece of land yours, there should still be “as good left” for other people to invest their labor in and make their own. Plainly, that no longer is true, and it was already false in England in Locke’s day.
So the basis of the property system was flawed from the beginning. But what can be done about it? Even if you could uproot the whole system without inciting a civil war, you would probably wreck productivity so badly that everyone would be poor for decades to come (as the Soviets proved in the 20th century).
In Agrarian Justice (1793), Thomas Paine provided a solution: Let the unjust-but-productive system run, but tax it to provide compensating benefits to those who have been disinherited from the legacy of God and our common ancestors. (Specifically, Paine proposed an inheritance tax to fund a grant of capital to the young and a pension to the old.)
And that’s the philosophical basis of the public sector we have today.
So the big number on your paycheck is your share of that original unjust system. It may seem like a lot, but for most people it is Esau’s porridge compared to the human birthright they have lost claim to.
Fortunately, though, those unjust desserts are taxed, and the taxes go to provide a public sector for the benefit of everyone. The public sector is our compensation for giving up our share of humanity’s common inheritance. Conservatives can argue that this compensation is too large. But when you appreciate the magnitude of the legacy, I think there’s a better case for claiming that the public sector is not big enough.
And that’s why the burger-flipper’s children are not freeloaders, even if their parents’ taxes don’t cover the cost of their education, or the use they get out of the parks or libraries or hospitals.
Mark Twain once responded to the charge that he was “low born” by pointing to his descent from Adam. The burger-flipper’s kids have a similar pedigree. It includes Og, who invented the wheel, and goes all the way back to God, who created the Earth.
Whenever we intervene in another country, we need to ask: What would count as success?
Obviously, our highest hope is that the country could become a prosperous democracy like Japan or Germany. But when is that a reasonable expectation?
Personally, I get a sinking feeling whenever I hear somebody wax optimistic about Afghan or Iraqi or Libyan democracy, but I don’t want to indulge in the racial, religious, or cultural stereotypes that so often get used to justify those feelings. You know what I’m talking about. There’s an longstanding argument about who is “ready for democracy”. Are Arabs ready for democracy? What about Muslims? Africans? Asians?
If you follow the thread of those questions back through history, you wind up listening to the self-justifications of 19th-century European imperialists, who carried the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to the benighted parts of the world. In this telling of the story, the non-Western nations are like children, and we are the grown-ups. We need to nurture and discipline them until they’re “ready” to be Western nations themselves.
Yuck. Get the mental floss.
On the other hand, it still seems naive to expect Libya to be Germany. But why, exactly?
The problems that have kept democracy from taking hold in places like Afghanistan are hard to think about because they are inherently political and collective, not averages of individual attributes like intelligence or maturity or education. (That should be obvious: Individuals of every description come to America, and once they get here they do fine with democracy.) Almost all these problems boil down to one issue: As a nation, have we reached consensus on the issues that are worth killing people over?
Try this thought experiment: You and I belong to different tribes, and our tribes have a blood feud going. My people want to kill all of your people, and vice versa. Now imagine that some imperial bureaucrat draws a circle around our territories and wants our two tribes to be a democracy. Is that going to work? If the candidate from your tribe loses the election and my tribesman takes control of the army, are your people going to submit peacefully to the genocide?
Of course not. We’ll be in civil war before the inauguration. But it’s got nothing to do with you and me as individuals, or even with the “maturity” of our tribal cultures. Maybe your tribe could be a perfectly fine democracy, and so could mine. We just can’t be a democracy together, because we don’t have consensus on the issues worth killing over.
Look at the early United States. We had a run of really excellent statesmen, but all they could manage was to put the Civil War off for most of a century — because slavery was worth killing over, and we didn’t have consensus on it.
Around the world, vast wealth is considered worth killing for. Sometimes there are widely accepted ideas about who legitimately owns what, and in those cases the accepted ideas can be the basis for democratic laws. But a lot of the world’s wealth is what I sometimes call pirate treasure — it belongs just as legitimately to any person as to any other person. Unless a society comes up with some way to legitimize its ownership, pirate treasure will be controlled by force — and that’s bound to undermine a democracy.
Oil in the ground is a prime example of pirate treasure. Why, for example, did Saddam control the oil of Iraq? Because he had the guns. When we came along with bigger guns, then we controlled the oil and could pass it on to whomever we chose. Nobody wastes their time worrying that some long-lost heir of Saddam will come along to claim legitimate ownership of the Iraqi oil, because there was no legitimate ownership in the first place. It’s pirate treasure; finders keepers.
So as we wonder whether Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan will come out of their current struggles with a democracy, let’s look in the right direction. It’s got nothing to do with their DNA or the sophistication of their culture or even with Islam. (Remember: Overall, Muslim Americans have proven to be fine citizens.) The right question is: Can these countries reach consensus on the issues worth killing over? In Libya and Iraq, that especially hangs on the question of legitimizing ownership of the oil.
It won’t be easy, because it’s not enough to wield a majority on these questions. The consensus has to be large enough that any dissenters can be characterized as criminals, not a rebel faction. Again, think of the U.S.: Some teen-ager may decide that he owns your car, but that’s not a threat to democracy in America. We can deal with it as a crime, not a revolution. Disputing the House of Saud’s right to the oil of Arabia, though, could only be a revolution.
University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan blogged a pessimistic view of Libya’s prospects on the NYT website. LIbya has numerous “characteristics that make democracy unlikely”, including oil and an “ethnically heterogeneous” population:
no amount of Allied help will change the country’s location or its basic economics. Nor would it change Libya’s demographics, though perhaps a post-Qaddafi Libya would consist of multiple countries, each more homogeneous than the unified Libya was.
The Allied intervention will not bring Libya peace in the short term, and will not bring democracy in the long term as long as Libya has valuable oil in the ground.
A separate NYT article raises the possibility that the Libyan revolt is a “tribal civil war”, but Juan Cole is more optimistic.
It’s important to understand why “heterogeneous population” is an obstacle to democracy, because otherwise you can find yourself justifying xenophobia and nativism.
The key insight comes from Walter Lippmann’s 1920 classic Public Opinion: Democracy is a way for the will of the people to manifest itself and rule a country. But drawing a circle on a map doesn’t automatically create a popular will among the people inside. Unless and until they form a national consciousness and develop a popular will, democracy will just be a tussle among the wills of various factions.
So homogeneity is useful when founding a democracy, but once a national consciousness has formed, people of all ethnicities can join it. In 1776, for example, the Founders benefited from a shared perspective as English Protestants. But if today’s Americans consider themselves Irish or Jewish or Hispanic in addition to being Americans, democracy isn’t harmed.
Here are some maps that deserve more attention than they’re getting: a tribal and ethnic map of Libya and the locations of the oil reserves.
Compare them with the battle lines. In general, the population is along the Mediterranean coast. Qaddafi holds the capital of Tripoli in the West, while the rebels hold the the cities of the eastern coast. The west is dominated by the El Magarha tribe, while the east is split among numerous other tribes.
Both east and west have oil reserves, a fact which lends itself to the idea that the country could be partitioned. The pipeline to Europe is in Tripoli.
The soap opera of Wisconsin’s union-killing bill just keeps getting soapier. In our last episode, a judge restrained the Secretary of State from publishing the bill (a technical step necessary for it to take effect). The injunction was supposed to provide time for the court to decide whether the rush-rush process Republicans used to pass the bill violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law.
Friday, in what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called “a stunning twist”, the Legislative Reference Bureau posted the bill to its website. The Walker administration says that’s publication enough — even though both the head of the LRB and the Secretary of State say no — so they will begin enforcing the bill as law.
Both of the Republicans’ latest moves are head-scratchers. The bill-passing maneuver didn’t have to be so rush-rush, and premature enforcement will only spawn new court cases. Why not just let the first case proceed to a conclusion? Ratings, I guess.
Gov. Walker’s budget slashes public funds available to finance elections to the state Supreme Court — because judges should have to pander to wealthy special interests just like everyone else.
In another classy move, Wisconsin Republicans are using a freedom-of-information law to examine the emails of a history professor who criticized Governor Walker. Paul Krugman comments.
Governor Rick Scott’s plan to contract out Medicaid services may or may not save Florida money, but it will definitely benefit the health-services company Scott founded. No conflict of interest, though, because he got rid of all his stock in that company — by transferring it to his wife.
Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, Scott Walker — Jon Stewart skewers them all in a segment called “Gov hurts“.
The Affordable Care Act became law a year ago (though many of its features haven’t kicked in yet). Wendell Potter, the ex-health-insurance-executive who realized that his previous job was immoral, explains why we should be happy about the ACA.
Warrantless wiretapping is back in the news. A lawsuit challenging the practice was thrown out of district court in 2009 because the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. But Monday an appeals court reversed that decision. Neither ruling touches the merits of the case, which may finally get a hearing.
The National Organization for Marriage has a new ad attacking President Obama’s decision to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Stop8.org takes the ad apart point by point.
Having just celebrated our 27th anniversary, my wife and I have a message for NOM: Thanks, but we don’t need your help. Whatever you think you’re accomplishing, don’t do it on our account.
It’s not a challenge exactly, but I would like to hear from you: How do you get the Sift? Email? RSS feed? Somebody links to it or forwards it to you? You bookmark the website? Is there some way that would be more convenient, or easier to pass on to others? Comment on the blog, drop an email to WeeklySift at gmail.com — whatever is convenient.
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
The way I see it is we’ve got two choices. I can have my union busted and stand alone and be pitted against my neighbor in a desperate and unequal economy, or WE can come together to say, “This is what our families need. This is what our communities need. This is what a just wage is. This is what democracy looks like.”
