Category Archives: Weekly summaries

Each week, a short post that links to the other posts of the week.

Wolf Liberation

October 18, 2010 – 2:12 pm

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

— Isaiah Berlin

In this week’s Sift:

  • What Money Buys. The flood of special-interest money coming into our political process doesn’t just buy ads. It buys whole movements.
  • The Sift Bookshelf: Merchants of Doubt. A new book looks at the small group of scientists who have spear-headed most of the science-obfuscating crusades of the last few decades, from secondhand smoke to global warming.
  • Short Notes. Not even Fox can get a straight answer out of Carly Fiorina. Diagnosing God. Cancer-free mummies. Corporate privacy rights. Why the Chilean miners might not thank free-market capitalism for their rescue. And gay-bashing at the Washington Post.
What Money Buys

The Democrats are trying to make a late issue out of the anonymous money flowing from corporations and billionaires (and even foreign countries) to front groups that support Republican candidates. I think it’s an important issue; I’ve been banging that drum myself longer than most people. (Rachel Maddow’s takedown of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Thursday was excellent. The Chamber takes donations from foreign corporations, supports American corporations sending jobs overseas, and then spends $75 million on ads that blame Democrats for killing jobs.)

While this problem is starting to get some attention, I still don’t think many people understand what outside money buys in politics. Of course it buys ads — something like half a billion dollars worth of ads this year, according to McClatchey Newspapers. But even that doesn’t capture the problem, because you can watch a lot of “Jones is a schmuck; vote for Smith” ads and still blacken the oval for Jones. No amount of advertising, for example, is going to make Delaware put Christine O’Donnell in the Senate. (She trails by 15-20% in all the recent polls.)

But well-organized money buys something more sinister: control of the public narrative. For example, we all know the narrative that the Tea Party has put forward since it first hit the headlines in Spring, 2009: The policies Obama implemented when he took office were so shockingly radical and leftist that crowds of ordinary Americans — mostly independents who had never identified with one party or the other — spontaneously found themselves organizing to protest.

Pretty much every part of that story is false. You want to know where the Tea Party folks were in 2008? Check out this video of people waiting to get into a Sarah Palin rally in Ohio or Pennsylvania, or this McCain rally in Denver, or Ohio again. It’s the same people — white, mostly over 50, angry — saying the same things: Obama’s a communist, a terrorist, a Muslim, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. They have the same insensitivity to racial symbolism. Blur out the McCain signs and you would never know these videos are two years old. It’s the Tea Party.

So the Tea Party is continuous with disgruntled McCain voters, particularly the ones energized by Sarah Palin. They were never independent; they backed a candidate who lost by a wide margin. They are not typical, mainstream Americans; the candidate who most energized them appears to have had an unusually large negative effect on her ticket in 2008. (Post-election academic research indicates that Palin cost McCain about 2% of the vote; most VP candidates have almost no net effect on the final vote. And a poll taken this month indicates that only 44% of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, with her national favorability rating at 22% — about half the size of Obama’s.)

Tea Partiers were not shocked into action by the agenda Obama implemented when he took office. The videos show that they had the same opinion of him before he was elected. And what are these shocking leftist policies? A health-care reform bill that resembles Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, a climate-change bill similar to one John McCain sponsored in 2003 and was still supporting when I saw him campaign in New Hampshire in late 2007, implementation of George W. Bush’s TARP plan. He has continued Bush’s wars and started no new ones. The U.S. has suffered no major terrorist attacks or serious foreign policies reverses on his watch. (By this time in the Bush administration, 9-11 had already happened.) In short, Obama has governed as a moderate Democrat. His agenda has been a compromise between the Democratic platform and policies continued from the Bush administration.

Then we come to the “spontaneously organized” claim. No one denies that the people who show up for Tea Party rallies are a voluntary and enthusiastic audience. But they are and always have been an audience for a show written and performed by someone else. The right comparison is not the Boston Tea Party, it’s the Rocky Horror Picture Show: Dress up in funny costumes, make a lot of noise, act out when you get your cues — but only in your imagination are you part of the movie.

The Tea Party has never been a bottom-up, pass-the-hat movement. From the beginning, the tab has been picked up by corporations and billionaires. Incalculable amounts of free advertising and organizing has been supplied by Fox News, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation. National organizing and messaging, as well as education of local organizers, has been the job of corporate funded lobbying groups like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.

That’s what money will buy you: A disgruntled lunatic fringe of sore losers from one election can be turned into the driving story of the next election. And that story can shut down entire avenues of public discussion: We’re not talking about the gap between rich and poor, doing something about global warming, trying to get health coverage for the people who still fall through the cracks of the new bill, ending the Afghan War, or any similar issue — even though there are as many or more Americans who care about those issues as their are Tea Partiers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s ads are all the more effective because many people confuse the U.S. Chamber, which is dominated by mega-corporations, with their local shops-on-Main-Street Chamber of Commerce. The two often have no connection at all.

Sunday, my local newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, reported that the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Hudson is not going to be renewing its membership in the U.S. Chamber because it wants to stay non-partisan. The Nashua Chamber hasn’t had a national membership “for many years.”

Tim Wise’s essay came out last summer, but the question is still worth asking: What if the Tea Party were black? The music video is pretty good too.

The Sift Bookshelf: Merchants of Doubt

Last year I told you about the book Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels. Michaels was writing about what corporations do when they face one of those unfortunate situations that sometimes come up in a modern economy: They discover that one of their major sources of profit is killing people — workers, customers, the people who live downstream from the factory, or somebody like that.

Now, when you imagine being in that boardroom yourself, you probably think something foolish, like: “Let’s stop killing people. We can shut down the factory, pull the product off the shelves, and warn everybody involved that they need to see a doctor right away.”

Whoa, there, Galahad. Don’t go all Mother Theresa on us. We’re talking about money here. Profits. Don’t be selfish and give the company away just to stroke your over-pampered conscience. We’ve got a moral obligation to our stockholders to keep those profits flowing as long as we possibly can.

And there’s a way. The tobacco industry blazed a trail, and now there’s a whole industry of PR firms and think tanks and “research” institutes that will obfuscate any issue you want. They’ll get “scientists” to say that the case against your product is still controversial. And that looks fabulous on TV, because it forces the real scientists to argue that there’s not really an argument. (They look so arrogant when they do that. The viewers have just seen somebody with a Ph.D. take the other side. And then some guy who’s spent his whole life in a laboratory and never appeared on TV before tries to tell them that the scientific debate is over and it’s time for action. It’s like, “Don’t believe your lying eyes. The debate is over when I say it’s over.”)

No matter how bad your product is — it can’t be worse than asbestos, can it? — you can argue that more research is needed to resolve the “controversy” before the government regulates anything. Then your lobbyists can get those regulations watered down before they go into effect, and if somebody tries to put teeth into the regulations later, it starts the whole cycle again: Your “scientists” say that the toothless regulations solved the problem, and where’s the proof that they’re wrong? It’s a whole new “controversy”.

This game can go on for half a century or more. And maybe someday the heirs of the people you killed will end up winning a lawsuit and owning a big chunk of the company — that’s what happened in asbestos — but it probably won’t come to that, and in the meantime the company has paid decades of dividends and executive salaries. Nobody’s ever going to get that money back.

See, that’s how it’s done. Now don’t you feel silly for making that stupid suggestion that we should just stop killing people? Don’t be such a baby next time.

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tells a different piece of the same story. Michaels is a government guy (currently an assistant secretary of labor), so his book focuses on the regulatory process and the industry designed to manipulate and defeat it. Oreskes and Conway are historians who specialize in the history of science and technology, so Merchants is more about the scientific community and the handful of scientists who work to subvert it.

By following the PR firms, Michaels’ trip goes from one product-liability issue to the next: tobacco, asbestos, leaded gasoline, and so on up to my favorite chapter where Republicans unite in the Senate to defeat regulation of a deadly additive for making butter-flavored microwave popcorn. (Clearly the economy would collapse if we had to do without butter-flavored microwave popcorn.)

Oreskes and Conway follow a handful of industry-shill scientists through a somewhat different path that starts in defense, and then goes from tobacco through a series of public debates that are mostly environmental: nuclear winter, acid rain, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, global warming, and finally the posthumous smear of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson.

The tactics evolve and get darker as time goes by. What begins as an attempt to blow smoke (so to speak) about the tobacco-and-cancer link ultimately becomes an all-out assault on the integrity of science. Decades ago, anti-tobacco scientists were mainly portrayed as over-zealous — too quick to claim certainty when the science wasn’t 100% clear. Today’s climate scientists, however, are smeared as evil: They are supposedly part of a sinister conspiracy that aims to take control of the world economy via a scientific hoax about global warming. The scientific community as a whole is routinely portrayed as a special interest — not people trying to solve problems and find truth, but conspiring to gain power and influence for their (mainly socialist) political views.

The mystery is why legitimate scientists (and the people Oreskes and Conway track were almost all legit at one time) would get involved in this.The corporate money and the attention you can get by being in the middle of a public debate would be enough motivation for some people, but that’s not the conclusion Oreskes and Conway come to. They tell the story this way:

Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? … they were working to “secure the blessings of liberty”. If science was being used against those blessings — in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise — then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. … Each of the environmental threats we’ve discussed in this book was a market failure, a domain in the which the free market had created serious “neighborhood” effects. … To address them, governments would have to step in with regulations, in some case very significant ones, to remedy the market failure. And this was precisely what these men most feared and loathed, for they viewed regulation as the slippery slope to Socialism, a form of creeping Communism.

Sadly, what is being defended here is wolf-freedom, not lamb-freedom. It’s freedom to be a predator and do damage rather than freedom to romp through the unblemished fields, breathe clean air, and drink from the lake with confidence.

To me, the nuclear winter debate seems pivotal. Scientists had been involved in liberal causes before — Linus Pauling, for example, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 by organizing scientists around the world to push for a nuclear test-ban treaty. But never before had a scientific argument been so central to the issue. If the nuclear winter hypothesis is true, winning a nuclear war is impossible because winners and losers alike will be swept up in the global environmental catastrophe that follows.

That issue was a bridge from defense issues to environmental issues. The political sides that formed there were ready to take up the ozone hole and other subsequent environmental issues.

By today, the attack on science and the scientific community has become a common cause uniting the various factions of the political Right. Christian groups are pushing a variety of pseudo-scientific causes, from creationism to the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education to abortion as a cause of breast cancer. Libertarians will argue against the existence of any global environmental problem, because such problems have no free-market solutions. And of course corporations will fund bogus institutes and journals to “prove” that their products are not really killing people. Anti-science fits in well with the Tea Party crusade against “elitism” — where the “elite” are not the billionaires or the bankers, they’re the people who know things you wouldn’t understand.

And that, I think, is going to be the hardest nut to crack. Expertise by its nature is anti-democratic. On scientific issues, the opinions that should matter are the opinions of the scientists who have spent their careers working on this stuff — and they are a mostly self-selected and self-validating group. A high-tech society can only survive as a democracy if the people are able to figure out which experts to trust. And that’s getting harder and harder to do as the techniques of obfuscation get better developed and better financed.

You’ve probably heard the claim that global warming might just be due to the Sun rather than anything humans have done. The Sun might be hotter for some reason like the sunspot cycle or something.

It turns out that was all studied and resolved about 15 years ago. It turns out the Earth would be warming differently if the Sun were the cause. If the Sun were the cause, all the layers of the atmosphere would be heating up as the solar energy passed through them on its way to us. But if greenhouse gases cause warming by trapping heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere, then the lower levels of the atmosphere should be warming while the upper levels are cooling.

