The Weekly Sift

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. 

— Karl Marx

In this week’s sift:

• Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don’t know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right’s regressive flat-tax idea doesn’t simplify anything. But there’s an obvious progressive reform that would.
• Koch-Funded Study: “Global Warming is Real”. Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
• Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to “man up” and face her rather than go after her staff.
• Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can’t Republicans be as gracious about President Obama’s successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading’s Mitt Romney video.
• Last week’s most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Around got the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
• Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It’s the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you’ve been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.

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

— Benjamin Franklin, Sayings of Poor Richard

In this week’s sift:

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

From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
dissenting opinion in the capital punishment case Callins v Collins (1994)

In this week’s sift:

• Talking About Killing. Troy Davis’ execution galvanized death-penalty opponents. But they’re still talking past (not to) death-penalty advocates.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight. How Israeli prison made a peace activist out of Sami al Jundi.
• Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes. Why military chaplains are not the victims of DADT repeal. The Republican debates are making the party “sound like crazy people” and hurting Rick Perry. The outrageous lie that put Herman Cain’s campaign back on the map. Amusing political images. Elizabeth Warren goes viral. And more.
• The previous Sift’s most popular post. Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say was on its way to a respectable showing when it suddenly took off last Monday, got 8000 hits in an hour, and set a Weekly Sift record with (so far) 66,000 views. Economics Works Backwards Now got over 400 views, which would have made it the top post of a typical week. Both were voted onto the recommended list when reposted to Daily Kos — the first time I ever hit that list two days in a row. Meanwhile, One Word Turns the Tea Party Around was having a third burst of popularity, and is now up to 17,000 views. I don’t know how long I can resist the Hollywood urge to write “Six More True Things Politicians Can’t Say” or “Another Word Turns the Tea Party Around”.
• This week’s challenge. Check out a couple of proposals that could use your support: The People’s Rights Amendment declares that only “natural persons” (not corporations) have constitutional rights. And the National Popular Vote Bill circumvents the Electoral College through a compact among the states.

Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. 

– Mike Lofgren, retired Republican Congressional staffer
“Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult“

In this week’s sift:

• Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence. Liberals like to use the word holistic, but conservatives are the ones whose ideology connects everything. Why a down-on-the-farm issue like Bt-resistant rootworms has larger lessons to teach.
• Blowing Smoke About Clouds. If you have enough media power, you can hijack the prestige of the biggest names in science and use it for your own purposes. Witness how climate deniers just hijacked the coverage of an article in Nature by researchers at CERN.
• A ConConCon and other short notes. Lawrence Lessig tries to make common cause with the Tea Party. Cheney’s book tour. Geo-engineering. Rolling Stone covers voter suppression. Convoluted music copyrights. Relative costs of the Libyan and Iraq interventions. More on Libertarians.
• Last week’s most popular post. Traffic mostly went back to normal last week, except for continuing interest in Why I Am Not a Libertarian (18K total views) and One Word Turns Around the Tea Party (7K). (Between them they’re still accounting for more than half the blog’s traffic.) Last week’s Barack, Can We Talk? got a more typical 450 views. However, it took off when I reposted it to Daily Kos, where it went to the top of the recommended list (800 recommendations, 800 comments).
• This week’s challenge. Try to put words around the political message you’re waiting to hear. What could a politician say or do that would give you a surprised reaction of “This person really gets it!”?

[8/22/2011]

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

– Clarence Darrow

In this week’s Sift:

• Why I Am Not a Libertarian. I still remember the points I found so convincing when I was a 19-year-old Libertarian. But 35 years later the world looks very different to me.
• Horse Race 2012. In general the corporate media over-covers the presidential horserace, and I hate to compound the problem. But they also cover it badly, so now-and-then I feel like I have to comment.
• The Great Flabbergasting and other short notes. Rachel Maddow coined an amusing term for a head-shaking phenomenon: Republicans turn against their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart confronts ideas that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist and that the poor should have their taxes raised before the rich. Plus, some cute pictures of endangered species.
• Last week’s most popular post. Last week was something of a break-out for the Weekly Sift. One Word Turns the Tea Party Around just passed 1900 hits on the blog, in addition to those who saw it via email or RSS. And when I cross-posted it on Daily Kos, it drew over 800 recommendations and 224 comments. What’s more, these blog visitors showed some signs of hanging around: The second-most-popular post last week was the Who Am I and Why I Started the Weekly Sift post that is always up. The popular posts of previous weeks have been driven by Reddit; One Word was driven by Facebook. Thanks to all of you who linked and liked and otherwise helped get it out there.
• This week’s challenge. When you hand your money to a big corporation, chances are a slice of it will go to ALEC or the Chamber of Commerce and be used to promote corporate rights over human rights. In the economy as it currently exists, you can’t avoid corporations completely unless you’re ready to live like the Amish. But chances are you can find some way to give them less of your money. This week, investigate whether a credit union could serve you better than a bank. Or patronize a locally-owned shop or restaurant, a farmer’s market, or some other human-scale business rather than a national chain.