— Wisconsin farmer Tony Schultz
at Saturday’s 100,000-person rally in Madison
In this week’s Sift:
Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the union-busting bill that Democrats have been trying to block and the citizens of Wisconsin have been demonstrating against for the last month. He didn’t compromise on anything, and also gained vast new powers to regulate the state health care system.
So it looks like we lost that one. Or did we?
How it got done. The 14 Democrats in the state Senate had escaped to Illinois to deny the Senate the quorum it needs to vote on fiscal matters. Despite a new rumor every few days saying that they were about to give in and come back, they didn’t. And despite a well-funded propaganda campaign about how they needed to “come back and do their jobs” — i.e., knuckle under to Governor Walker — poll after poll showed the people of Wisconsin supporting their position.
Here’s how it went down: After weeks of claiming that the union-busting parts of the bill were absolutely essential to close the budget gap, the Republicans reversed themselves, split the union-busting off from the rest of the bill, and then declared that union-busting part was non-fiscal, and so didn’t need the 20-senator quorum. They passed it 18-1 in what the Wisconsin State Journal called “a bizarre two-and-a-half hour legislative sprint” that appeared to violate Wisconsin laws about public notice.
Democratic Senator Jon Erpanbach summed up:
They have been saying all along that this is a fiscal item; we’ve been saying it is not. They have been lying. Their goal is to bust up the unions.
Will it stand? Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law says that public meetings require 24 hours notice unless there is an emergency, and even then two hours are required. The conference committee that split the fiscal and non-fiscal parts of the bill did neither. Worse, notice was provided inside the Capitol at a time when access to the Capitol had been strictly limited.
So there will be a legal challenge, and it’s possible the bill will get thrown out. On the other hand, the Senate clerk says everything is OK, and it’s not clear that the state courts have the right to call the legislature to account for rules the legislature imposed on itself. I can’t predict what will happen.
BTW, this makes the April 5 election of a new state Supreme Court justice way more interesting.
What next? The bill restricts the public-employee unions’ ability to collect union dues and requires an annual re-certification election, in addition to taking off the table nearly all the issues that would make workers want to have a union to begin with. So without question, it will kill the unions in the long run.
In the short run though, not much happens other than public employees seeing their take-home pay shrink. (Governor Walker told Sean Hannity workers could make up the difference by not paying union dues: “So, you can use those five or $600 if you are a state employee that you otherwise pay for union dues or up to $1,000 for teachers’ union dues, and you can use those if you chose to pay for your health care and your pension contributions.”)
Other than what the courts do, the next fight is to recall the eight Republican senators who are eligible for recall. Petitions are circulating, but the process is difficult. Two senators, though, seem to be in real trouble, and their recall would send a serious message.
Energized Democrats. There are a number of lenses through which to see the two major parties: big government vs. small government, government vs. corporations, and so on. The one that paints the Democrats in the best light is: working people against the rich. That’s the frame this issue reinforces, and the longer it stays in the headlines, the better for Democrats.
In all these state budget battles, Democrats are for working people, for the public schools that the children of working people attend, for the state universities working people hope to send their kids to, and for unemployment insurance and state health care assistance they will need if they ever lose their jobs. Republicans, meanwhile, are for tax cuts and subsidies for corporations, and against any regulations that will prevent corporations from abusing their workers, cheating their customers, or destroying the environment.
The longer that frame stays in place, the better for the Democrats.
Best of all, for once Democrats did not knuckle under. They lost, but they lost defiantly, determined to continue the battle and win the war. Rank-and-file Democrats are hungry for that kind of backbone — as was obvious Saturday when nearly 100,000 energized people welcomed the 14 Democratic senators back to Madison.
Contrast this with other recent progressive losses — for example, when the public option was removed from the health care plan. Then we were left feeling depressed and leaderless, because our leaders were the ones telling us we’d have to give in. Is it any wonder Democratic turnout was low in 2010?
I think Walker expected that pattern to repeat. The polls would back him, the Democrats would come back to Madison with their tails between their legs, and we’d all feel depressed again. That didn’t happen. Instead, Walker had to pull a fast one to get his way.
Tactics. The important question is what to do with this energy and how to keep it going. Initially, I worried that there would be violence after the legislative chicanery. But through some combination of leadership and good sense among the rank-and-file, that hasn’t happened.
Obviously, recalling the Republican senators is an important political move.
There has even been talk of a general strike — a phrase that (until this week) I had not heard used seriously in the United States in my lifetime. I’m still doubtful this will happen, and I’m undecided about whether it would be a good idea. But it shows where we’ve gotten to: Tactics from the earliest days of the labor movement are relevant again, because (like then) the survival of the labor movement is at stake.
Lesser actions are already happening. For example, unions are urging people to take their money out of the M&I bank, which has been a major Walker supporter. The M&I boycott home page is here. The full boycott list is here. (This morning, I sold my IRA’s shares in one of the boycott companies, Johnson Controls.)
What you can do. MoveOn is raising money to support the Wisconsin recall movement. You can contribute here. When I checked this morning, they were just short of $1 million.
Tomorrow, Defend the American Dream demonstrations are planned around the country to protest the ongoing attacks on the middle class disguised as state and federal budget proposals. You can find one near you here.
One way to get rich is to inherit Koch Energy from your Dad. Another way is to start out with next to nothing and use your talent to write books people enjoy reading. Strangely, the people who take these different paths look at the world differently.
Stephen King, well known as a Mainer but also a Florida snowbird, spoke to an Awake the State rally in Sarasota Tuesday. The purpose of the rally was to raise energy against the budget proposed by new Tea Party Governor Rick Scott. King said:
You might say “hey what are you doing up there, aren’t you rich?” The answer is, “thank God, yes” … And you know what, as a rich person I pay 28 percent [federal] tax. What I want to ask you is: Why am I not paying 50? Why is everybody in my bracket not paying 50?
Scott’s budget is perhaps the most naked class-war attack of any of the new Tea Party governors, because it is clearly not about closing a deficit. He proposes billions in new tax cuts for businesses and property owners while cutting public education and Medicaid, as well as cutting benefits for state workers. Scott intends Florida’s business taxes to go away completely by 2018.
Conservative rhetoric says that soaring compensation for public employees is bankrupting the states. Is there anything to that? Well, no. The Center for American Progress gets numbers from the U. S. Census Bureau and graphs total worker compensation as a percentage of state spending: It’s been heading slowly downward since 1992, from around 23% then to a little less than 20% now.
The states are in trouble because revenue collapsed during the recession and hasn’t completely recovered. No matter how many times you hear someone say, “We don’t have a revenue problem”, we have a revenue problem. Tax cuts just make it worse.
Comparisons have been made between the Wisconsin legislative maneuver and the Democrats passing health care reform through the reconciliation process. There are similarities, but also some important differences: The Democrats’ maneuver was discussed in public long before it happened. At the time it happened, anybody who was paying attention knew what was going on. And finally, the legal justifications of the maneuver were made in public before the fact, not afterwards.
I can’t resist pointing out the time-honored history of the general strike. History’s first recorded general strike was the Aventine Secession of 494 BC that resulted in the establishment of the Roman tribunes, ten plebeian officials who had veto power to protect the common people.
Department of Corrections. Last week I said:
Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker inherited a budget headed for either balance or a small surplus, which he promptly wrecked with corporate tax cuts.
This turns out not to be true, as a commenter pointed out to me. I was fooled by the fact that the budget gap was $137 million and Walker had just passed a $140 million corporate tax cut. But the the cut is for the next fiscal cycle.
I stand by the larger point of the article — that Walker took a fairly minor budget gap and used it as an excuse for solidifying Republican power in ways that had nothing to do with the budget.
The best video I saw this week — both for content and technique — was Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It’s 11 minutes long, has fascinating content, and demonstrates what you can do with low-tech animation tools like a whiteboard and fast forward. It’s from a talk Daniel Pink gave at RSA almost a year ago, and apparently almost 5 million people saw it before I heard about it. (I’ve got to get better connected.)
The economic “common sense” that keeps popping up in both business and government says you can get people to work harder and produce more if you reward the top performers with more money and penalize or fire the poorest performers. This creates a king-of-the-hill environment where everybody scrambles to be the best.
Well, research shows that this only works if the task is mechanical and repetitive. If you’re paying people to dig ditches or stack up cinder blocks, they’ll dig or stack faster if it affects their pay.
But if the task involves skill or thought, the reverse happens: pay-for-performance actually makes performance worse. Money will get you to pay more attention to a task you don’t want to do. But if you already want to succeed, money just mucks things up. (Ask any golfer standing over a million-dollar putt.)
Pink explains:
The best use of money as a motivator is to give people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
OK, now let’s look at this week’s news: Florida legislators want to rate public-school teachers half on their principal’s opinion and half on student test scores. High-rated teachers will be paid more, while poorly rated teachers will be paid less or fired.
This is a great idea if teaching is a mechanical job like ditch-digging or block-stacking. If teachers aren’t interested in seeing their students learn, then we can pay for performance so that they get interested and work harder at the rote task of teaching.
On the other hand, what if teachers already want to teach? What if good teaching requires thought and creativity? Well, then, Pink’s research says you would get better results if you just paid the teachers decently and got out of the way. Give them autonomy to try out their own ideas. Encourage them to master their profession and find a sense of purpose in the success of their students.
But rather than compare just-so stories from both sides, let’s look at data. Since 2007, New York City has been trying out merit pay for teachers. Public and private sources came up with an extra $75 million for incentives. A Harvard economist (who was originally optimistic about the incentives) analyzed the results and concluded: “If anything, student achievement declined.”
The economist believes differently-structured incentives still might succeed, but a commenter on the news report about this study has a different analysis:
The idea of merit pay includes an underlying assumption that teachers are operating at well below their capacity: in other words, merit pay should only be expected to work if teachers are, in fact, mostly being lazy, and are capable of much better work simply by applying themselves.