That’s what’s happening: the lower levels of the atmosphere are warming while the upper layers are cooling. So we know — and have known for 15 years — that the cause of global warming is not the Sun. (Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this; I didn’t either until I read the first chapter of this book.)

This is a common pattern, something to watch out for. When somebody claims that they have an explanation that the scientific community refuses to consider, often it turns out that the scientific community had this conversation a long time ago and it’s over now. The biggest example of that type is the creation/evolution “controversy”. It’s not that scientists rejected creationism out of hand. The creation/evolution question was a scientific controversy in the 19th century, but evolution won that argument more than 100 years ago and there has been no scientific reason to reopen the discussion since then.

Short Notes

Sometimes candidates are so evasive that even Fox News people start to act like journalists. Here, Chris Wallace gets frustrated that he can’t get a straight answer from Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina about where to find the spending cuts to balance extending the Bush tax cuts.

How did I not notice this myself? The Onion News Network reports that God has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It explains so much.

A study of Egyptian mummies shows that cancer was almost non-existent in ancient Egypt. Dr. Michael Zimmerman of the University of Manchester (UK) concludes:

The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explains how privacy rights are decreasing for people but increasing for corporations:

It used to be the case that embarrassment, harassment, and stigma were the best check against corporate wrongdoing. But that was before corporations had feelings.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger announced: “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.”

Seriously? His reasoning, such as it is, is that the miners were rescued using cool new equipment developed and built by for-profit companies. In the parallel regulated-capitalism universe, we all know, there is no technological change or quality manufacturing. And government could never have invented anything as high-tech as the Internet or space travel or nuclear power, so specialized drill bits are out of the question.

Bill Black of New Deal 2.0 gives the obvious counter-argument: Free-market capitalism is why those miners were down there needing rescue in the first place.

A $25 ladder apparently would have prevented the tragedy, but the private owners’ profit motive led them to avoid that expense.

The Washington Post hits a new low. It’s “On Faith” feature gives a platform for Family Research Council President Tony Perkins to spew misinformation about homosexuality. Media Matters responds.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Help me figure out what to do with the Sift’s Facebook page.

By weeklysift | Also posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (5)

Stir the Pot

September 27, 2010 – 1:42 pm

That’s the point of social democracy: It’s not just that working people get an extra chicken in the pot; more important, they get the right to stir the pot.

— Thomas Geoghegan

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Sift Bookshelf: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? We Americans don’t know much about how things work in Europe. We should. In an economy a lot like ours, ordinary people are better off. They have more free time, more access to high-quality public goods, and less to worry about.
  • Short Notes. Thomas Friedman explains why the Iraq War was “unquestionably worth doing”. Katy Perry’s video is banned on Sesame Street. If money is speech, three billionaires are speaking really loud. Democrats don’t have to run wimpy campaigns. Jon Stewart examines the Republican “Pledge to America”. And more.
The Sift Bookshelf: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Recent Sifts have focused a little too much on the downside: what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and why it’s so hard to do anything about it. How conservative propaganda works and why evidence doesn’t seem to dent it. How the economy has been stagnating for everybody but the rich, and why a supposedly democratic system has been pushing that outcome.

Well, this week’s book talks about how things can work better: the sick can get care, the old can retire in comfort, education can be free, cities can be safe and beautiful, and society can start re-orienting itself in a greener direction. And best of all, this isn’t a happening in a visionary Utopia, it’s happening in a continent: Europe.

The non-collapse of the European welfare state. Here in the U.S., we’ve been hearing for decades that the European system doesn’t work and is headed for disaster. Back in the 70s, I saw a 60 Minutes piece about the crazy welfare state of the Netherlands, where all kinds of silly things were subsidized, taxes were spiraling upward, and soon no one would bother working because they could do just fine sitting around and collecting welfare.

You know how the Netherlands is doing, nearly 40 years after that dire assessment? Better than we are. Wikipedia lists 2009 per capita GDP according to three different sources: the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA. The Dutch beat us in all three. Unemployment in the Netherlands is 4.8%, about half of our rate. And the unemployed Dutch are much better off than unemployed Americans, because … well, because the Netherlands is still a crazy welfare state.

Maybe over the years you’ve seen the same Europe-is-collapsing story about Sweden or Norway. They’re doing fine too. Norway has 3.5% unemployment, Sweden 8.5%. Sweden’s per capita GDP is a little less than ours, but Norway’s is a lot more. (North Sea oil has something to do with that.)

America’s conservative propagandists have realized that they can say anything they want about Europe, because most Americans will never go there. Most of the ones that do go will get their pictures taken in front of the Eiffel Tower or have a genuine Oktoberfest beer in Munich, but they won’t learn the local languages, read the newspapers, talk to the natives, or learn much of anything about how the countries actually work.

So during the debate over the Obama health-care plan, we heard the most amazing things about socialized medicine in Europe: long waits for care, no access to the latest treatments, letting the old die to save money, and so on. Pretty much none of that is true, but who cares? You can say anything about Europe. (A fairer comparison of the U.S. and French health systems appeared in — of all places — Business Week. See this summary table. BW covered the waiting-time issue here.)

Germany and France. Advocates of American-style capitalism brush off the comparisons to small countries. Put together, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a population somewhere between Texas and California — a little over 30 million. But Germany and France put together have about 150 million people, about half the size of the U.S.  Compare us to them, people say, and you’ll see the American advantage.

Well, sort of. The U.S. is 11th on the CIA’s per-capita-GDP list ($46,400), while France is 16th ($41,600) and Germany 18th ($40,700). The difference is even greater when the CIA figures in the over-valuation of the euro and other local factors to come up with something called “purchasing power parity” GDP. Since dollars are the measuring unit, the U.S. stays the same ($46,400), while France ($32,800) and Germany ($34,100) drop.

That extra $12-14K per person makes Americans better off than Germans or the French, right?

Not exactly. First you have to adjust for inequality — our concentration of very rich people pulls up the averages without making life any better for the ordinary person. It’s tricky to find the exact statistic you’d want, but this source does a reasonable job of estimating the median rather than the average. Now the US is at $37,100, Germany at $31,300, and France at $29,500.

So that extra $6-8K per person makes Americans better off than Germans or the French. Right?

Were you born on the wrong continent? That’s where Thomas Geoghegan takes up the argument. He’s a labor-union lawyer from Chicago who goes to France, spends some serious time in Germany, and then explains why life is better over there for ordinary people.

Before I get into his book, two caveats: First, Geoghegan writes in a chatty that-reminds-me-of-a-story style that you will either love or hate. So this is not a book you can hand to your conservative cousins, because they’ll throw it down in disgust by about page ten. Second, I think Geoghegan’s numbers are spun slightly — not false, but not always measuring the right thing. (The difference isn’t extreme — about par for the course in books with a point of view.) So I’ve gone looking for my own numbers rather than just repeating his.

Geoghegan makes a few arguments to knock the numbers down, and then goes into intangibles. Let’s start with the numbers.

First, the main reason the Europeans make less money than Americans is that they work fewer hours. They get more vacation, more holidays, and work less overtime. In 2004, the average American worker put in 1777 hours per year, while the French average was 1346 and the German 1362. So to get your household’s extra $6-8K per person, the workers in your household each put in an extra 400 hours. (Picture a family with two working parents and two kids: 800 extra working hours produce about $28K more money.)

Geoghegan argues that even 400 hours is an underestimate, because Americans are pressured to put in off-the-clock hours, while Europeans tend to knock off early. Also, Americans are more likely to live in suburbs or edge cities from which they spend a long time commuting. Those don’t count as working hours in the stats, but they’re not free time either.

Public goods. Purchasing-power statistics underestimate the European lifestyle, because Europeans have access to high-quality public goods that are expensive for Americans to duplicate privately. (That’s the dark side of President Bush’s vision of an “ownership society“.)

In America we are short-changed on public goods, though there are still enough around to make the point: I live in an apartment, so I have no yard and much less space for books than I would like. But two blocks in one direction is Mine Falls Park, where I once shot a blurry photo of a wild mink. Two blocks in the other direction is a very nice public library. Imagine how rich I would have to be to provide that level of luxury for myself, by owning things, rather than by living in a city that owns them for me.

Ordinary Europeans may be poorer than we are as individuals, but they are collectively richer. They have smaller cars and pay more for gas, but they also have better, cheaper, safer public transportation. They don’t have huge suburban houses, but they don’t need them, because their cities are safe and provide good public schools. They enjoy public art that they could never afford to buy or display in their homes. They’re less likely to have elaborate playscapes in their yards, but the public parks are clean and safe and beautiful.

You can measure the cost of such things in terms of taxes, but how do you measure their value?

Risk and competition. Europeans have less need to pile up money than we do, because they are exposed to less risk. If they get sick, they’ll get health care. Their kids’ education is paid for, even college. When they retire, they get a pension. If their aging parents have to go to a nursing home, the state takes care of it.

So a German with nothing in the bank is in much better shape than an American with nothing in the bank. In spite of that, the Germans save more than we do and take on less debt.

Plus, there’s a more subtle effect. European society is set up for most people to succeed, so there is less competitive pressure to make sure you (or your child) gets to the top. That is another reason Americans need money.

For example, state universities in the U.S. may not be free, but some are considerably cheaper than private schools. Annual in-state tuition at the University of Arkansas, for example, is only $6768 — one of the cheapest I could find and far less than the $36,640 at Princeton. But in an economy where only a few people really succeed and the unsuccessful face so many risks on their own, is U of A good enough? Don’t you have to send your kid to Princeton if you can?

Producer spending vs. consumer spending. One very insightful concept in Geoghegan’s book is the difference between producer and consumer spending. An awful lot of the extra money we get for working extra hours is spent on things we need only because we work so much. It looks like consumption in the stats, but it really is a cost of production.

In the stats, a Parisian couple enjoying a leisurely night out at the bistro looks just like an American mom picking up some KFC on the way home because she had to work late and there’s no time to cook. 

As we work longer hours, we really do need to eat out, bring in housecleaners, and in general contract out our lives. As I say, these are not so much “consumer” but “producer” wants. We need computers so that we can work at home, i.e., on weekends, late at night, etc. … We are not so much “consuming” as we are “investing” in ourselves as human capital.

How do they do it? If you listen to American conservatives, European socialism is all about “redistribution” — taking money from productive people and giving it to unproductive people. And there is a kernel of truth there: European governments do make more transfer payments — unemployment compensation, welfare, etc. — than our government does.

But that’s not the heart of the difference. In Europe, the working classes have more power to shape the system, so equality is built into the way things work, not just pasted on after-the-fact by transfer payments. The poster child here is Germany. By law, German corporations practice co-determination (mitbestimmung). Half the people on a corporate board are elected by the workers. Shareholders have a tie-breaking vote, but on any issue where the workers’ representatives are united and the shareholders aren’t, the workers’ interest prevails.

That explains why the Germans haven’t shipped all their manufacturing jobs to China.

Germans also practice regional industry-wide collective bargaining: All competing companies are committed to pay the same wages for similar job classifications, so none can get an advantage by squeezing its workers harder.

This is an important point to understand about cost-cutting in American corporations. Often it has nothing to do with efficiency or innovation. A company can cut costs just by paying people less, or by insisting that they do more for the same money. That kind of cost-cutting just re-slices the pie without doing anything to make it larger.

When one American company manages to squeeze its workers harder, its competitors are driven to follow suit in a race to the bottom. For example, when WalMart supermarkets came to California, the other groceries chains demanded cutbacks. Business Week reported: 

The industry’s goal is to bring its health-care costs more in line with those of nonunion Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). The retail giant’s medical plan covers fewer than half its workers, and its sales clerks earn less, on average, than the federal poverty level.