That assumption is pretty clearly embedded in the US’ current public image of teachers. My own experience as an educator, however, indicates that such teachers are actually a minority of the active field of teachers. Most of the teachers I work with are working pretty near their capacity (and so couldn’t be realistically expected to raise their performance in response to any sort of incentive…)
An interesting sidebar here is that the same people who believe in merit pay are also likely to believe in reforms that make teaching more mechanical and less emotionally rewarding: uniform curricula, tightly scripted lesson plans, frequent testing, and so on. Perversely, they could end up creating a situation in which their ideas pan out. Teaching could be turned into a dull, mechanical job that nobody really wants to do. And then financial incentives would make a difference.
I’m assuming you already know everything I do about the Japanese earthquake. JM Ashley adds this point: The headline you’ll never see is Strict Government Regulations Save Millions of Lives. But that might well be the truth. Japan’s building codes include a high level of earthquake-proofing, and they’ve done a massive amount of public education regarding disaster preparedness. As bad as this has been, imagine how a libertarian Japan would be faring.
It’s hard to grasp the scale of the quake, but these numbers give you an idea: Much of the coastline of Japan’s main island of Honshu seems to have moved about 8 feet, and the earth’s axis shifted by 4 inches. And if you think time is speeding up, you’re right: An earth-day is now 1.8 millionths of a second shorter. But Dan McNamara of the U. S. Geological Service says some of the claims for the earthquake are overblown.
CNBC’s free-market cheerleader Larry Kudlow comments on the impact of the quake: “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.” Or at least Larry can be grateful that he has more invested more in stocks than in people.
In addition to busting unions, another element of the Republican plan to solidify power is to make it harder to vote. (Marginal voters tend to vote for Democrats.) Here in New Hampshire, we’ve managed to scrap a plan to disenfranchise college students.
Nate Silver explains why Newt Gingrich won’t be the Republican nominee: He has no base, and his high unfavorability ratings make him a poor dark horse candidate if the early leaders falter.
Speaking of Newt, Salon has graphed “wives per GOP presidential candidate, 1988-2012“. It starts at 1.17, drops to 1 in 1992, and then starts its inexorable climb to 1.8 in 2012.
The drill-baby-drill crowd knows what we have to do to protect the country from high oil prices: Increase domestic production. Guess what? We did. US oil production in 2010 was the highest since 2003, up more than 10% from its low in 2008. Have you noticed any decrease in gas prices at the pump?
Michelle Bachmann continues to do everything necessary to run for president. She just got endorsed by an Iowa state senator who the Iowa Independent describes as “a favorite of Iowa’s evangelical conservatives and tea partiers”.
And then she came to New Hampshire and congratulated us on the battles of Lexington and Concord. Actually that was Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, but we have a Concord in NH too, so what’s the big deal?
Don’t be passive this week. Whether you support my positions or not, do something to participate in democracy: Go to a demonstration, contribute to a fund, write a letter to the editor, call your representatives, boycott something, or whatever. Don’t just wish things would get better. If you want, post a comment about what you did.
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants.
— Martin Luther King
from the Mountaintop Speech given the day before he died
In this week’s Sift:
Every time I think that I’m over-obsessing on the Wisconsin budget stand-off, I run into some other intelligent person who has barely heard about it. Considering the coverage comparative handfuls of Tea Party activists got in the summer of 2009, the fact that a three-week siege of the Wisconsin Capitol by thousands of pro-union protestors isn’t leading the network news every night is pretty amazing.
Previously … In case you’ve only been paying attention to the major media outlets, let me catch you up. (You can catch me up on other vital issues like Charlie Sheen and Kate Middleton.)
Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker inherited a budget headed for either balance or a small surplus, which he promptly wrecked with corporate tax cuts.
He then proposed a “budget repair bill” to fix this “emergency”. The bill closed his self-created budget gap by cutting benefits on state employees, and then went on to do some very non-fiscal-emergency stuff: It ended state and local employees’ rights to collective bargaining on any issue but wages (i.e., benefits, working conditions, lay-offs), and imposed new rules on public-employee unions that probably would lead to their eventual extinction. He continued to insist on the non-fiscal union-busting parts of the bill even after the unions indicated they’d give in on the fiscal parts.
This was all supposed to be a rush-rush emergency, and Democrats knew they didn’t have the votes to stop it, so they tried a desperation tactic: The 14 senate Democrats escaped to Illinois, preventing the state senate from meeting its constitutionally-required quorum.
Meanwhile, thousands of teachers, nurses, firemen, and other ordinary Wisconsinites who work for state and local governments, together with UW students and out-of-state liberals who have come to see Madison as the Minas Tirith of the American labor movement, have surrounded and sometimes occupied the state capitol in numbers that reach into the tens of thousands on weekends.
Next budget. That’s all about the budget that ends in June. Tuesday, Governor Scott Walker released his budget proposal for the two-year cycle beginning in July.
It’s a piece of work. In this era of partisan polarization, each side does a lot of speculating over the true intentions of the other side, and frequently you’ll hear it said that one side is “planning” X, Y, or Z based on some off-hand remark or a statement by some radio host or comparatively minor official.
Well, this is a budget proposed to the legislature by the governor in a middle-of-the-road state. We’re not speculating here. This is what the Right wants to do.
On education, for example, the Right wants to break public schools and push everybody into using state vouchers to pay for private schools. You see that in Walker’s budget in the combined effect of these proposals:
The best way to kill any public service is to get the wealthy to abandon it, because the wealthy are usually in the best position to make their voices heard. After the wealthy are gone, you can start the vicious cycle of cuts and abandonment, because each cycle eliminates the voices most likely to protest successfully.
And the wealthy are in the best position to take advantage of vouchers. Vouchers typically aren’t large enough ($6442 per student, currently) to pay a really ritzy school’s tuition, but they’re a nice bonus if you were thinking about sending your kid there anyway.
So if this passes it will put the Milwaukee public schools on the road to extinction, a fact which can then be used to argue that people across the state would prefer private schools.
Other hidden gems. In his budget address, Walker said:
It’s true we are reducing aid to local government by just over one and a quarter billion dollars, but we are providing almost $1.5 billion in savings through our budget repair bill.
“What savings?” you might wonder. Well, after the budget repair bill takes away collective bargaining rights, local governments can cut their employees’ pensions and other benefits. So: I’m taking money away from you, local governments, but I’m showing you how to take even more from your employees. Win-win.
This, again, strikes at the conservative principle of local control. Any local government that doesn’t want to screw its workers will be in a deep financial hole. And remember, it can’t raise its own taxes.
Deep in the weeds of the budget, Madison’s Madtown Max found $100 million for the recently-created Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. It’s publicly funded, has a broad mandate to support “new business start-ups, business expansion and growth”, is run by a small board dominated by the governor, and is exempt from most regulations that apply to state agencies (like the Department of Commerce that the WEDC more-or-less replaces).
Max concludes:
A picture emerges of the governor and a few friends, with the “flexibility” to dispose of a large budget to achieve very broadly defined, “pro-business” goals, without any pesky concerns about the environment or clean energy, or providing retirement benefits to their employees.
But what’s $100 million to Wisconsin? It’s not like the state is broke or something.
As protests continue and Walker’s popularity falls, the governor is resorting to increasingly authoritarian tactics. Police illegally kept protestors out of the capitol, and Walker supporters were brought in to clap for his budget address.
Some Democrats in the Assembly (which unlike the senate is still functioning), moved their desks outside (in Wisconsin in March) so that they could continue to meet with their constituents in spite of the Capitol lockdown.
Among the tactics used to pressure the 14 Democratic senators to return to the state: They’re being fined $100 a day. Arrest warrants have been issued, so that they can be taken into custody the moment any of them appear in Wisconsin. They also face a barrage of pettiness: they have lost their parking privileges, their staffs have been re-assigned, they can’t use the copy machines, and they can’t access their paychecks until they appear in person to claim them.
Strangely, loss of copy privileges has not crushed their resistance.
Walker has also issued a series of don’t-make-me-kill-the-hostages threats, including laying off state workers.
This is the kind of stuff an executive resorts to when the people turn against him.
The anti-Walker protests have been a huge political boon to Democrats. DaveV reports:
my 82 year old dad — a 50 year union member who has voted R since Reagan — offered the other day to picket with me. He doesn’t listen to Limbaugh any more. He has turned off Fox News.
Meanwhile, recall petitions are circulating on 16 of the 33 Wisconsin senators — everyone who can legally be recalled at this point in the election cycle. It’s 8 Democrats and 8 Republicans, but given the polls, I like the Democrats’ chances of making gains. Bring it on.
While Bill O’Reilly and an on-the-scene correspondent talk about the protestors in Madison, Fox shows video of shouting and shoving in Sacramento. If most viewers get the impression that the Madison protests have turned violent, well, that’s not really Fox’s problem, is it? Stephen Colbert gives this the ridicule it deserves.
Russ’ Filtered News — a filter, a sift, it’s the same thing — documents at least 20 lies from Governor Walker.
Another recent bill proposed by Walker rescinds the requirement that cities disinfect their drinking water. This is one of those “savings” that make up for cuts in state funding. A Madison Democrat dubbed this “the Poison Our Drinking Water Act”. I wonder if Poland Springs contributed to Walker’s campaign.
Another priority is to stop defending wetlands from developers.
After the Citizens United decision, we had to wonder how far the corporate personhood insanity would go. Well, this week the Supreme Court had a chance to push to even more bizarre lengths, and they backed off.
The case is FCC v AT&T, and the issue comes from an investigation into AT&T overcharging a government program. AT&T settled the case for $500,000. But later, competitors of AT&T filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records of the FCC’s investigation.