When the dust settled, the real economy hadn’t changed — the same workers did the same jobs, for the most part — but they just made less money. That couldn’t have happened in Germany, because WalMart would have been covered by the same collective bargaining agreement as the other groceries.

The work rules in German businesses are interpreted by works councils, who are also elected by the workers. Geoghegan explains: 

That means you help manage the place. On layoffs and other issues, the employer has to reach an agreement with the works council. So you help decide when to open and close the store. You help decide what shift someone gets. You help decide if someone gets fired. (No, I’m not kidding.) … That’s the point of social democracy: it’s not just that working people get an extra chicken in the pot; more important, they get the right to stir the pot.

At any moment, about half a million German workers are serving on works councils. Millions more have served at one time or another. That experience, Geoghegan claims, makes them politically aware and motivates them to stay informed. Geoghegan believes that’s the reason German newspapers are fat and widely read: 

78 percent of Germans read a newspaper every day for an average of twenty-eight minutes.

Competitiveness. Hearing all that, an American pictures bloated organizations that can’t compete globally and will soon be run out of business — if not by us, by the Chinese. But that’s not happening. According to the CIA, Germany exports more than the United States and only slightly less than China. Per capita, Germany exports almost four times as much as we do.

German industry survived, Geoghegan claims, precisely because its corporate structure forced it to compete on quality rather than wages. 

in the U.S. and the U.K., we got out of manufacturing because the labor costs were too low. We took the path of least resistance, competing on the basis of labor costs. Then, when that didn’t work, it was so much easier to shut down.

So low-wage South Carolina stole the textile industry from high-wage Massachusetts — for a few years, until the jobs moved on to Mexico or India or China.

Why don’t we all know this already? I didn’t, and I like to think I’m pretty well informed. I had no idea just how socialist Germany is. Most Americans have no idea how well health care works in France, that Denmark is energy independent, or that Sweden handled their banking collapse much more smoothly than we did.

The coverage we get of Europe, and especially of European socialism, is almost entirely negative. The Greek crisis is attributed to socialism, but not the German recovery.

Think about how often you hear that American workers need to tighten their belts, because we have to compete with the Chinese. To be more competitive, we need even deeper cuts in rich people’s taxes and government benefits for the rest of us. We have to accept even more individual risk, work even longer hours, and be less particular about the environment and food safety and whether we’re killing our miners.

Europe proves that it ain’t necessarily so. But in a country where Disney, News Corporation, Time-Warner, General Electric and Comcast control just about everything you see or hear, why should anybody tell you?

Well, why should anybody (other than the Daily Show) tell you? Last April, Wyatt Cynac went to Sweden to expose the socialist nightmare. Part I. Part II.

Short Notes

Assuming that the Iraq War is over now, Thomas Friedman tells Charlie Rose that it was “unquestionably worth doing“. What does Friedman think we got for our trillions of dollars and thousands of lives? We got to send a message to Middle Eastern Muslims: “Suck on this.”

I’m increasingly amazed that Friedman is treated as if he were an insightful thinker, or even a sane one.

Racy movies used to advertise that they’d been “banned in Boston”. Well, this Katy Perry video is too hot for Sesame Street, for what that’s worth. At least she didn’t wear this.

After their 2006 and 2008 disasters, the Republicans went into a period of soul-searching, promising to come back with new ideas. Now the fruit of their labors: their Pledge to America.

Jon Stewart brilliantly cuts between the new pledge and old footage of Republicans saying the exact same words in previous years. He sums up with the image of an abusive ex-boyfriend who wants a second chance:

“Baby, I know you left me. But if we get back together I pledge to you, I promise you I will still try to f**k your sister every chance I get. It’s who I am, baby.”

The media does this all the time with polls: Obama’s agenda is assumed to be liberal, and then if a poll says people disagree with it, pundits assume that the people want something more conservative.

Well, maybe not. According to a new poll by Associated Press, the number of people who wish the health reform bill did more is double the number who wish it did less.

I always suspected that those groups behind conservative attack ads were funded by a few rich people, but I didn’t realize how extreme things had gotten.

Friday, Rachel Maddow explained how Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group, which is planning to spend $52 million to elect Republicans this year, got 91% of its August contributions from three billionaires. We’re not just talking about a small fraction of the public. We’re talking about three people.

You want to see how a Democrat can hit a Republican hard? Check out these ads by Alan Grayson and Barbara Boxer.

Digby shoots down Ben Stein’s whining about his taxes.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Help me figure out what to do with the Sift’s Facebook page.

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Made For You and Me

September 20, 2010 – 2:52 pm

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
Sign was painted, it said “Private Property.”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

— Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land“ (1940)

In this week’s Sift:

The Sift Bookshelf: Winner-Take-All Politics

Very suddenly over the last month, the liberal side of the blogosphere has started buzzing about the concentration of wealth and income, and how the United States has become much more stratified over the last few decades.

Of course this is nothing new: You’ve been seeing articles about the disappearing middle class for many years. (The Barlett and Steele best-seller America: What Went Wrong? was on the story in 1992, and the libertarian magazine Reason felt it necessary to deny the trend in 2007.) Lots of us have been talking about this for a long time, but recently we’ve all been talking about it at the same time. Why?

I think it’s due to two new popularizations: the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson which came out September 14, and Timothy Noah’s 10-part series The Great Divergence on Slate, published September 3-14. Both draw from research published over the last five years by two French economists: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

Winner-Take-All-Politics is a marvelous connect-the-dots book. It makes not just one point, but a series of points that fit together like train-cars.

Inequality is really happening, but not how you think. This is the part that relies on Saez and Piketty, who looked at U.S. tax data to paint a finer-grained portrait of inequality than we used to get from census data. The old statistics typically cut the country up into five 20% chunks (quintiles) or ten 10% chunks (deciles). If you do that, you can see the top quintile or decile pulling away from the rest, but it doesn’t look too bad.

Saez and Piketty showed that something much more strange and scary is going on: The real action isn’t in the center of the economy, it’s on the extreme where the very rich live. What the rest of us are experiencing is just the trailing edge of a wave that starts there.

Within the top decile, the top 1% is pulling away even faster from the other 9%. Within the top 1%, the top .1% is pulling away faster yet, and so on. If the United States were 1000 people, the richest guy would have made 2% of the money in 1973. By 2008 his share was up to 8%. (Factoring in capital gains, it goes from 2.7% to 12.3%. In a village of 1000 people, one guy makes nearly 1/8 of the money.)

And that screws up a lot of the benign explanations. Yes, globalization and immigration force our unskilled workers to compete with the unskilled workers of the world. Yes, automation is replacing factory workers with machines. Yes, women and minorities are competing in labor markets that used to belong to white men. Yes, the educated fare better in the modern world than the uneducated. But that can’t explain why the effect is most pronounced at the wealthy extreme, why we increasingly have a winner-take-all economy. None of those factors apply to the moderately rich, or explain why they can’t keep up with the super-rich.

It’s the government, stupid. We usually picture the economy as a natural phenomenon, and see government coming in after-the-fact to “redistribute” income. The recent decades’ changes in government “redistribution” — mainly tax and benefit cuts — clearly benefit the rich, but aren’t enough to account for the changes, so we think government is off the hook and look for larger forces like globalization.

In fact, government shapes the “free” market at every level: what can be owned or sold (your patented idea is a marketable asset, your liver isn’t), who has a seat at the negotiating table (unions are represented on corporate boards in Germany, and boards have much more control over CEOs), who absorbs risk (that’s what the bailouts represent: private interests transferring their risks to the public), what costs are externalized (pollution), and so on.

In the United States (and not nearly so much in Europe) government policy since about 1978 has consistently shaped the economy towards a winner-take-all structure. As a result, the U.S. used to be more egalitarian than Europe, and now is much less so. And that’s not because Europe exists in a different global economy.

What about democracy? Hacker and Pierson take seriously the paradox of an elected government systematically favoring the few over the many, even when Democrats have been in power. How is that possible?

The short answer is that when a complex bureaucracy governs a complex economy, organization matters more than numbers. The rich and their corporations have gotten much more organized in the last generation, while organizations that focused workers’ power (i.e., unions) have declined. Both of these patterns are embedded in vicious cycles: the government can make it harder or easier for various interest groups to organize.

The organized few beating the disorganized many explains how polls can say that 60% favor a public option in health care, but the public option doesn’t even come up for a vote in the Senate. A clear majority favors letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, and it makes no sense to extend them, but even some Democrats are ready to.

Even when good laws get passed, enforcement depends on a million little things happening correctly, and the organized power of wealth is there to see that they don’t happen. Loopholes get written into regulation. Regulators get appointed who don’t want to enforce the law. Penalties get set at levels so low that violators just consider them a normal cost of doing business, and so on.

Organization also shapes the outcome by misdirection: Exxon never gets confused about where its interests lie in the global warming debate, but ordinary people do.

Hacker/Pierson trace this trend to the Carter administration, when huge post-Watergate Democratic majorities were unable to make any progress on a liberal agenda. The initial conditions that get the vicious cycle started are: a decline in union membership, television increases the role of money in campaigns, and the wealthy started pooling their money to create a wide-ranging infrastructure. (In the old days, GM would lobby against car safety regulations and Standard Oil would try to hang onto special tax treatment for oil wells, but neither would do much to influence a Supreme Court nomination. Now, corporate and billionaire money supports a broad conservative movement through institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Club for Growth.)

America in a parallel universe. I don’t really have the space to do the Hacker/Pierson case justice, so instead I’ll illustrate in my own way how relatively subtle changes in the economic/political cycle can have huge impacts over time. Let’s look at how early America could have developed differently.

America was founded not just on freedom and democracy, but also on high wages. In colonial times, the nearby western frontier worked like a minimum-wage law. If you paid people too badly, they’d go clear their own land instead of working for you.

As the frontier moved further west, the causality started working in the other direction, creating a virtuous cycle: High wages in the East allowed workers to raise the capital they needed to go west and homestead — enough for a horse, a wagon, some tools, and the wherewithal to keep a family going until a crop came in. In Democracy in America (1835) de Touqueville described it like this:

The European emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request; he becomes a workman in easy circumstances, his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes  a rich landowner. The former amasses the capital which the latter invests.

So the West was like college. You came to America and saved so that you could send your children there.

Whatever actually happened always looks inevitable. But it didn’t have to work that way. If the rich in the East could have beaten down wages for just a decade or two, they could have stopped this egalitarian cycle. Then the poor would be trapped working for them for subsistence wages, and never raise the capital to go west.

Picture how it plays out from there: As the western expansion fizzles, the wealthy make the case to Congress that the policy of selling public land cheaply in small parcels (going back to the Land Ordinance of 1785) has failed. The way to settle the continent, they claim, is in vast Spanish-style haciendas.

But America’s frontier isn’t the open country of Mexico. So how can the rich clear the forests of Ohio and turn them into tillable land? The same way they drained the swamps of Georgia and South Carolina and established plantations there: with slaves. The case might sound a lot like the one made by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1787: “the nature of our climate, and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes … without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste.” [“desert” meant “deserted” in those days, not dry.]

So the first new states get settled like this: A plantation-owning family from Virginia purchases a 10,000-acre plot from the government and sends out a younger son with a slave workforce to clear it. Any law that might stop him is standing in the way of the nation’s progress, and needs to be repealed.

And this, of course, keeps the low-wage cycle going. If you want a job on the frontier, you’ll have to do it cheaper than a slave. Even in Ohio, a worker can’t raise the capital to move on and settle Illinois or Wisconsin. So the rich will have to manage that expansion too.

When coal is discovered in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that also becomes a job that white (i.e. free) men won’t do — at least they won’t do it for wages that compete with slaves. That becomes common sense, just like our idea today that only Mexicans will pick lettuce.

And America becomes a very different place.

You see, an egalitarian society is a fragile thing. If power and wealth ever get too concentrated — even accidentally, even just for a little while — then the powerful can capture enough of the government, media, and intelligensia to make their vision of the future seem like common sense. Even if you theoretically have the votes to defeat them, you can’t, because any alternative vision seems too utopian to fight for.

If you want to see how the far Right responds to these ideas, look here. The vanishing middle class is Socialism’s fault. The fact that it’s not happening nearly as badly in countries that are more socialist than we are just doesn’t come up.

Anti-Crazy is not a Winning Political Platform

Now the primaries are complete: Christine O’Donnell of Delaware has joined Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, and Joe Miller in Alaska in a bloc of seven Republican/Tea Party Senate candidates.

Of that group, O’Donnell is both the newest and the most unlikely: Not only does she have no government experience, she barely has a resume at all. She founded the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT, as in “salt of the Earth”), a group that encouraged young people to live lives of Christian purity, particularly in regard to sex. (By now probably everyone has seen her denunciation of masturbation on MTV.) And she worked for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a conservative non-profit focused on college students) until that job ended in a gender discrimination lawsuit in 2005. Since then she has been running for the Senate and supporting herself by doing “odd jobs” — or maybe by illegally spending campaign funds for living expenses.

Democrats have treated O’Donnell’s victory over popular Congressman Mike Castle like an early Christmas present. Castle was a shoo-in to move Joe Biden’s old seat into the Republican column, but O’Donnell trails Democrat Chris Coons by double digits. Castle is refusing to endorse O’Donnell — maybe her campaign’s suggestion that he’s gay ticked him off — so the prospects for Republican unity are dim.

Still, I’m worried that the campaign against O’Donnell is off to a bad start. Despite their pro-rich, anti-working-class agenda, conservatives appeal to the working class by casting liberals as over-educated elitists who look down on people like you. So carelessly heaping scorn on O’Donnell just makes her the someone-like-you that liberals look down on.

In particular, problems in a candidate’s past only work if they are substantiated in the present. Here’s what I said about Obama/McCain in June, 2008:

Experience works as an issue only until the public can see the candidates side-by-side. At that point, the experience difference has to be visible in their performance — McCain needs to look like he knows what he’s talking about while Obama doesn’t. If the experience advantage is invisible — and I think it will be — the issue goes away.

Well, crazy works the same way. If O’Donnell on the campaign trail looks no more threatening than a young Sally Field, it won’t matter how many nutty things she’s said in the past. But if Democrats can make an issue of the nutty things she’s advocating now, then her past becomes significant again.

With that in mind, I think Rachel Maddow was on the right track Thursday when she called attention to the truly radical anti-abortion positions of the Tea Party candidates:

There are now at least five Republican Senate nominees — five — who not only think that the government should outlaw abortion nationwide, they think there should be no exceptions made for anybody who’s the victim of incest or is the victim of rape. … What these Republican candidates are talking about is not only the federal government monitoring every pregnancy in the country to make sure that it ends the way the government prefers, which is a live birth, but they’re also saying that the government should force rape victims –– the government should force rape victims, under pain of criminal prosecution — to give birth to their rapist’s baby.

In the world Sharon Angle, Cristine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, and Rand Paul want to create, rape is a viable evolutionary strategy for men. We can put a rapist’s body in jail, but his genes will live on.

Similarly off-the-wall Republican positions are that to return all unspent stimulus money. In other words: All those half-done road repairs should be left the way they are. Rand Paul’s view that private business should be allowed to practice racial discrimination — that’s something he believes now, not some foolish idea from his benighted youth. And in the Senate, he’d have a vote on nominees for the Supreme Court.

And finally, the attack on health-care reform needs to be met head-on. Fifty million people now lack health insurance, and many of the rest of us are one lay-off away from joining them. The law that Democrats passed will cut that number in half, and give Americans security where Republicans offer them only risk. Repealing health-care reform with no plan for covering those 50 million is a truly wacky idea, and it needs to be called out as such.

If you follow the Rachel Maddow link, you’ll see one thing that I think she gets wrong. She quotes Sharon Angle responding to the no-exception-for-rape abortion question :

I’m a Christian, and I believe that god has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives, and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations. We need to have a little faith in many things.

Rachel comments: “I don’t know what you’re supposed to have faith in” and makes a couple of guesses that miss the point. But anybody who speaks Fundamentalist knows immediately what Angle meant: You wouldn’t have gotten pregnant if God didn’t have a plan for your rapist’s baby.

Let’s be sure to call her crazy for the right reasons, and not because we don’t understand what she’s saying.

Restore Sanity With Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is rallying in Washington to restore sanity. It’s on: Saturday, October 30 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C, sane people will get together to “take it down a notch for America”.

Not to be outdone, Stephen Colbert is having a counter-rally to Keep Fear Alive.

This is not a joke. Or rather, it is a joke, but it’s also really happening. Here’s hoping the Jon/Stephen combo can significantly outdraw Glenn Beck. Think about going. It will be fun.

Short Notes

Image of the Week: Fractal Wrongness.

Check out the Echo Park Time Travel Mart in Los Angeles. (“Whenever you are, we’re already then.”) If the slushy machine isn’t working come back yesterday. But don’t even think about buying fire if you’re pre-Neolithic. (“No upright posture, no mastery of tools — no fire.“)

Paul Krugman’s take on the folks who want the rich to keep their Bush tax cuts:

when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices. But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Jay Rosen’s lecture to French journalism students is well worth reading. Your authority as a journalist, he tells them, “begins when you do the work” of going someplace, talking to somebody, or reading something that your readers haven’t gone/talked to/read. “If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned.”

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Propaganda

September 13, 2010 – 2:14 pm

It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient. It is common, however, to see one man possessing not ten times but a thousand times the wealth of his neighbor.

— Willford I. King The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States (1915)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right. It’s no longer enough just to correct the specific misinformation that comes from the Right. We need to figure out how their propaganda works.
  • Distribution of Wealth. Concentrated wealth at the top isn’t just bad for the people at the bottom. It’s bad for the economy in general.
  • Short Notes. Why Koran-burning is news now. What teaching in Florida is really like. Haley Barbour’s fictional history of southern Republicans. What the WaPo can learn from Digby. And the Dutch example for dealing with teen sex.

The Weekly Sift is now on Facebook. I haven’t done much with the page yet, but keep watching. If you have advice, write on the wall.

Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right

The most frustrating thing about this election campaign is how much of it is based on nonsense and fantasy. If we were just losing a reasonable debate about, say, the role of government, I think we’d all know what to do: go back to the drawing board and come up with better policies and better ways of explaining them.

But what if we lose because sizable numbers of people believe that President Obama is a Muslim who hates white people? Or that the new health-care law institutes death panels? Or that the Democrats are part of some sinister plot to recruit children into homosexuality or impose sharia law?

What drawing board do we go back to then?

So often we seem to be in a battle with something we can’t see. The other side makes a claim that is provably false — like that Obama has raised taxes or quadrupled the deficit — and rather than ask for examples or evidence, large numbers of people just nod their heads. We can’t get important issues like global warming or the increasing concentration of wealth on the national agenda, while the other side can conjure issues like the ground zero mosque or Obama’s czars out of thin air.

How does that work?

In a word, the problem is propaganda: The Right has the Left way outclassed in terms of propaganda. And because most of us have no idea how propaganda works, we feel like we’re battling with ghosts.

For a long time the Sift has been pruning the branches of propaganda: I do a Disinformation Watch article every now and then, and most weeks some outrageous lie gets debunked in the Short Notes. But that’s like digging up individual dandelions. The other side can produce a hundred new lies in the time it takes to debunk one.

This week I want to look at the larger structure of propaganda: Why does it work? Why are so many people so ready to believe these things?

Beyond Lying. The fundamental misconception most liberals have about propaganda is that it’s just lying: Say something false, repeat it often enough, and people will start to believe it. Superficially, “death panels” worked that way. Overnight the phrase was everywhere, repeated by so many people that it seemed like there must be something to it, even it had been exaggerated.

But if propaganda was just lying, then truth-telling would undo it. All we’d have to do would be to get more people telling our truth than their lie, and we’d win.

How often have you seen that work?

Beyond Framing. A frame is a metaphoric template that organizes the individual facts about an issue. What makes them so effective is that most of the action is unconscious: You can invoke a frame by using some of its words and images, without ever justifying that it’s the right way to think about the issue. When neo-cons talked about “appeasing” Saddam, that one word invoked the whole Hitler/Munich frame, in which the enemy is implacable and war is inevitable. And because those ideas stayed in the background, they didn’t have to support them with evidence.

The problem is that counter-framing also doesn’t work very often — for reasons that liberal framing godfather George Lakoff understands but has trouble communicating. It’s in his books, but it seldom comes across.

What most liberals miss about framing is that effective framing doesn’t happen in mid-debate. Effective framing is laid down in layers, over decades or even centuries. (Ironically, this is why the word framing frames its subject badly. Framing suggests a one-time event where you decide what’s in the picture and what’s out.)

The only way I can think to explain this is through the example of a small-but-specific issue: The current religious-right argument that anti-bullying campaigns in the schools are part of some sinister gay agenda that takes away the rights of Christian parents. And I want to describe some of the layers of frames that make their argument so undeservedly convincing and so hard to argue against.

It Starts With the Devil. Like a lot of traditional faiths, the Christian Right’s theology includes a Devil. This isn’t the place to argue about the existence of a Prince of Darkness, but I want to point out what you can do once you have a Devil in your theology.

The Devil is the ultimate sinister conspirator, motivated by pure evil. Once you have a Devil, it follows without evidence that there is a conspiracy against anything true and good and right. How could there not be? The Devil is against it, and unless he has suddenly lost his innate cleverness and his characteristic ability to lie and tempt and cajole, he will have followers.

So if you are arguing in front of a Devil-postulating audience, you don’t have prove that there is a conspiracy against the Good — of course there is — you only have to identify that conspiracy. The Manichean frame (God/Devil, Good/Evil) is sitting there, waiting for you to connect yourself with Light and your opponent with Darkness.

Once you’ve done that, the hardest part of establishing a conspiracy theory — giving it a motive — is accomplished. So when President Bush said of terrorists

They are a movement defined by their hatreds. They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.

large numbers of people just nodded their heads in recognition. They didn’t ask for evidence that such people exist or wonder why anyone would sign up with them. The Devil has minions. How could he not?

Layer II: Reverse discrimination. The second layer isn’t quite so universal as the Devil, but it has been used for decades in so many circumstances that it also can be invoked largely without evidence: Maybe the weak were persecuted generations ago, but in our era the tables have been turned, and it is actually the strong that are persecuted.

Now, it is claimed, the law favors blacks over whites, non-Christians over Christians, the poor over the rich, gays over straights, foreigners over English-speakers, illegal immigrants over citizens, and on and on and on.

In general, minority rights are controversial in a democracy, and special action is required to make things equal. But no matter how bad things are for the minority in reality, the special action can always be cast as some kind of privilege. (The Little Rock Nine were escorted by the 101st Airborne Division. But I had to fend for myself when I went to high school.)