There are a series of exemptions from FOIA reports, which usually just result in some parts of documents being blacked out. Trade secrets are one exemption. A more generous exemption is for “personal privacy” — for example, details that turned up about individual AT&T employees.
AT&T wanted to claim that as a corporate person, it was entitled to the personal privacy exemption, and not just the trade secret exemption.
The Court ruled 8-0 against this strange idea, with Justice Kagan not participating. Judge Roberts, the driving force behind Citizens United, wrote the Court’s opinion.
His reasoning hangs on legal grammar, and does not at all undermine corporate personhood in general. Roberts argues that in the FOIA, “personal privacy” means more than the sum of its parts:
“Personal” in the phrase “personal privacy” conveys more than just “of a person.” It suggests a type of privacy evocative of human concerns—not the sort usually associated with an entity like, say, AT&T.
But Roberts ignored the fact that being a “person” at all is usually “evocative of human concerns — not the sort usually associated with an entity like AT&T.” So while he refused to double down on his previous mistakes, he didn’t back off either.
In the background of the hot political debate about teachers and their unions is a long-smouldering public discussion about education. And that discussion is made all the more bitter by the fact that none of us really know what we’re talking about.
American education is prone to fads and controversies: the new math, phonics vs. see-and-say, strictness vs. freedom, competition vs. collaboration, big consolidated schools vs. small neighborhood schools vs. home schooling, tenure reform, merit pay, charter schools and on and on. Every few years, it seems, we decide that our schools are failing and launch some big reform. And then a few years later we wonder what that was all about.
Usually, it wasn’t about much. For example, it’s worth remembering that the current testing fad is based largely on Governor Bush’s “Texas miracle” — which we now know was miraculous mainly its ability to cheat and juggle statistics.
It’s hard to admit that after decades of research, teaching is still more art than science. Every educated person can look back and pick out some extraordinary teacher. But if you try to nail down exactly what made that teacher special — something that can be codified in rules and mandated across the country — you’ll have to admit that you don’t really know. Beyond “every student like me should have a teacher like that” we’re all just guessing.
We’ve identified some things that don’t work: bad childhood nutrition, violent schools, cruelty, sexual abuse. Beyond that, we’re mostly just playing hunches backed by a few anecdotes. Perhaps out of embarrassment, education researchers have developed layer after layer of jargon that the general public finds impenetrable.
So it was surprising to find a recent report by James Heckman that is surprisingly readable, makes clear recommendations, and seems to be based on actual data:
American public policy has to shift to acknowledge that the core skills needed for success in life are formed before children enter school. The main lesson of Figure 1—that gaps in child test scores open up early and persist and that schools contribute little to these gaps—needs to be acted on.
Figure 1, which Kevin Drum reproduces, shows the gaps in achievement test scores between children of mothers with various educational backgrounds. The gaps appear by age 3 and stay fairly flat thereafter. Maternal education is an easily-measured stand-in for a host of fuzzier variables: delayed parenting, greater wealth and social standing, more two-parent homes, richer intellectual home environment, higher parental self-esteem, and so on. Educated mothers, for example,
spend more time reading to children and less time watching television with them. Disadvantaged mothers, as a group, talk less to their children and are less likely to read to them daily. … Disadvantaged mothers encourage their children less and tend to adopt harsher parenting styles. Disadvantaged parents tend to be less engaged with their children’s school work.
Footnotes reference the studies that establish these statements as statistical tendencies rather than free-floating stereotypes. (In case you’re wondering, Heckman poses and refutes with data the theory that the differences are primarily genetic.)
It’s worth noting that black educator Geoffrey Canada came to the same conclusions, and so his Harlem Children’s Zone project is as much about training disadvantaged parents to raise high-skill toddlers as it is about educating school-age children.
Another interesting point is that Heckman is talking more about “soft skills” than about IQ. Some of the differences that concern him are in the ability to manage time and delay gratification, as well as character traits like curiosity and confidence. A curious and confident child who enters school with an ability to delay gratification and manage time may be way ahead of a kid who is just smart.
Which means that current policy is dangerously wrong-headed:
In contrast, the school-focused No Child Left Behind program diverts teaching away from fostering other skills that matter for success in life besides tested math and reading. Because it ignores inequality at the starting gate, No Child Left Behind leaves many children behind.
Heckman thinks early-intervention programs focused on supplementing the resources available to disadvantaged families would be far more effective than many of the programs we are funding now. In the long run, we might save more on future remedial programs than we spend now.
Unfortunately, in the current environment, I can easily imagine his research being interpreted to say “don’t fund schools” — ignoring the part about funding early interventions.
I saw this joke everywhere this week:
a CEO, a tea party member, and a union worker are all sitting at a table when a plate with a dozen cookies arrives. Before anyone else can make a move, the CEO reaches out to rake in eleven of the cookies. When the other two look at him in surprise, the CEO locks eyes with the tea party member. “You better watch him,” the executive says with a nod toward the union worker. “He wants a piece of your cookie.”
It’s typical of the discussion the TV talking-heads are having: The 11 cookies taken by the rich are already off the table, so we’ll focus on everybody else fighting over that last cookie. But Michael Moore is right: There are plenty of cookies.
Example: How about we narrow the deficit by cutting subsidies to the oil companies? No, no, those are too important — cut medicine for sick kids instead. No Republican in Congress was willing to cross Big Oil.
Jon Stewart collects the video: The same people who defended rich people and Wall Street bonuses on principle, reverse those principles when it comes to teachers.
Stewart is biased, of course, because his mother was a teacher. And I’m biased because my sister is. (She was at the big demonstration in Nashville Saturday. If it had been a Tea Party rally it you’d have seen it on all the news shows, but … you know.)
Come to think of it, a whole lot of people are “biased” by actually knowing somebody who works for state or local government. Demonization works pretty well when it targets Muslims or illegal aliens or inner-city single moms. But the trick is harder to pull off when the public already knows the people being demonized.
Sheen, Beck, or Qaddafi? Take the quiz about which loon said which loony thing. It’s hard. I got 9 out of 15.
New research on the difference between sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, which sweetens most processed foods: HFCS leaves you hungrier than a calorie-equivalent amount of sugar. That could be one reason why Americans are getting fatter.
Stephen Colbert says “sometimes income brackets just drift apart” and proposes the rich create their own country, America Plus.
The New Republic puts its finger on what’s wrong with the low-taxes-low-services-low-regulations model of economic growth:
The fact that the “beneficiaries” who get jobs as a result of this corporate development model will have to work for lower wages and fewer benefits, and suffer from poor schools and a violated environment, is beside the point.
Chris Hayes explains why polls say Americans want the government to focus on creating jobs, while the actual government (and the media that covers it) are focused on anything but jobs: If you’re part of the DC power structure, just about everybody you know either has a college degree or lives in DC. Those two segments of the economy are recovering pretty well.
it just so happens that policy-makers, pundits and politicians are drawn from the classes that are in recovery, and they live in an area where new sushi restaurants are opening all the time. For even the best-intentioned and most conscientious staffers and aides this has, I think, a subconscious effect.
The Cookie Joke gets its point across without any of the boring facts and statistics that liberals are famous for. What other jokes should we be telling?
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.
— Frederick Douglass (1857)
In this week’s Sift:
Back in the 1950s, about a third of all American workers were unionized, and just about everybody had friends or relatives in a union. Workers in non-union factories (like my Dad) knew that they were treated better because management feared the threat of unionization. Just like today, some people thought unions were wonderful while others thought they came from the Devil. But everyone knew why they should care.
That’s not true today. Unions represented only 11.9% of workers in 2010 and only 6.9% of private-sector workers. Both numbers are still dropping, for two reasons: The types of jobs most likely to be unionized are being shipped overseas, and the rules for organizing unions have gotten so badly out of whack that it’s almost impossible to organize a company if the management decides to resist.
So unions appear to be dinosaurs, and most Americans don’t know why they should care.
Coincidentally — or maybe not so coincidentally — the American middle class is also shrinking, and our country’s wealth is getting increasingly concentrated. We still have economic growth, but only for the wealthy.
It’s easy to play tricks with numbers, but this statistic seems both fair and important to me: Over the entire Bush economic cycle, from the beginning of the recession of 2000-2001 to the beginning of the recession of 2008-2009, inflation-adjusted median household income dropped. So the household at the 50th percentile (the actual middle of America), had less real income at the end of the economic cycle than at the beginning.
In all the economic cycles since World War II, that had never happened. If median household income dropped during a recession, it would grow even more during the expansion that followed. But not this time.
Now, I’d be over-stating things quite a bit if I attributed that all to the lack of collective bargaining power. But as books like Robert Reich’s Aftershock and Hacker-and-Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics make clear, changes in government policy have played a central role in ability of the rich to capture all of the economic growth. (That was clearly evident in the crisis of late 2008: A Republican administration and a Democratic Congress ponied up vast sums to keep the bankers afloat, while ordinary homeowners have been allowed to sink.)
Kevin Drum has written an important article in the current Mother Jones, explaining the significance of unions in American democracy. It’s a primer on democracy as it actually works, which is not precisely what we were taught in civics class.
The gist of Drum’s case is that public opinion changes nothing by itself. (Otherwise the health-care law would have included a public option.) Public opinion only has power when it is channeled by organizations that have the wherewithal to affect elections: the ability to put money and manpower into political campaigns. On the Right, billionaires and corporations provide the money and fundamentalist churches provide the manpower. On the Left, unions used to do both, but they are increasingly unable.
During their heyday, the unions pushed politically for workers in general, not just for their members. So, for example, unions supported minimum wage laws, even though their members already earned more than minimum wage. They supported worker-safety laws that covered all workers, not just their own. They supported Social Security and Medicare, not just their own pension and health-care plans.