Almost invariably, the examples of reverse discrimination fall apart when looked at closely. (The Christian church near Ground Zero that hasn’t been rebuilt yet was part of a deal involving millions in public money. It’s not an example of Christians being treated worse than Muslims.) Majorities are powerful in America, and they can get their cases favorably resolved.

This layer serves two purposes. First, it corrupts the language of equality, devaluing it in the same way that counterfeit money devalues real money. “You’re discriminated against? No, look at me, I’m discriminated against.”

But in the longer term, the second purpose is even more significant: By constant repetition, the notion that the majority is persecuted becomes axiomatic — at least in the eyes of the majority. If a minority is claiming rights and wanting government intervention, it must be trying to claim an advantage. There’s no need to specify that advantage too exactly, or to substantiate examples of majority persecution.

You can see Layers I and II working together in the claim that same-sex-marriage advocates want to destroy traditional marriage. (“this is the ultimate goal of activists,” writes James Dobson, “and they will not stop until they achieve it.”) It’s an unmotivated conspiracy of the minority to oppress the majority. What would same-sex couples gain by destroying traditional marriage? How are opposite-sex couples harmed when same-sex couples marry? Among the faithful these questions are answered by the unconscious assumptions in the frame; more specific answers are unnecessary.

Tactics. There are other layers that have taken decades to lay down — the poor are lazy, traditional sexual morality is related to non-sexual moral issues like honesty and integrity — but lets just stick with those two and see how they influence tactics. The main thing to remember is: When you work within a long-established frame, you don’t have to prove anything, you just have to fill in the blanks.

Think about Glenn Beck’s chalkboard talks. If you make yourself watch one, I predict you’ll come out saying, “What was that all about?” They’re all names and labels: So-and-so is a Marxist and is connected to this other guy who has some kind of relationship with Obama. It doesn’t sound like an assemblage of evidence, because it isn’t. He’s just helping his audience identify an enemy that abstract principles tell them must exist.

And only now do the lies come in: to vilify somebody like Van Jones. And pointing out that the lies are lies gains very little: The point is the pattern of accusations, and if this one or that one isn’t true, well, what of it?

The lies exist inside a web of mischaracterization. No enemies are quoted in complete sentences or allowed to speak in their own words at length and in context. Everything is summarized and labelled.

Applied Tactics. The easiest way to see how tactics work is to look at some small issue you haven’t thought much about before. For me this week, that was the Religious Right’s attempt to smear a campaign against bullying in schools. (It’s part of the “gay agenda” to “sneak homosexuality lessons into classrooms”.)

It’s a comparatively young smear, so you can read a nearly complete collection of documents in a short time. Start with an article called Parents beware of deceptive “anti-bullying” initiatives. (You can pull the glossier print version off the truetolerance.org main menu.)

If you come to the article wondering what is happening that you as a parent should worry about, you will be confused. LIke the Beck chalktalk, most of it goes right past the uninitiated, leaving a “What was that about?” feeling.

Instead you’ll learn that local anti-bullying organizations have “ties” to gay-friendly organizations. (Given how often bullying involves insults like “queer” or “faggot”, it would be strange if they didn’t.) They’re also “tied” to “President Obama’s controversial ‘Safe Schools czar’ Kevin Jennings”. (Czars are bad, even when they’re doing exactly what their job titles indicate.)

You’ll also learn about things that might happen or even could be happening right now: gay activists “infiltrating classrooms” which would be “transformed into indoctrination centers” with “mandatory homosexuality lessons”. But you’re well into the second page before you run into anything that actually did happen:

the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance [was] heavily involved in crafting state legislation that makes “sexual orientation” and “gender-related identity” protected categories in schools.

No clue what that would actually mean in terms of stuff happening in the schools, but it plugs into the “special rights” frame. The minority is oppressing the majority again! When good Christian kids scream “queer!” in some other kid’s face, they will be in trouble instead of the homo.

A variety of books and videos are identified as things to watch out for. They are pejoratively summarized in a few words, never linked to, and never quoted in complete sentences. The only way you can check these summaries is if they mention a title you can google and look up on your own.

(I managed to look up and read Just The Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth, a pamphlet intended for teachers and school administrators. The religious-right counter-pamphlet Just the Real Facts Please, is then easily seen to be a collection of non-sequiturs that use out-of-context quotes as excuses to go off on tangents. But how many people are going to go to that much trouble? Most will just know that there is a good pamphlet refuting the bad pamphlet.)

What to do? Imagine being a liberal parent and having a religious-right parent give you Parents Beware as part of a we-have-to-do-something talk. What can you say? You can’t argue with a case that hasn’t been made, with “ties” and sinister fantasies that don’t involve any checkable facts. It is impossible to prove that some organization you just heard of isn’t in league with the Devil.

This problem shows up again and again. Take the so-called Ground Zero Mosque: What exactly its opponents are afraid of and what exactly they want to do about it has remained fluid. Arguing about it has been like wrestling with a jello monster.

Tactically, when you have these kinds of discussions one-on-one, I recommend a judo strategy: Draw the other side out before you object. You can’t argue with unconscious assumptions, so make them state a problem and propose a solution. If they can’t, ridicule them for that — don’t take the bait and go down some tangent.

Long-term, we need to recognize that we can’t re-frame issues in mid-debate just by making up new slogans and new metaphors from scratch. The other side is using multiple layers of frames, the deepest of which have been laid down centuries ago. We need to get in touch with our own deep layers (which go back to the Enlightenment, the Sermon on the Mount, and timeless notions of fairness) and work to nurture and promote those ideas in everything we do. When we do that, we can speak with a power and authenticity that is very different from “spin”.

Wednesday in DailyKos I addressed a different level of propaganda: How right-wing money creates bogus think tanks whose bogus experts get quoted even in supposedly liberal venues like the New York Times.

Distribution of Wealth

Just about the only time I hear the phrase distribution of wealth these days is when somebody like Glenn Beck talks about redistribution of wealth — that’s when the evil Marxists come, take away the money you earned by your hard work and brilliance, and give it to the lazy stupid people.

This week, though, Slate’s Timothy Noah started a series called The Great Divergence, about why the portion of our national income that goes to the rich has grown so much over the last 30 years. (Inequality peaked just before the Great Crash in 1929, fell from the 30s through the 70s, and recently has returned to 1929 levels.)

I had planned to cover that series in this week’s Sift, but it isn’t finished yet. So next week I’ll discuss Noah’s points (and possibly the new book Winner-Take-All Politics which takes on related issues).

This week I just want to make one point: It’s no coincidence that high concentrations of wealth and bad economies go together. When you shift money from the poor and middle class to the rich, demand drops. That can turn into a deflationary cycle if business adjusts to lower demand by cutting jobs, which then lowers demand further.

What was the real difference between the Happy-Days economy of the 50s and the Grapes-of-Wrath economy of the 30s? We had the same natural resources, similar technology, similar culture. But in between, the war gave our government a reason to tax the rich and spend an enormous amount of money. That shifted the distribution of wealth, moving the economy to a high-demand, high-production mode rather than a low-demand, low-production mode.

Since the Reagan administration, we’ve been doing the reverse.

Short Notes

The best coverage of the Koran-burning minister came from Rachel Maddow:

For the most part, [this story] has been talked about in terms of religious freedom and First Amendment rights.  That‘s the way that the national, responsible mainstream media dealt with this story. But that‘s actually the wrong frame for this story. He is a kook doing as kooks do.

Religious nutjobs have burned Korans in public before and no one cared. But they’re newsworthy now because supposedly serious political figures like Newt Gingrich are mining the same vein of war-with-Islam craziness.

A major piece of the conservative government-is-evil rhetoric is to demonize everybody who gets a paycheck from the taxpayers: They’re all lazy parasites (unless they die, like the 9-11 firefighters).

From the Facebook wall of my sister the teacher, an essay by a Florida teacher explaining how things really are:.

I am required to teach Social Studies and Writing without any curriculum/materials provided, so I purchase them myself. I am required to conduct Science lab without Science materials, so I buy those, too. The budgeting process has determined that copies of classroom materials are too costly, so I resort to paying for my copies at Staples, refusing to compromise my students’ education because high-ranking officials are making inappropriate cuts. It is February, and my entire class is out of glue sticks. Since I have already spent the $74 allotted to me for warehouse supplies, if I don’t buy more, we will not have glue for the remainder of the year.

No doubt she’s living like a princess on her $28K a year.

Here’s what I wonder: Each kind of government worker — teachers, police, fire, and so on — knows that the conservative rhetoric about them is false. Do they realize that it’s false about the other government workers too? Or do they believe that the folks at the DMV are living it up?

Haley Barbour is rewriting the history of civil rights in the South to put himself and the Republican Party on the right side. The truth: When the Democrats embraced civil rights, white racists switched parties and became Republicans. And they were welcomed with open arms.

Digby points out one way in which bloggers are more thorough than Washington Post reporters: Before we quote a congressman, we’ll google him to make sure he’s real.

You know whose statistics on teen pregnancy and STDs we should envy? The permissive Dutch.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Evolving Traditions

August 9, 2010 – 11:08 am

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. … The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children.

–– Sir William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional. The trial record may be as important as the ruling. If same-sex-marriage opponents think there’s so much “evidence” supporting their position, why didn’t they present any?
  • The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution. An easy-to-read new book explains how interpretations of the Constitution legitimately change with time.
  • Ground Zero Mosque, Part II. “Opposing” the mosque can mean two very different things, but not many mosque opponents are making the distinction clear.
  • Short Notes. What Fox thinks of the 14th Amendment. China takes on bold new infrastructure projects, while we let things fall apart. Superman saves a home in the real world. A suggestion for protesting the Tea Party. Civil disobedience in Arizona. And where you can hear me next Sunday.
Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional

Every few months, it seems, the saga of same-sex marriage in California takes another twist or turn. Since the voters passed Proposition 22 ten years ago, there have been votes by the legislature, vetoes by the governor, civil disobedience by the City of San Francisco, a second referendum passing a constitutional amendment, and countless trips up and down the state court system.

By May, 2009, things had gone as far as they could at the state level: The voters had passed Proposition 8, which wrote one-man-one-woman into the state constitution, and the California Supreme Court had recognized its validity (while still upholding the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to Prop 8).

At that point a liberal/conservative all-star team of lawyers decided to take the argument federal. Ted Olson and David Boies, who had been the opposing lawyers in Bush v. Gore, filed suit in federal court to have Prop 8 declared unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” and “due process of law” to everyone.

Wednesday they succeeded in their first step: Judge Vaughn Walker declared Prop 8 unconstitutional. (Judge Walker’s ruling is long, but easy to read.)

As I explained last month after the Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional, just about all same-sex-marriage decisions hang on the same question: Laws that treat one group of people differently from another have to pass the rational basis test, which asks whether the law is “rationally related to furthering a legitimate government interest”. Can a law banning same-sex marriage pass that test? What legitimate government interest is furthered by treating same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples?

This is why court decisions often come out differently than referenda: Voters don’t have to answer that question. As Judge Walker put it:

The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose.

The secular logic of Prop 8 hangs on some real-world questions about the institution of marriage, its effects on children, the nature of homosexuality, and so on. So Judge Walker held a trial to gather testimony on those issues.