With the decline of unions, there has been no organizational voice for progressive economic policy. A few meaningful (if less powerful) groups lobby for the environment and for the rights of various minorities and occasionally for peace, but no powerful organization defends the middle class in general or the rights of workers. And so we have seen decades of corporate deregulation and upper-class tax cuts.
Think about the effort to re-regulate the financial industry and prevent another 2008-style debacle. The vague idea of putting more restrictions on Wall Street is very popular, but who speaks for it? Who is going to draw a line in the sand about some particular provision and get people knocking on doors if it’s not passed? Nobody. And so, in spite of all the proven abuses that led to the crash, and in spite of having a Democratic president and (for two years) large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, nothing much has changed.
The same is true of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Taxing the rich is popular, but who speaks for it? Organizationally, who is going to stand their ground and not crumble when billionaire front-groups like Americans for Prosperity or corporate lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce launch attack ads?
Decades ago, the unions would have. Union presidents like George Meany and Walter Reuther would have been all over the TV talk shows, putting politicians on the spot and saying the things that today go unsaid.
That’s why billionaires and corporations want the unions gone completely. And why you should hope they bounce back instead.
The standard Republican talking point is that states are in trouble because they’re being bled dry by unions. Mike Konczai looks at the numbers and finds no correlation between the percentage of a state’s employees that are unionized and its budget deficit.
What does correlate? Mortgages with negative equity. In other words, if your state got hit hard by the housing bubble, it’s probably in fiscal trouble.
So if you wanted to change the rules in such a way as to make states more fiscally sound in the long run, stricter regulation of the financial industry makes a whole lot more sense than ending collective bargaining for the unions.
Matt Yglesias thinks getting rid of teachers’ unions won’t even save the taxpayers money in the long run:
When conservatopia arrives and kids all go to for-profit schools where they’re taught by non-unionized teachers, the school operators’ trade association will have all the same sometimes problematic incentives that the National Education Association has today. Heck, it’ll probably even be called the National Education Association. But instead of being a “union” that promotes high levels of education spending in sometimes inefficient ways plus egalitarian social policies, it’ll be a “business association” that promotes high levels of education spending in sometimes inefficient ways plus regressive social policies.
One of Daily Kos’ most popular posters is Kenneth Bernstein, better known among Kossacks as teacherken. Well, this week the teacher graduated to the major media with a piece CNN titled No Unions: Government by the Rich, For the Rich. His actual phrase is better: “Government of the corporations, by the already powerful, for the wealthy.”
Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather (Canadian politician Tommy Douglas) warned about such a government back in the 1940s in his Mouseland speech, recently animated.
At this writing, neither Governor Walker nor the Democrats in the state senate are backing down. Walker is refusing to make any changes in his “budget repair” bill, and the Democratic senators are staying out of state to deny the state senate the quorum it needs to hold a vote on the bill.
Obviously this can’t go on forever, but how does it end? Initially, speculation was that the Democrats would fold, because only one of the 14 senators needs to give in to create a quorum. Eventually, some combination of bribery, intimidation, family emergency, or simple boredom would bring one senator back home.
As the stalemate has dragged on, though, it becomes clear that the status quo works in favor of the Democrats. Walker’s hardline, no-compromise position is polling badly, and Democrats have done a good job of framing the issue in terms of workers’ rights rather than greedy bureaucrats. Usually, politicians have to decide between exciting their base and appealing to the center. For Democrats, this issue does both. It also unites economic progressives with social-issue Democrats; the lunch-pail brigade has not been so shoulder-to-shoulder with students and other DFHs since their falling-out at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968.
Other Republican governors have been tepid in their support of Walker, a clear sign that their political instincts say this issue is a loser around the country. Democratic fund-raising is strong. The solidarity demonstrations across the country look enough like Cairo and Tripoli to associate Walker with Mubarak or Qadaffi. The rallies are the political equivalent of evangelical revivals, and many liberals are feeling born again.
That all creates a second possibility. At some point the people who run the GOP, the Kochs and their fellow billionaires, are going to say “We need to get this off the front page.” Their first instinct will be to create a bigger distraction somewhere else. But if that doesn’t work, Walker may have to fold.
Yesterday the first Republican state senator defected from Governor Walker.
The “budget repair” bill in Wisconsin was originally supposed to be about making up a budget shortfall. But then people started blowing away the fog of propaganda and seeing that it was really about union busting. The budget was a pretext, and after the unions gave in on the financial issues, it was a lame pretext. Even some people on Fox News see through it.
Well, it turns out that even that insight does not get you all the way to the bottom of this abysmal legislation. The bill also allows the governor to sell state-owned power plants (there are some, like the one that supplies the University of Wisconsin campus) without soliciting bids or going through the legislature. Why would Governor Walker want a provision like that? Well, it would be very handy if he were planning to sell state assets for pennies on the dollar to the companies that financed his campaign. Naked Capitalism and Paul Krugman explain how the scam works.
In the Third World and the former Soviet Union countries, this was called “asset stripping”. (For details, see Naomi Wolf’s The Shock Doctrine.) Under the pretext of some emergency, valuable assets bought or developed by the people wound up in private hands, with great profit to cronies of the ruling power. Now it seems that asset stripping is coming the the states. If we elect a Republican president in 2012, we may see it on the federal level.
The first people who noticed this gem in the Wisconsin bill figured that the Koch brothers, owners of Koch Energy and major financial backers of Governor Walker, would be the beneficiaries of the scheme. But then another Walker contributor, Alliant Energy, started posting jobs for power plant managers in Wisconsin.
So far, no specific sales have been publicly proposed. (In a serious asset-stripping scheme, you wouldn’t expect specifics until the law is safely in force and the public is looking in another direction.) So at the moment this is all speculation. But if the speculation were false, Walker could quickly end it by explaining where the sale-of-assets provision comes from and what it’s for. So far he hasn’t.
To hear people like Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck tell the story, you’d think President Obama had unilaterally decided to reverse one of the laws of the land, just because he doesn’t like it. What a dictator! Who does he think he is, George W. Bush?
Would it surprise you to find out that none of that is true? That it’s totally egregiously pants-on-fire not true?
Here’s what’s really going on: Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) says that for federal purposes, same-sex couples are not married even if a state says they are. So some couples legally married in, say, Massachusetts can’t file joint tax returns. Or if one of them works for the federal government, he/she can’t extend his/her health insurance to his/her spouse.
Last summer, a federal judge said that was unconstitutional, and more suits are on the way. Up until now, at considerable political cost, Obama’s Justice Department has defended DOMA in court, in line with what Attorney General Eric Holder calls “a longstanding practice of defending the constitutionality of duly-enacted statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense.”
But now Obama/Holder have determined that they can’t find “reasonable arguments” that work in the federal districts where the new cases are being filed. So they’re not going to defend Section 3 any more, and AG Holder wrote a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner to explain why — giving House Republicans the chance to raise their own defense if they so choose.
The legal issue is interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing. Each federal court district has its own precedents, established by its own appellate court, and sometimes legal interpretations can differ from one district to the next unless and until the Supreme Court steps in to make a precedent that is binding across the country. Currently, one such issue is whether gays and lesbians are a protected class like blacks and women. If they are not such a class, then laws discriminating against them are subject to the fairly loose rational-basis test. But if they are, then the court has to apply a higher standard, and consider the possibility that apparently reasonable arguments made for the law are actually rationalizations for bigotry. In particular, judges have to consider the arguments actually put forward by the law’s supporters in Congress rather than more legally defensible after-the-fact justifications.
Up until now, cases have only appeared in districts where precedent said that gays/lesbians are not a protected class, so the Justice Department was able to make arguments that it thought met the rational-basis test. (The judge disagreed, holding that Section 3 couldn’t even meet this low standard.) But the new cases are arising in districts where the protected-class question is still open. So to defend DOMA there, the administration would have to argue that gays and lesbians shouldn’t be considered a protected class.
Holder’s letter recalls the Supreme Court’s established standards for protecting a class: (1) a history of discrimination, (2) immutable characteristics that define the group, (3) minority status that prevents the group protecting itself through the political process, and (4) the group’s defining characteristics are unrelated to any legitimate government purpose.
Looking at those criteria, Holder says … well, duh. We can’t make the case that gays don’t qualify. And then he looks at what it would take to defend Section 3 under the heightened standards and says … we can’t do that either. If you look at the actual Congressional debate on DOMA, it was full of bigotry. So the administration is going to have to punt and let somebody else make the crazy-ass arguments that are necessary to defend Section 3’s constitutionality.
In the meantime, the Justice Department will continue to enforce whatever the courts’ interpretation of DOMA turns out to be, and it will continue to defend the parts of DOMA it can find reasonable arguments for.
That’s “dictatorship” for you.
BTW: Somebody needs to pin the Tea Partiers down on why this isn’t a states-rights issue. Massachusetts says these people are married. Where in the Constitution does the federal government get the power to overrule a state’s judgment on such matters?
There’s a Democrat in the White House and a Republican majority in the House. Must be impeachment time.
The demonization of teachers during the Wisconsin stand-off has produced a lot of responses explaining what it’s really like to be a teacher these days. Here’s the best one I’ve found, from an Oregon elementary school teacher with 34 years of experience.
Matt Yglesias explains why it’s a bad idea to run the government like a business:
A state is fundamentally an ethical enterprise aimed at promoting human welfare. A business isn’t like that. If you’re trying to look at America from a balance-sheet perspective the problem is very clear. … The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auction. With that in place, you could cut taxes and massively ramp-up investments in physical infrastructure, early childhood education, and be on easy street. The problem with this isn’t that it wouldn’t work, it’s that it would be wrong, morally speaking.
If you worry about corporately irrelevant things like morality, that is.