Evidence-based knowledge vs. faith-based knowledge. Boies and Olson called a series of expert witnesses: historians to describe the long-term evolution in American marriage laws (allowing wives to own property, allowing interracial marriage, etc.) and the history of discrimination against homosexuals; demographers to compare same-sex couples to opposite-sex couples (they’re not that different); economists to assess the impact of Prop 8 on the City of San Francisco (negative) and on same-sex couples and their children (also negative); social scientists to assess the affects of social stigma on gays and lesbians (bad), the impact of seven years of same-sex marriage on family issues in Massachusetts (negligible), and how children raised by same-sex couples compare to those raised by opposite-sex couples (not much difference); psychologists to discuss whether therapy can change a person’s sexual orientation (it can’t) and whether same-sex couples receive the same psychological benefits from marriage as opposite-sex couples (they do), and so on.

In other words, every question a reasonable person would ask about the impact of Prop 8 was answered by a professor of some relevant subject with peer-reviewed publications in the field, who cited actual research on the topic.

The defenders of Prop 8 did nothing of the kind. (The name of the case is Perry v. Schwarzenegger, but although California officials like Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown were named in the suit, they wanted no part of defending Prop 8. So the job passed to the people who got Prop 8 on the ballot in the first place.) They announced a number of expert witnesses, but only called two of them to the stand — neither of whom was actually in expert in what he was testifying about, and one of whom, David Blankenhorn, doesn’t seem to be an expert in much of anything. (This section of Judge Walker’s opinion is a good primer on the legal definition of expert witness.) Rachel Maddow spent an entire segment of her show Wednesday making fun of Blankenhorn’s “expertise”.

WaPo’s Jonathan Capehart commented:

if I were the conservatives I would troop back into court — and sue the pro-Prop 8 attorneys for malpractice.

Here’s an example from Judge Walker’s decison:

At oral argument on proponents’ motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents’ counsel the assumption that “the state’s interest in marriage is procreative” and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Counsel replied that the inquiry was “not the legally relevant question,” but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The impression the trial leaves — and this may have political implications even if the ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court — is that the logic of banning same-sex marriage is all 30-second sound bites and won’t stand up to scrutiny. The Religious Right may claim that there is massive evidence ( James Dobson has claimed “more than ten thousand studies“) relating same-sex marriage to dire outcomes for society, but when they had a chance to present their evidence in court, they folded.

As David Boies said on Face the Nation (in response to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council):

It’s easy to sit around and … cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. … But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence, there weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. It’s easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court you can’t do that.

This case may affect the overall national discussion in the same way that the Dover intelligent design case did. After a court show-down in which one side has no real evidence to present, it’s hard for the media to go back to he-said-she-said coverage.

Marriage evolution. Testimony from the historians dismantled another standard talking point: That marriage has been one thing for thousands of years and now gay activists want to change it to something else.

To the extent that the phrase traditional marriage means anything at all, it refers to the kind of relationship this week’s Sift quote describes: domination of the wife by the husband. Through all of American history marriage has been slowly evolving away from that: allowing wives to own property; letting them sign contracts and accept employment without their husbands’ approval; protecting against domestic violence; recognizing marital rape; and so on.

As a result of that evolution, marriage laws no longer enforce separate gender roles. So the gender-specific titles of husband and wife no longer correspond to any legal rights or responsibilities not included in spouse.

Without that evolution — in the 18th-century world of Blackstone’s Commentaries — Prop 8 proponents would be right: Same-sex marriage makes no sense if the law requires a dominant male husband and a submissive female wife; two men or two women can’t do it.

But in marriage as it stands today (and how many people would really want to go back?) two men or two women can fulfill the legal roles of spouses as well as opposite-sex couples do. Laws that prevent them from doing so are relics of a system whose underlying logic was abandoned decades ago.

Impact. Ultimately this is headed for the Supreme Court, where (as Dahlia Lithwick explains) the case will be decided by Justice Kennedy, the Court’s swing vote.

If the Supreme Court reverses Judge Walker, the impact of would not be as great as some people seem to think. It would be harder for a future Supreme Court to find protection for same-sex marriage in the 14th amendment, but state legislatures could still recognize same-sex marriage and state courts could still find a same-sex couple’s right to marry in their state constitutions.

Rather than take on the evidence, most “family values” spokesmen attacked the judge: He’s gay. And all those professors of whatever who testified? They’re gay too. What more do you need to know?

While Boies does CBS, Olson is handling Fox.

Stephen Colbert sees Judge Walker’s decision as “Arma-gay-ddon“.

Humorist Andy Borowitz explains why most marriages are already gay:

“Soon after marrying, most men stop hitting on women and start shopping for furniture,” Dr. Logsdon said. “Scientifically speaking, how gay is that?”

I’m coming to like NYT’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat even though I seldom agree with him. He consistently offers something genuine to disagree about, and doesn’t just spout nonsense and make stuff up.

The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution

The Living Constitution by David Strauss is the best popularization of constitutional law I have read. It is short (139 pages of 300-350 words each), readable, and well organized. Best of all, it does something important: debunks the theory of constitutional interpretation that you most commonly run across in the media (originalism) and provides an alternative that makes sense out of what the courts have been doing for the last 200-or-so years.

Let’s start with originalism. This theory says that the Founders had a definite idea in mind when they wrote each line of the Constitution, and that the role of a judge is to ascertain that idea and apply it to the case at hand. There are two problems with originalism: (1) it’s impossible to carry out; and (2) it violates Thomas Jefferson’s principle that the dead should not rule the living. (De-sound-biting that a little: The democratic principle of “the consent of the governed” doesn’t mean much if the consent was given once and for all in 1787.)

Strauss brings home the impossibility of knowing the Founders’ original intent by recalling what Americans went through in the 1970s around the Equal Rights Amendment. (The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972, but fell just short of ratification by 3/4 of the states, so it is not part of the Constitution now.)

If the ERA had passed, originalism would have future judges try to ascertain and apply what the people alive in the 1970s had “intended” by it. That’s laughable to anybody who lived through the 1970s, because to a very large extent we didn’t know. (I remember hearing long arguments about whether the ERA would force all bathrooms to be unisex.) Different people intended different things, and we couldn’t agree on what the ERA would mean even for the situations we could envision, much less situations that might arise in 200 years.

I know the founding generation was supposed to be full of giants, but were they really that much more self-aware than the Americans of 1972?

So, if we admit we can’t always find a well-defined meaning by recreating the mindset of 1787, how are we supposed follow the Constitution? Well, some things are obvious, like a president’s term lasting four years or senators needing to be 30 years old. But how “freedom of the press” applies to the Internet, or exactly what constitutes “abridging the freedom of speech” — now or in 1787 — requires some interpreting. How do we do it?

The defenders of originalism say that the only alternative is anarchy; the law will be whatever the current judge wants it to be, until he’s overruled by some other judge.

Strauss describes the alternative method of common law, a pre-constitutional process we inherit from England. Under common law, a judge considers how similar cases have been decided in the past. And if there’s still wiggle room, s/he resolves it by applying more abstract principles of justice, fairness, and common sense to the facts of the case at hand. For centuries, common law provided a workable legal system even in situations where there was no written law.

Strauss claims that this is in fact what our courts have been doing for the last two centuries: applying the text of the Constitution when it is clear (four-year presidential terms), consulting precedents to interpret provisions that are not clear (abridging freedom of speech), and attempting to resolve the remaining uncertainties with justice, fairness, and common sense.

A written constitution combined with a common-law method of interpretation produces a “living constitution” — one whose meaning evolves from generation to generation.

Strauss’ examples are the best part of the book. He devotes a chapter to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools. Half a century later, everybody likes the Brown decision. But it clearly violated originalism: Hardly anybody who voted for the 14th Amendment in 1868 thought they were voting for desegregation.

On the surface, Brown also violates common law, because it reverses a precedent rather than following it. The key precedent in this case isPlessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 decision saying that the 14th Amendment‘s promise of “the equal protection protection of the laws” can be satisfied by facilities that are “separate but equal”.

Looking deeper, though, Strauss shows that the 1954 Court was not just saying “Our moral values are better than the 1896 Court’s moral values.” He goes through a series of cases between 1896 and 1954 in which the Court tried to make separate-but-equal work. In case after case, it decided that the specific separate arrangements at hand (mostly concerning segregated law schools) were not equal. If you collected all those precedents, it became hard to imagine how to design racially separate facilities that the Court would consider equal.

So when the 1954 Court says that racially separate schools can’t be equal, it isn’t pulling that conclusion out of its own sensitive conscience. Instead, it’s amalgamating the conclusions of many specific cases decided since 1896, and coming up with an interpretive scheme that retroactively explains those decisions better than separate-but-equal did.

That’s how the common-law method works: You stick with an interpretation until the exceptions start to overwhelm the rule, and then you come up with a new interpretation that handles the exceptions better. It’s flexible enough to evolve through accumulated experience, but it’s not open to individual whim.

Ground Zero Mosque, Part II

Since I first wrote about the Ground Zero Mosque two weeks ago, more people and organizations have come out against it — bigots and right-wing extremists, of course, but also people who should know better like the Anti-Defamation League, John McCain, and the Wiesenthal Center.

Their statements all fudge an important issue: When you say you’re “against” the mosque, do you mean “I wish the people building it would reconsider” or do you mean “I want the government to stop them”? The first expresses sympathy for the people who feel insulted by the mosque; the second attacks religious freedom in America and sides with anti-Muslim bigots.

It’s important to be clear about this. Whenever a minority tries to exercise its rights, it’s going to be unpopular. In such a climate, announcing that you oppose their efforts is going to encourage bigotry, even if you claim that’s not your intention and even if you word your statement carefully. The headlines you generate are more important than your precise phrasing. The ADL should know that from its own experience battling anti-Semitism. (Some other Jewish groups have supported the mosque project.)

In response to the ADL’s statement, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria returned an award and honorarium the ADL gave him five years ago.

The poll showing that New Yorkers oppose the mosque fudges the same issue. The question asked was:

Do you support or oppose the proposal to build the Cordoba House, a 15 story Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan 2 blocks from the site of the World Trade Center?

I wonder if you could get the opposite result (“New Yorkers Support Mosque”) by asking Mayor Bloomberg’s question:

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Short Notes

It’s striking how much of this Sift revolves around the 14th Amendment, or, as Fox & Friends calls it, “the anchor baby amendment.“

Here’s one way in which China has already replaced the United States as the leader of the world. A few decades ago, if you saw plans for some crazily futuristic public-works project, you knew it had to be in America. Now it has to be in China.

Check this out: Train-car-sized buses that use the same right-of-way as ordinary highways, but they sit up so high that cars drive under them. They’re like rolling overpasses. More artist-conception pictures here. Construction in Beijing is supposed to start later this year.

Meanwhile, our cities are turning off streetlights and breaking up roads because we’re not willing to pay taxes to maintain them.

In the real world, a family home facing foreclosure is not usually considered a job for Superman. Except this one time. A previously unexamined stack of old magazines in the basement turned out to include a copy of Superman’s debut comic, Action #1. It’s expected to bring $250,000 at auction.

Jesus’ General is normally a satirist, but he seems serious about this suggestion: Go to a September 12 Tea Party rally and burn a Confederate flag in protest.

The parts of Arizona’s immigration law that were not thrown out by the courts went into effect July 29. Resistance to the law has also begun.

If you happen to be near Bedford, Massachusetts around 10 a.m. next Sunday morning, come listen to me preach on “Spirituality and the Humanist” at First Parish Church.

 

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Contractions

July 26, 2010 – 12:22 pm

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Ground Zero Mosque. Mainstream opponents of the mosque rely on a lot of unstated assumptions. Uglier voices go ahead and state them.
  • If Republicans Take the House. Remember the Clinton years? That’s what they’ve got in mind.
  • Disinformation Watch. The Shirley Sherrod incident lowlighted a big week for disinformation, but there was some encouraging pushback.
  • Short Notes. June and climate change were both too hot for the Senate; Jane Austen’s Fight Club; Judge Napolitano says Bush should have been indicted; don’t take your gun to mass; Arizona shows what Tea Party principles are like in practice; Ohio’s giant Chia pet; more bogus trends; my news fantasy; and Top Secret America.
The Ground Zero Mosque

One tactic of polarization is for each side to trumpet the nastiest stuff on the other side — as if this kind of extremism is typical among your opponents, who all think this way when they’re not trying to present a reasonable public image.

And so an offensive YouTube video often gets more attention from its foes than its fans. That happened back in 2003 when MoveOn sponsored a “Bush in 30 Seconds” competition to make and upload your own anti-Bush video. Somebody uploaded an ad comparing Bush to Hitler, which MoveOn decided was offensive and took down — but not before conservatives had grabbed it and prominently displayed it on their own web sites as an example of MoveOn’s liberal extremism. (It’s still being used that way.) So the Bush/Hitler video has probably been viewed far more often by conservatives than by liberals.

I try to keep that example in mind while I sift the news, because my goal is to keep Sift readers well-informed, not just pissed off. So when I run across some example of right-wing hate or ignorance, I try to ask myself: How important is this? Is it an example of an attitude that is widespread and influential, or is it just a few crazies representing no one but themselves?

This long build-up is necessary because the debate over the proposed Cordoba House, a.k.a, the Ground Zero Mosque, has pulled a lot of the nasties out of their holes. The protests range from mainstream Republican leaders like Sarah Palin, who issued this joycean tweet:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

to the lunatic fringe, who are virulently anti-Muslim. The question is how much attention those harsher voices deserve: Do they have an actual following? And is there a clear division between what they’re saying and what the mainstream voices are saying, or are they fleshing out what Palins and Gingrichs merely hint at?

In this case I’ve decided that the ugly voices do have a sizable following, and that often they are saying explicitly what the mainstream voices only imply.

The main idea behind all the anti-mosque activists — ire against a mosque visible from Ground Zero makes no sense otherwise — is collective guilt. Muslims blew up the World Trade Center in 2001 and now Muslims are building a mosque nearby. We are supposed to think of them as the same people. This ad, put out by the National Republican Trust (no direct connection to the Republican National Committee), makes it clear:

On September 11, they declared war against us. And to celebrate that murder of three thousand Americans, they want to build a monstrous 13-story mosque at Ground Zero.

Who? They.

This video, whose reasonable-sounding narrator is nobody famous, but whose message has been viewed more than 2 million times, takes it a step further. Muslims — even apparently secularized, Westernized American Muslims — are not just tainted with collective guilt, they are actually rooting for the downfall of the United States:

Those of you who know — personally — who know Muslims close enough to where they can tell you what they really think, you know this is actually quite common: Good citizens in public, not-so-good citizens in private. Interestingly, this dual Muslim nature is advocated in the Koran.

So if you think that Ali (who has lived next door or worked with you for years) is actually a good guy — think again. His religion tells him to be tricky. Secretly he was dancing for joy when the Twin Towers went down.

The second, related idea is that we’re not chasing down a conspiracy of international criminals, we’re at war with Islam itself — all 1.5 billion Muslims. Newt Gingrich, for example, blogged this:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

This only makes sense if you assume several incredible things.

  • The Christendom and Judaism are at war with Islam.
  • The United States plays a role in that war comparable to Saudi Arabia’s; churches and synagogues are “ours” while mosques are “theirs”.
  • Religious intolerance is a valuable tactic in that war, a source of strength.
  • We have handicapped ourselves by swearing off this tactic while our enemy uses it.

I don’t see how else to reach Gingrich’s remarkable conclusion that the United States ought to take Saudi Arabia as its model, basing our behavior on what they do. And it’s not just Newt. If you watch Fox News or read the comments on just about any online article about the Ground Zero mosque, you’ll find many people echoing his point: We ought to be intolerant because the Muslim countries are.

Mayor Bloomberg has the right answer:

I think our young men and women overseas are fighting for exactly this. For the right of people to practice their religion and for government to not pick and choose which religions they support, which religions they don’t.

To which I would add this: We respect religious freedom not as part of some deal with the rest of the world, but because that is the American way. We see it as a source of strength, not weakness, and we’ll do it whether anybody else does or not.

The Founders would be horrified at the idea that we might give up on religious freedom because some other country doesn’t practice it. At the time they were writing that principle into the First Amendment, no other country was practicing it.

Juan Cole gives this example:

Ben Franklin … wrote in his Autobiography concerning a non-denominational place of public preaching he helped found “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

I wondered whether there were any English-speaking Christian churches in Hiroshima. Yes, there are.

Ground Zero is just the tip of an iceberg. New mosques are being protested all over the country.

If Republicans Take the House

What can we expect if the Republicans take control of the House? We got some indications this week that they want to do what they did during the Clinton administration: investigate everything until they can find an excuse to impeach the president. Thursday, Michelle Bachman told the GOP Youth Convention: “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

Impeach Obama. The same day the flagship conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, had not one but two editorials (by Jeffrey Kuhner and Tom Tancredo) demanding President Obama’s impeachment. Each editorial is long on rhetoric, but the specific high crimes and misdemeanors to be prosecuted are hard to decipher.

Tancredo says Obama is “an enemy of our Constitution” who “does not feel constrained by the rule of law”. He objects to the Obama Justice Department giving the “weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act”, the auto bailout, the off-shore drilling moratorium, “his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it”, and large deficits — without saying what specific laws these policies might violate.

Obama’s “most egregious and brazen betrayal of our Constitution” is his immigration policy, which Tancredo says violates his constitutional responsibility under Article IV “to protect states from foreign invasion”. So Tancredo’s impeachment case seems to rest on interpreting the “invasion” metaphor literally.

Kuhner accuses Obama of “erecting a socialist dictatorship”.

We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism.

The specific policies Kuhner mentions are mostly acts of Congress like health-care reform (which he claims funds abortions), that could be thrown out by the courts if they are actually unconstitutional. (But they won’t be, so impeachment is necessary.) Comprehensive immigration reform will make 12-20 million new citizens — “shock troops for his socialist takeover”. The administration is not just a “gangster regime” but also a “fledgling thug state”. Kuhner closes with what sounds to me more like a call for assassination than impeachment: “The usurper must fall.”

So far Congressional Republicans have not shown any inclination to resist the wilder ideas that come from the Right. Will they resist this one if they get the power to pursue it? I’m not optimistic. A Republican House will take as an axiom that Obama should be impeached; they’ll search until they can find an excuse.

Repeal everything. High-ranking Republicans have pushed repeal of health care reform and Wall Street reform. They can’t actually do either, of course, without 60 votes in the Senate and enough popularity to intimidate an Obama veto. But what they could do is refuse to fund implementation.

Return to Bush policies. The basic Republican ideas are still to cut rich people’s taxes, let corporations regulate themselves, and stand behind Big Oil.

Will they? The Intrade Prediction Market is giving Republicans a 55% chance of taking the House, which seems high to me. But it all hangs on this bit of framing: If the 2010 elections becomes a referendum on whether or not people are happy, with voting Republican as the way to register unhappiness, the Republicans will win. If it becomes a contest between the Democratic vision of the future and the Republican vision, the Democrats will win.

The reason I think 55% is high is that most voters still do not know who their candidates will be and what positions they will take. So polls are still mostly an am-I-happy-with-things measure. As we get closer to election day, I expect more voters to compare candidates’ visions.

The model here is the Nevada Senate race. A few months ago, when that race was just about Harry Reid and his responsibility for how things are, Nevadans wanted him out. Now that he has an opponent — Tea Party extremist Sharon Angle — he has forged into the lead.

Disinformation Watch

This week had a major disinformation story: the Shirley Sherrod incident. Tuesday, Rachel Maddow did a good job of covering the collapse of the original Obama-official-is-racist spin, and then she did an even better job Wednesday of connecting the dots:

What is the same about the four Fox-News-initiated “scandals”: Van Jones, ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, and Shirley Sherrod? What’s the same about these four stories?

This isn’t about racism, this is not a story about picking on black people. This is a story about political outcomes, the tried and true political strategy of not targeting black people, but targeting white people. white voters, or white would-be voters to feel afraid of black people. To feel afraid of African-American people as if they’re not fellow Americans, but rather a threat to what white people have.

This tactic goes way back. Maddow traces it to George Wallace and the segregationists, but she could walked it back to the early days of the labor movement, when hard-working people who wanted a living wage and a safe workplace were painted as dangerous communist revolutionaries.

You can’t rally your side by standing for inequality, for keeping other people down. If you want to oppose equality, you have to pretend that you’re the ones in danger. That’s what Fox is pitching to whites: telling them over and over again that black people threaten them, and proving that point by making up facts as necessary.

Andrew Breitbart, the well-connected conservative blogger who promoted the doctored Sherrod video (and the doctored ACORN videos before it) has a defense: His dishonest smear wasn’t aimed at Sherrod, it was aimed the NAACP in order to discredit their criticism of racism in the Tea Party.  I’m glad he cleared that up. (And BTW, what he’s saying about the NAACP is also false.)

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum comments on the Right’s unwillingness to police itself:

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.

Frum blames this on the “closing of the conservative mind” — an unwillingness to face difficult facts. But Digby has another explanation:

this phenomenon is clearly less a matter of narrow-mindedness and ignoring of unwelcome fact than a conscious decision to lie for political ends. The [conservative] rank and file are misinformed because they are being purposefully led astray by the same conservative intelligentsia which owns and operates the right wing media.

The other big current disinformation story is Journolist. Journolist was a private email discussion list with (according to Wikipedia) “400 journalists, academics and others, all with political views ranging from centrist to center-left to leftist.”

The list was set up to be private, but sensationalized excerpts are being released on Tucker Carlson’s conservative blog The Daily Caller by Jonathan Strong. (Latest one here.) On the Right, this is seen as evidence of the great left-wing media conspiracy that they have always known existed.

That story has a few holes. First, this is like Climategate: a large collection of private emails excerpted to make the writers look bad. But unlike Climategate, the full collection is not available to the public. So when Strong mixes quotes with paraphrases (often the quote is only damning in the context of the paraphrase) we can’t check whether the paraphrase is fair.

(This, BTW, is an important point to remember in any scandal story: Can you check the source material, and if not, why not? Who is controlling your access and what is their motive?)

Second, the Daily Caller headlines exaggerate. Salon observes:

Today’s Caller headline — “Liberal Journalists Suggest Government Shut Down Fox News” — is objectively untrue. Simply reading the e-mails quoted in the story show that a non-journalist asked an academic question — whether the FCC had the authority to shut down Fox — and was quickly shot down by the journalists involved in the discussion.

Finally, the Caller’s stories rely on the reader’s imagination to connect the dots. A real expose’ would start with a Journolist comment and show how it led to some particular biased news coverage by the commenter or his/her organization.

Without such dot-connecting, even the cherry-picked excerpts sound like beleaguered liberal academics and opinion journalists (not reporters) trying to catch up to the better-organized conservative spin machine. They only seem sinister if you already know in your gut that biased coverage elected Obama.

Elena Kagan has not been “promoting the injustice of Shariah law” — or wearing a turban.

Lower taxes don’t lead to more revenue, as this simple graph shows. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell defines his own reality:

there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.

Rachel Maddow shows numerous Republican politicians making this tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves point and numerous conservative economists denying it. It’s exactly what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics”.