Mike Huckabee is sounding a lot like a presidential candidate. His new book trashes RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
Huckabee is the most likeable of the Republican candidates and I think he would be the toughest for President Obama to beat. But in the Republican Party there are three major interest groups: neocons like Dick Cheney, corporatists like Mitt Romney, and theocrats like Rick Santorum. Huckabee is popular among the theocrats and gets neocon street cred for being more pro-Israel than most Israelis. But the corporatists are still suspicious of him. The Club for Growth declared him a “liberal” in 2006. That’s where the anti-Huckabee attack ads will come from.
Every country that has signed the Convention Against Torture has an obligation to investigate credible accusations of torture, particularly those that are being ignored by the country where the torture happened. That’s why Spain is going to start investigating Guantanamo.
ACORN … public employee unions … clearly the next thing to destroy is Planned Parenthood.
Liberal media. A funny thing happens when you watch Candy Crowley’s “Sound of Sunday” summary of yesterday’s Sunday talk shows — you only see Republicans: Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels, Halley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, and Chris Christie.
That’s only a slight misrepresentation of the shows themselves. Fox News Sunday, CBS’ Face the Nation, and NBC’s Meet the Press had only Republican guests: the ones listed above, plus John McCain. ABC’s This Week had a balanced line-up, but that seems to be the best you can hope for. When do we get an all-Democrat week?
In a week where labor issues were front and center, union leaders were nowhere to be found, at least on network TV on Sunday morning. After protest from liberals online, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was added to a five-person panel discussion on Meet the Press. But MtP allowed union-busting Governor Scott Walker to make his case without being part of any “balanced” panel. And so more falsehoods about unions got propagated without rebuttal.
Meanwhile, pro-union demonstrations were held all over the country Saturday, including a giant 70,000-person rally in Madison. It went virtually uncovered on TV. Recall how much coverage much smaller Tea Party rallies got during the health-care debate.
The last American World War I vet just died. He was 110.
The WikiLeaks-related hacker group Anonymous declared war on the Koch brothers and their astroturf organizing groups. Yesterday, the Americans For Prosperity web site went down. That’s amusing, but what I really want to see are internal emails where the Kochs laugh at the suckers who think they’re part of a grass-roots movement. Find and leak those, hackers, and you’ll have done something.
This week’s challenge comes from Kevin Drum’s article, discussed in more detail above:
If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we’ve ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.
Are there any 21st-century alternatives to re-envigorating the union movement? What would they be?
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
Barry Goldwater famously said, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Maybe so, but extremism in the defense of fantasy is a tougher sell.
— Dave Hawkins, NRDC Director of Climate Programs
In this week’s Sift:
Simple demographics tells you that in the long run an American political movement doesn’t want to be anti-Hispanic or anti-gay.
The Hispanic segment of the population is 15.8% and growing, and is already a major force in Southwestern and Southern states that a Republican presidential candidate needs to carry. Bush in 2004 won and McCain in 2008 lost the 46 electoral votes of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Florida, largely due to the Hispanic vote, which simultaneously grew and shifted Democratic. In 2012, those states will have 49 votes. Texas (38 more electoral votes and growing) is securely Republican for now, but is projected to have a Hispanic majority by 2040.
Opposition to gay rights is concentrated among the elderly and getting moreso every year. If only people under 30 could vote, same-sex marriage would pass in 38 states, including places like Nebraska and West Virginia. On the other hand, even in liberal Massachusetts and Vermont, no more than 1/3 of those over 65 support it. Year-in, year-out, a lot of elderly Americans die and a lot of teen-agers register to vote. If anti-gay is not already a losing position, it soon will be.
For the Republican Party, nativism and homophobia are like crystal meth: They produce fabulous short-term boosts to the Party’s metabolism, but wiser heads — it’s scary when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are your wiser heads — look down the road and say, “We’ve got to get off of this stuff.”
But kicking the habit is easier said than done.
Nativism. Enlarged GOP majorities in 15 legislatures are pushing Arizona-style immigration laws — sometimes to the dismay of their demographically aware Republican governors. California Republican strategist Adam Mendelsohn points out the ominous implication of one of the few Republican failures of 2010:
I really think that California serves as a very important case study in what happens when Republicans alienate Latinos with aggressive rhetoric. We lost every statewide election because we lost Latino voters.
According to the same article from the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium:
Conservative Hispanic Christian leaders said talking about illegal-immigrant children as if they’re criminals turns off their conservative congregations, driving them away from what should be a natural alliance with the GOP on other social issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Homophobia. This week’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference was an early salvo in what I expect to be a long-term struggle.
GOProud is a conservative pro-gay-rights organization that participated in CPAC. A boycott led by folks like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council failed to get them thrown out, probably because GOProud’s board includes conservative heavyweights like Andrew Breitbart and Grover Norquist.
So far the results are a draw: The new chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, says “it’s going to be difficult to continue the relationship” with GOProud. But in a straw poll of CPAC attendees, 62% supported the decision to include them. (An asterisk there: To the extent that the boycott had any effect, which is questionable given that attendance was up, it would have skewed the straw poll.)
Rather than tip-toe in and thank everyone for their tolerance, GOProud co-founder Christopher Barron whacked the hornets’ nest like this:
What we’re doing is separating the people who don’t agree with the left-wing agenda from the real bigots. You can be against ENDA and hate crimes and federal safe schools legislation and not be a bigot. [But] if you’re Tony Perkins, you’re a bigot. You’re against all of that stuff not because of any federalist reasons, but actually because you’re just a nasty, anti-gay bigot.
Barron’s “attack against long time solid conservatives” set off Redstate.com founder (and CNN commentator) Erick Erickson, who roundly denounced GOProud. The 200+ comments on his post mostly agree with him, but there are some interesting threads that demonstrate how this discussion plays out on the Right. Ender asks, “how does being for gay marriage preclude someone from being a firm free-market capitalist, supporting limited government, lower taxes and strong national defense?” And jpmulhern replies:
As a society’s morality is less and less capable of holding it together, political power will fill the void. Any efforts to maintain a limited government will be futile once the moral foundation that makes such government possible disappears. … You have joined the side that wants to see the West fall, which is not where any conservative should find himself.
It will be interesting to see how similar discussions progress over time, because jpmulhern’s just-so-story logic, devoid of any examples or data — Massachusetts and Canada have had same-sex marriage for years without any apparent effect on social order — is widespread on the Right. People who have to fight against it may come to question the whole right-wing agenda.
In another conflict, Bill Kristol’s criticism of Glenn Beck’s grand Egyptian conspiracy theory has sparked an old-fashioned bar fight among conservatives. Media Matters provides a scorecard, with links to the major bottle-smashers and chair-swingers. Even Beck’s Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly isn’t buying it. Find a safe place with a good view and pass the popcorn.
I still haven’t wrapped my mind about this, so I’ll probably come back to it next week. But I’m pretty sure it’s the most important story sailing under the radar: Private security firms that have extensive government contacts and contracts have been pitching proposals to Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and God knows who else to run “information operations” against their enemies. Not rival corporations: unions and liberal blogs.
It gets complicated because there are conflicts of interest in the reporting path: We know all this by way of WikiLeaks and a related group of hackers called Anonymous. But WikiLeaks is itself one of the targeted enemies. And here, ThinkProgress covers a Chamber of Commerce plan to attack (among others) ThinkProgress:
ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.
Assuming this is accurate, we’re not talking about normal public-relations stuff. The plans call for discrediting liberal organizations by doing things like creating fake documents that can be leaked to them and then exposed as fakes after the organization runs the story. (Doesn’t that sound like what happened to Dan Rather?)
Plans also target journalists who support WikiLeaks (most notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon), saying “these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.” The Tech Herald interviewed Glenn, who called the report “creepy and disturbing”. In his own column, Greenwald wrote:
My initial reaction to all of this was to scoff at its absurdity. … But after learning a lot more over the last couple of days, I now take this more seriously — not in terms of my involvement but the broader implications this story highlights. For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation’s largest private corporations
I’m still fuzzy on lots of this, like how they planned to make Glenn “choose career preservation”. Also: Is this is a case of private-sector spooks trying to scare up business, or corporate bigwigs soliciting proposals for covert ops? Maybe by next week I’ll have a clearer picture.
I’d also like to know who thought up the smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
Governor Scott Walker’s plan to balance Wisconsin’s budget is to get rid of public-employee unions. He doesn’t propose outlawing the unions altogether, but under his plan they lose their right to negotiate over anything but base pay, or to demand base-pay increases higher than inflation. So basically the unions can exist, but it’s illegal for them to do anything meaningful.
If workers get tired of belonging to do-nothing unions, they can just stop paying their dues, and Walker’s proposal mandates annual elections to dis-establish the union.
And by the way, state workers will have to pay more for their pensions and healthcare.
The newly-elected Walker has not negotiated with the unions about any of this, and is prepared to call out the National Guard if they strike. WisPolitics.com reports:
“If you’re going to negotiate and you’re going to do it in good faith, you’re going to have to have something to offer,” Walker said. “The state’s broke. Local governments are broke. They don’t have anything to offer.”
It’s one thing to drive a hard bargain. A lot of states have seen revenue drop and expenses increase in the recession, so you would expect them to take a hard line in contract negotiations. But this is something else. This isn’t just money, it’s taking workers’ rights away. And not just until the economy gets better. Permanently.
Who voted for that? What candidate said, “Vote for me. I’ll take your collective-bargaining rights away.”?
And speaking of revenue drops, Walker has already signed tax cuts that increase the Wisconsin deficit by $117 million over the next two years. Budget-balancing spending cuts in education and Medicaid are expected when Walker’s complete budget comes out — because it makes so much sense to take money from kids and sick people so that you can give it back to corporations.
The title of this section comes from the famous reflection of German Pastor Martin Niemöller on his experience under the Nazis. Glenn Beck has been misquoting this, and popular culture is in danger of losing the original version. Beck says, “First they came for the Jews, …”
But that’s not it at all. It really goes: “First they came for the communists … then they came for the trade unionists”. Then they come for the Jews and eventually Niemöller himself.
But Beck can’t quote it the way it’s written, because he’s right at the end of an attack on — you guessed it! — union leader Andy Stern, “communist” Van Jones, and “Marxist” Jim Wallis. Naturally, it wasn’t long before he started going after Jews like George Soros.
Here’s a somewhat larger exposition of the pattern Niemöller was pointing to: First they demonize somebody, then they take those people’s rights away, and then they demonize somebody else. Over the last few years a lot of effort has gone into demonizing government workers and their unions, to the extent that even private-sector union members may not identify with the “bureaucrats” and “paper-pushers” any more. But once government workers’ rights are gone, the demonization machine can move on to focus on somebody else.
(But not you, of course. You could never be demonized.)
There’s a lesson here, and it’s a very old lesson: People who work for a living need to stick together. When the corporate media tries to raise your envy at some other group of workers who “make too much money”, stop and think it through. It’s really the corporations and financiers who make too much money. They love it when working people forget about them and squabble with each other instead.
So when you hear that such-and-such workers get some amazing pension, the right question isn’t “Who do they think they are?” it’s “Why can’t I have a pension like that?” There’s probably no reason, other than fat cats maneuvering to keep the money for themselves.
The LA Times’ Big Picture blog seemed taken aback that CNN’s Anderson Cooper repeatedly used the words “lie” and “lying” to describe what the Mubarak regime was doing in its final days. Big Picture noted “Cooper’s pronounced shift toward more opinion-making” and theorized that Cooper “may be trying to adopt the more commentary-heavy approach of [his] higher-rated competitors, Fox and MSNBC.”
Here’s what’s strange about the LA Times’ view, which seems widespread in the mainstream media village: If a newsmaker says something provably and obviously false, then “lie” is an accurate and objective report, not “commentary” or “opinion”. And indeed, Big Picture seems to realize this at some level, admitting uneasily that “It’s hard to find fault with what Cooper had to say” even though it had just spent an entire column finding fault.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald quotes CNN media critic Howard Kurtz similarly asking “should an anchor and correspondent be taking sides on this kind of story?” And then Glenn points out what ought to be obvious:
“Objectivity” is breached not when a journalist calls a lie a “lie,” but when they refuse to do so, when they treat lies told by powerful political officials as though they’re viable, reasonable interpretations of subjective questions. The very idea that a journalist is engaged in “opinion-making” or is “taking sides” by calling a lie a “lie” is ludicrous; the only “side” such a journalist is taking is with facts, with the truth.
So what’s going on here? This isn’t a glitch, it’s how the media works. But how is that exactly?
Jay Rosen is one of the sharpest observers of journalism around. A couple years ago, he brought back Daniel Hallin’s Vietnam War model of media coverage. There are, Hallin/Rosen say, three spheres of coverage. At the core is the Sphere of Consensus, the stuff you can either assume without mentioning it or present without any opposing view. Next is the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy, “of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process”. Finally, there is the Sphere of Deviance, in which the press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant views.
What issues belong where is not something that can be determined objectively. Things move from one sphere to the other through some unconscious cultural process among journalists that the journalists themselves don’t really understand.
It’s an intrinsic part of what [journalists] do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions can be arbitrary, automatic, inflected with fear, or excessively narrow-minded. Worse than that, these decisions are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists that the school does not teach values.
Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good.
So what Anderson Cooper did “wrong”, then, was to decide that what he saw with own eyes was not debatable. He reported the Mubarak lies as if their falsehood was in the Sphere of Consensus. Other journalists were placing them in the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy. But since the sphere-placement decisions are unconscious, the other journalists couldn’t put their finger on Cooper’s misdeed. So they said he was expressing his opinion.
Their criticism didn’t make any sense, but it was all they could think of. People do stuff like that when their unconscious processes get interrupted.
Another Rosen observation: “Powerful and visible people can start questioning a consensus belief and move it form the ‘everyone agrees’ category.” Grist’s David Roberts points out how this makes the press manipulable by propagandists.
The right has been masterful in manipulating these spheres over the last few decades, dragging things that were once in consensus out into legitimate debate (torture is unacceptable), dragging things that were once legitimate debate into consensus (raising taxes is bad), and — perhaps most importantly — preventing things from entering consensus (cigarettes are harmful; climate change is happening). What conservatives have realized is that you shift things between spheres not with clever arguments but with social pressure. They repeat simple messages, loudly and through multiple media, and lean hard on those who question them (“working the refs”). If they need to get a lie pushed into the sphere of legitimate debate, they relentlessly repeat the lie and accuse anyone who identifies it as such as “biased.”
The Onion reports that Senator John Cornyn of Texas “was honored for his 20 years of work with the overprivileged Sunday.” The article quotes billionaire T. Boone Pickens: “John has dedicated his life and career to helping the uptrodden.”
The past doesn’t change, but Mitt Romney’s autobiography does. It’s called No Apology, and the new paperback version demonstrates that there’s no need to apologize if you can keep re-spinning.
The slogans always talk about cutting government “waste”, but somehow it always comes down to stuff like this: Camden, New Jersey — which the FBI ranks second to St. Louis in crime — just laid off half its police force.
Florida Governor Rick Scott’s budget cuts per-pupil state education spending by 10% and cuts $3 billion from Medicaid. He also calls for $1 billion in corporate tax cuts and $1.4 billion in property tax cuts. It can’t get any clearer: more for corporations and owners of big estates, less for kids and sick people.
The NYT’s Bob Herbert responds to the celebrating in Cairo:
John Kerry said that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.” Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
And that’s pretty much what George Carlin said a few years ago.
Sometimes you have to take a step back to realize just how far things have gone. Paul Krugman points out that Milton Friedman “was a leftist by the standards of today’s GOP”. Cenk Uygur goes even further, outlining all the ways that Ronald Reagan was more liberal than today’s mainstream Democrats.
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Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don’t you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don’t you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? — Robert Ingersoll, “A Lay Sermon” (1886)
In this week’s Sift:
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has such a good lead paragraph I’ll just steal it:
Articles of faith, as a rule, don’t change every few months. And yet, just nine months ago, it was an article of faith among court watchers that President Obama’s health care reform plan would be upheld at the Supreme Court by a margin of 7-2 or 8-1. Today it is an equally powerful article of faith that everything rests in the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy in what will surely be a 5-4 decision. What changed between last March and last Monday?
Let me back up and set the stage. The part of the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Healthcare Reform or Obamacare) that is being challenged in court is the insurance mandate: People who don’t have adequate health insurance will have to pay extra on their income tax form starting in 2014. If that’s interpreted as a new tax, it’s clearly constitutional, because the Constitution grants Congress a fairly broad power to tax. But if it’s interpreted as a penalty, that’s dicier; the constitutionality of the mandate depends on the Commerce Clause: “Congress shall have Power … to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”
The Commerce Clause is the stretchiest part of the Constitution, mostly because the Founders had no idea what a big deal interstate commerce would become. In 1787, just about everything you used was made locally. Or if it wasn’t, it could be. Luxuries like tobacco and fine manufactured goods came from other states or overseas, but if you had to do without all that stuff, you could. People grew their own vegetables and had their shoes made by the local cobbler, who got his leather from the local tanner, who bought hides from the local butcher.
Today, living on local products is a major challenge. Just about everything you buy crosses state lines before it comes to you. So the power to regulate interstate commerce is more-or-less the power to regulate everything. And over the years the Supreme Court — for both liberal and conservative reasons — has chosen to interpret the Commerce Clause broadly: In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court held that even use of homegrown marijuana could be criminalized under the Commerce Clause:
the regulation is squarely within Congress’ commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity
Justice Scalia concurred with that opinion. So everyone assumed it would be impossible for him to squirm out of that position and deny the same argument for the insurance mandate. Specifically: A person’s decision not to purchase health insurance has a substantial effect on the national market for health care.
The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen argues that Scalia will squirm out, and that the signal of this squirming is a dissent that Justices Thomas and Scalia issued January 10th to the Court’s refusal to hear another Commerce-Clause case. It’s fairly rare to publish dissents to such refusals; typically the Court turns down a case if it sees nothing in the lower court rulings it needs to weigh in on, and that’s that. That two of the Court’s conservative justices chose to do so, Cohen says, signals that they are ready to overturn the ACA.
Simon Lazarus of the Public Policy Counsel finds similar decisions containing words that Justices Roberts and Kennedy will have to eat before they can overturn the ACA. But at the same time he raises the specter of Bush v Gore. Law may not matter if the conservative judges decide that the outcome is important enough.
I’ll let Lithwick wrap up:
If the odds of success for the health care challenges have tilted in recent months, it’s not because the suits themselves have somehow gained more merit. It’s because the public mood and the tone of the political discourse have shifted dramatically—emboldening some federal judges willing to support a constitutional idea whose time, in their view, has finally come.
There is no one unified ACA court case. So far four federal judges have ruled in four different districts: Two found the individual mandate constitutional, and two didn’t. (Several other judges have found procedural reasons for their districts’ cases not to go forward.) If you are only aware of the negative rulings, there’s a reason: They’re the only ones getting media coverage.
DeanDemocrat points out that the mandate is a result of an attempt to compromise with the Republicans and the insurance companies. If we’d gone for a single-payer system, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
Building on the Ingersoll quote at the top: A private market for health care is like a private market for air. Rather than making air a public good, we’ve created a system where the air stays private, but we have a government subsidy to help people pay for it.
The case against the individual mandate is that if it is constitutional, then the powers of the federal government are virtually unlimited. For some reason critics have fixated on broccoli: If the government can make you buy health insurance, why then, it could make you eat broccoli. Matt Yglesias comments:
I really think these efforts to scare people with the specter of unlimited government founder on the fact that any government empowered to levy excise taxes is conceptually pretty much unlimited. The government is allowed to tax everyone, and use the revenue to subsidize broccoli consumption. Now maybe you think that’s legally distinct from the idea of fining people for failure to consume broccoli. But the practical impact is identical.
In any reading of the Constitution, with or without an expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause, Congress has the power to do things that sound absurd. The constitutional remedy for this possibility is for the people to elect sensible representatives.
House Republicans seem to have abandoned their attempt to redefine rape, but not their overall culture-war agenda. According to TPM, a new bill in the House would “allow hospitals to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform the abortion that would save her life.”
H.R. 358, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (which Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter calls “the Let Women Die bill“) is the logical extension of those “conscience” provisions 46 states have put into their laws, allowing right-wing Christians not to participate in medical procedures they find immoral. (I have yet to hear of a liberal or non-Christian or even nonstandard-Christian application of these laws. Imagine the outcry if some televangelist died after a car wreck because a Jehovah’s Witness EMT refused to give a blood transfusion.)
In Idaho, a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription to stop the bleeding in a woman’s uterus, because the nurse couldn’t give assurance that the patient hadn’t just had an abortion. (If she had, apparently the pharmacist was content for her to bleed to death. God’s will, I guess.) When asked to recommend someone who would fill the prescription, the pharmacist hung up. The Idaho Board of Pharmacy has found that the pharmacist did nothing wrong. In Idaho, where the next drug store might be some distance away, you have no right to get a prescription filled if the pharmacist doesn’t want to fill it.
I have a compromise proposal for those states where some kind of conscience law is unavoidable: Medical professionals shouldn’t be able to make these life-and-death decisions on a whim. If a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist wants to claim such a right-of-conscience, s/he should have to file ahead of time and go through a process similar to claiming conscientious objector status in war. That would allow hospitals, drug stores, and patients to maneuver around these people’s limitations, and the more arduous process should weed out the folks who are just being jerks.
The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal says the redefinition of rape was necessary “to protect us from the worst kind of rape: money rape.” She defines “money rape” as “forcible taking of taxpayers’ money to pay for abortions.” (That’s parody, folks.)
Everybody who is not a political junky will be amazed to hear this, but the race for the 2012 Republican nomination is off to a late start, at least compared to recent presidential cycles.
Last time around, Barack Obama announced his candidacy right about now: February 10, 2007. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and various others were already in. On the Republican side, John McCain held off until the end of February, but he had already formed an exploratory committee the previous November. Mitt Romney announced on February 13. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and various others were already in by now.
In the 2004 cycle (which is more comparable to 2012 because there was an incumbent president), Howard Dean announced his candidacy in August of 2002, and Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, and John Kerry had exploratory committees out there raising money by the first week of January, 2003.
By contrast, Daily Kos’ GOP Cattle Call 2012 says “the only Republican to even file exploratory papers thus far is Herman Cain, a millionaire best known as the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.” And it’s not just that people are saying maybe in a wink-and-nod way. Yeah, we are 99% sure Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum are running, and Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann clearly want to, but there’s genuine doubt about whether Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee will be in or out.
This is just a guess, but I think the Palin uncertainty is making everybody wait. Minor candidates usually go first (because they need the publicity). And the first impression a minor candidate wants to make this year is different depending on whether Palin is running.
The Daily Kos Cattle Call and National Journal Presidential Power Rankings differ wildly on who they take seriously. National Journal takes more of a political-insider view and so gives points to people for organizing and fund-raising, while DKCC is more focused on polling. So DKCC’s top three are Huckabee, Romney, and Palin, while NJ’s are Romney, Pawlenty, and Huckabee.
In the 2008 cycle, I was awful at predicting Democratic trends and uncanny when I analyzed the Republican race, maybe because I was more objective. This time, the only Republican who scares me (in terms of beating Obama and becoming president) is Huckabee. For this reason: When I ignore the content of his words and just look at his body language and listen to his tone, Huckabee does by far the best job of sounding like a reasonable guy. If you had all the potential Republican candidates read the phone book out loud, and then asked a random group of low-information voters who they’d trust to do the right thing about an issue they know nothing about, they’d pick Huckabee.
On that look-and-sound test, Romney seems calculated, Bachmann crazy, Palin flighty, and who the hell are these other people anyway?
Fortunately, Huckabee doesn’t seem to be raising money yet or maneuvering to sign up organizational talent in key states. I don’t know why. Maybe he’s happy being a Fox News host.
Another thing to bear in mind about this race: No sitting governor has any chance, because the problems of the states are just too big. Daniels, Jindal, Barbour, Christie, Perry — forget about them. They’re going to have to throw people out on the streets, raise taxes, and/or sign off on huge deficits right in the middle of the campaign. It won’t fly.
The main reason I think Palin will lose in an embarrassing way (even in the primaries) if she enters the race: She doesn’t have the organizational ability.
Organization is why the Democratic race came down to Obama and Clinton last time, and why Obama won. His golden rhetoric, personal charisma, and yes-we-can slogan got all the credit, but Obama’s people were consistently a step ahead. They knew all the rules, and understood that you run a caucus campaign differently than a primary campaign. They consistently out-delegated Clinton in caucus states, and that was the difference.
Contrast Palin: Last week we found out she had taken the unusual step of applying to trademark her name, and the application was rejected because she forgot to sign it. Is she really going to out-organize Mitt Romney?
BTW, trademarking is a commercial rather than a political move, and so fits my belief that Palin is more interested in being a celebrity and making money than in governing. Funny, being a celebrity was bad when Obama did it.
The New Yorker points out one of the little-publicized stories of this year’s Super Bowl: The Packers are owned by their fans. There is a limit on how much stock any individual can own, and the by-laws don’t allow the team to pay stockholders dividends, give them tickets, or provide anything of value other than a football team worth watching. The only reason to own stock is to have a say in how the team runs.
That explains why the Packers haven’t moved to a bigger, richer city (Green Bay has about 100,000 people and is not a suburb of anything larger) and still play in historic Lambeau Field (which has been consistently upgraded over the years). ESPN adds that beer prices are reasonable, and the concession profits go to local charities.
Think about that: Los Angeles can’t keep an NFL franchise. (It lost both the Rams and the Raiders in 1995 and hasn’t had a team since.) But Green Bay can.
Remember the Packers the next time somebody claims that profit is the only way to motivate excellence. The franchise has won 13 NFL championships (nine before the Super Bowl was established in 1966), more than any other team. Ask your free-market-fundamentalist friends how Green Bay or the Packers would benefit from having an owner to siphon $20-30 million of profit out of the team every year.
The Green Bay model motivates community involvement. When a big snow needs to be swept out of the stands before a game, volunteers show up to do it. That would be incredibly stupid if their free labor was benefitting some billionaire owner. But it’s not; it benefits a community institution.
How did this come about? The Packers’ ownership model was established in 1923, before anybody knew pro football would be a gold mine. No other major sports franchise works this way, and the owners of the other franchises would rather you didn’t find out about the possibility. NFL rules ban any other teams going the way of the Packers, but the Packers are grandfathered in.
A radio ad is using the community-owned Packers as a way to tweak Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
For a long time now, I’ve been telling you that Bush administration officials with torture records shouldn’t travel too freely. Well, this week President Bush himself canceled a trip to Geneva, apparently to avoid a criminal complaint filed against him in Swiss court. Protests were also planned, and the official explanation of the cancelation was security.
The torture case against Bush is fairly easy to make, given that he himself has admitted approving waterboarding, which international law has long recognized as torture.
If only you had $300, a video camera, some talent, and a few friends with nothing better to do — then you too could have made Lazy Teenage Superheroes.
And while we’re talking about the more-than-human among us, have you filed your papers yet with the Supernatural Registration Authority? Descended from the UN’s post-World-War-II Supernatural Refugee Board, “the Supernatural Registration Authority is responsible for tracking the birth/creation, movement, employment and death/transubstantiation of the world’s supernatural entities.” Registration is free.
I haven’t watched Bill O’Reilly’s interview of President Obama yet. But it does raise a question: Can you imagine Sarah Palin or any of the other Tea-Party champions having a one-on-one sit-down with Rachel Maddow? Sarah and her ilk don’t have Obama’s confidence or courage.
I’m getting the feeling that Glenn Beck has jumped the shark. He has a truly wacky interpretation of the Egyptian protests that winds up with the whole eastern hemisphere divided among China, Russia, and a Muslim Caliphate. (Spain, Italy, and maybe even Britain and France wind up in the Caliphate. Russia gets the Netherlands and China grabs Australia.)
Naturally, lefty voices like the Guardian and Rachel Maddow noticed the craziness. But even conservatives like US News’ Scott Galupo (a former John Boehner aide and Washington Times writer) have lost their fear of criticizing Beck: “Beck is a college sophomore with a big budget. He knows just enough history to be dangerous rather than simply ignorant.”
And Bill Kristol calls Beck’s presentation a “rant”, saying that “he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”
Paul Krugman connects some dots: Protests in the Middle East connect to high food prices, which connect to extreme weather events like last summer’s Russian heat wave, which connect to global warming.
the evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come.
Explore the sorry mess that is the state of Arizona: Already ranked near the bottom in education and children’s health, the state faces a $3.2 billion deficit and a legislature determined not to reverse recent tax cuts. They can’t sell the state capitol again this year, so … more education-and-health cuts ahead. And more flashy distractions like trying to take away the citizenship of “anchor babies”, making sure all future presidential candidates have a valid birth certificate, nullifying the national health care law, and offering new “In God We Trust” license plates.
The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.
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