Only sleight-of-hand allows Republicans to claim that President Obama has “quadrupled the deficit“. They are comparing the current deficit to the 2008 deficit of $459 billion. But the government’s fiscal year begins in October, so the 2009 budget was actually made under President Bush, not Obama. Bush’s last budget projected a $1 trillion deficit, which (due to the recession being worse than expected) had increased to $1.2 trillion by the time Obama took office.

Short Notes

As the Senate gives up on even a very stripped-down climate-change bill, we discover that last month was the hottest June ever recorded.

The fake movie trailer is getting to be an art form of its own, and they don’t get much better than Jane Austen’s Fight Club..

Talk about straying from the reservation: Former judge and frequent Fox News guest Andrew Napolitano recently said on C-SPAN that Bush and Cheney “absolutely should have been indicted. For torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants.”

Because one body is enough and more blood is not necessary, Louisiana Catholics won’t be taking advantage of their new right to carry concealed weapons during mass.

Harper’s puts its articles behind a subscription wall, so you read the whole thing online, but “Tea party in the Sonora” is incredible. It describes the sad result of the low-tax, low-regulation, and nativist principles (i.e. Tea Party principles) that have guided Arizona’s legislature for several years now.

Here’s the detail that paints the whole picture: Arizona doesn’t own its own state capitol. They did a sale-and-leaseback arrangement in January to raise cash for the current budget.

Now, why didn’t I already know that? Back in September The Daily Show did a great piece about putting the capitol building on the market. “What happens next year?” Jason Jones asks a state senator. “You’re killing me here,” she answers..

Instead of a concrete noise wall, Ohio is constructing the world’s largest Chia pet.

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on Jack Shafer and the ever-increasing number of bogus trends.

To illustrate the point that non-Americans have almost as much to lose from the decay of the American press as we do, I wrote a fake news story in which foreign governments bail out American journalism. “If the American people continue to be so misinformed,” says my fake Swede, “they’re just going to keep screwing up the world.”

More people should be reading/viewing the Washington Post series Top Secret America.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Crimes Uncovered

July 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm

We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers.

— Albert Schweitzer

In this week’s Sift:

Tortured Coverage: Two Problems in 21st Century News

Two recent stories about torture expose different aspects of what’s wrong with American journalism.

In the first, a study by students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government demonstrated that major newspapers’ characterization of waterboarding abruptly changed in 2004, when it came out that the U.S. government was doing it. Prior to public knowledge of American involvement, 44 out of 54 New York Times stories that mentioned waterboarding characterized it as torture, but only 2 out of 143 subsequent articles did. The LA Times was also studied and its numbers showed a similar pattern.

The raw numbers are bad enough, but then you get to the NYT’s self-justification:

As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture. When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

Translation: The Bush administration told us not to call it torture, so we stopped. Similarly the Washington Post:

After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

What’s wrong here? Waterboarding-as-torture didn’t become “contentious” because some new information threw previous judgments into doubt. It became contentious because an interested party — the U.S. government — started contending against it in defiance of all previous objective standards.

And the major newspapers buckled. By backing off of a word the government didn’t want them to use, reversing their previous judgments about its meaning and proper use, they did take a side in the political dispute. I’ll let Glenn Greenwald sum up:

We don’t need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

The second story is also about torture, but on a much smaller scale: A former Chicago police lieutenant was just convicted of torturing sometimes-false confessions out of suspects, some of whom have subsequently been released from death row and won a suit against the city. The case came out of a series of articles investigative reporter John Conroy wrote for the Chicago Reader, starting in 1990.

Chicago public radio station WBEZ lucked out in its coverage of the trial: Conroy was available to blog about it because he’s unemployed. Like most big-city papers, the Reader has been laying off reporters — obviously not just the deadwood.

So who’s going to catch the next torturing cop? And who’s going to look into the stories of the people who are still in jail based on their tortured confessions? Not Conroy — now that the trial’s over, he needs to go find a job.

Immigration Reform: Comprehensive or Cartoon?

The Obama administration did two things to push the immigration issue forward in the past two weeks: President Obama gave a speech outlining what immigration reform ought to look like, and the Justice Department filed suit to keep Arizona from enforcing its papers-please law, S.B. 1070. [text of federal complaint. text of 1070]

The course of the immigration debate boils down to this: The problem is simple to describe, and there’s a simple-minded solution that feels satisfying but is cartoonishly unrealistic. Nobody wants to hear complicated answers this year, so every discussion founders on why we can’t just do the cartoonish thing.

WileECoyote.jpg

Here’s the simple problem: Millions — nobody’s sure exactly how many millions — of people came to this country illegally and live here either under false identities or off the books entirely. This has both good and bad effects on our economy (which I’ll discuss next week). It creates a big hole in our homeland security (because malevolent foreigners might hide in the crowd of harmless people who sneak into the U.S. and live here illegally). And it undermines our worker-protection and public-health laws (because undocumented workers won’t complain to the authorities, and who knows whether their children get vaccinations).

The simple-minded solution is that you build a wall at the border, then pick up the millions of illegal immigrants and dump them on the other side. Patrol the wall with enough troops to shoot anybody who tries to come back. Done.

As soon as you start adding details to that picture, though, the whole thing falls apart. For instance: If a wall will solve the problem, then why is there an illegal Chinese immigrant problem in Israel? They didn’t walk there.

We want foreigners to come here as tourists, students, and on business of various sorts. And we want to be the kind of open society where the government doesn’t keep track of our every move and force us to keep proving that we’re legal. So unless we’re willing to assign Soviet-style minders to every foreign family that goes to Disney World, we’re going to have illegal immigrants.

Now start imagining the Gestapo you’d need to round up millions of people, many of whom have been here for years and have friends and relatives who are legal residents with attics and basements. At a bare minimum, you’d need national ID cards, surprise house-to-house searches, and big penalties for those giving shelter. Where does that go? Years from now, high school students in Germany might be reading the tragic diary of some teen-age Anna Francisco from Indianapolis.

So if you think about the issue for more than a minute or two, you begin to see that we can’t solve this problem unless the vast majority of our undocumented residents cooperate. We can track down some of them, but we’ll need most them to come in voluntarily and register. And that means that our program has to have more carrots than sticks.

Conservatives hate that, because their instinctive reaction to any problem is to punish some non-wealthy person who doesn’t resemble them. But no punishment-based program can solve this problem.

We need what President Obama (and President Bush before him) described: a comprehensive plan that tightens the border, cracks down on employers, and offers undocumented residents legal status if they jump through a series of hoops. Such a program won’t bring the undocumented population down to zero — nothing short of ethnic cleansing will. But it should cut the problem down a few sizes.

Unfortunately, you have to get past the Wile E. Coyote solutions before you can even talk about anything realistic. And even Republican senators who know better aren’t willing to stand up to their radical base.

The federal suit against Arizona has a simple point: Regulating immigration is a federal responsibility, and the federal government needs to have the discretion to handle it. For example, it’s federal policy not to deport refugees who come here fleeing oppression. The Arizona law has no provision for that.

The best place I’ve found for studying the immigration issue is the Immigration Policy Center.

Obama’s immigration enforcement techniques are less showy and more effective than Bush’s.

The NYT has a fascinating article about the long-term unemployed. On the third page we find this:

“I would take a gardening job,” said a 58-year-old woman who had earned $24 an hour as an office manager. “I would clean toilets if I could, but I can’t take that job. Millions of people in California are illegal and they’re taking our jobs.”

A long list of factors went into explaining what had happened to the American economy so that former professionals conversant in spreadsheets and mutual funds were now chagrined to be denied the opportunity to scrub toilets. To a student of macroeconomics, the arrival of illegal immigrants seemed far down the list, somewhere after weak long-term job growth and the near collapse of the financial system.

But to unemployed people trying to divine a cause through the miasmatic haze of their own situations, the presence of illegal immigrants was the explanation they could see most clearly. You could spot them on street corners, waiting for work. You could see them crammed into rental homes, or hear their music blaring from pickup trucks. Joblessness was disorienting. Illegal immigrants formed the only putative cause that lived next door.

DOMA is Unconstitutional

Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that a big chunk of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional.

The case. It’s easy for the facts of a case like this to get lost in the subsequent debate, so I’ll state them up front: Seven same-sex couples who are legally married in Massachusetts applied for federal benefits that opposite-sex married couples routinely get (like family health insurance for federal employees), but they were denied because of DOMA. Three surviving same-sex spouses applied for federal survivor benefits under Social Security and were also denied.

Judge Joseph Tauro ruled that they should get their benefits (with one exception on a technicality). From here the case will almost certainly go to an appellate court and then to the Supreme Court before it is finally resolved.

DOMA. Congress passed DOMA in 1996, shortly after a case in Hawaii raised the possibility that same-sex marriage might become legal in that state. (It still hasn’t happened. Hawaii’s governor vetoed a same-sex civil-union law Tuesday. Same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004 and is now also legal in Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Wikipedia has the details.)

DOMA says two main things:

  • States don’t have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
  • Every reference to “marriage” in federal law means opposite-sex marriage.

Judge Tauro ruled that the second is unconstitutional. The first provision is also constitutionally suspect (Article IV: “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.”), but it didn’t come up in this case, so it is unaffected.

The reasoning. Most of the coverage of this decsion has emphasized the 10th Amendment states-rights angle. (In ratifying the Consitutiton, the states never surrendered their right to define marriage.) But that’s not the argument that does the heavy lifting.

If you’ve read any other decision that defended same-sex marriage, this one looks a lot the same. They all start with the 14th amendment, which promises “equal protection under the laws” to every person under the jurisdiction of the United States.

In practice, this means that if the government treats one class of citizens differently from another, it needs to have a good reason. How good a reason depends several factors, but the lowest hurdle a law has to jump is the rational basis test:

A law that touches on a constitutionally protected interest must be rationally related to furthering a legitimate government interest.

In other words, Congress can’t pass a law just to screw with some group it doesn’t like. For example, the laws against burglary were passed in order to protect property (a legitimate government interest), not just to screw with burglars because their lifestyle offends Congress’ sense of morality.

Judge Tauro went through the reasons originally given when DOMA was passed, plus a couple of others put forward by the Justice Department (which defended the case on behalf of the government — more about that later), and found that denying federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples is not rationally related to any of those goals.

[For example, the administration argued that the federal government has an interest in the simplicity of standardizing benefits state-to-state. Judge Tauro found that the federal government had never before worried about the different standards for marriage in the various states, and does not now worry about it with respect to any other issue:

a thirteen year-old female and a fourteen year-old male, who have the consent of their parents, can obtain a valid marriage license in the state of New Hampshire. Though this court knows of no other state in the country that would sanction such a marriage, the federal government recognizes it as valid simply because New Hampshire has declared it to be so.

Worse, this new desire to choose which state-approved marriages it will recognize has actually complicated the federal government’s process rather than simplifying it.]

Putting Tauro’s conclusion very simply: The disadvantages DOMA inflicts on married same-sex couples aren’t unfortunate side-effects of a law with some other good purpose. Disadvantaging same-sex couples is the purpose of the law. And that’s not rationally related to any legitimate government interest.

The Obama Administration’s Role. This case puts the administration in a difficult position. The executive branch has an obligation to defend the laws as written. (Article II, Section 3: The president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”) So when someone sues to have a law declared unconstitutional, the Justice Department defends.

On the other hand, President Obama is on record saying that DOMA ought to be repealed. One way to get rid of it would be not to defend suits against it. But that’s a bad process, and is exactly the kind of abuse of executive power I complain about in other contexts.

Taken to an extreme, this practice would allow the president and one federal judge to repeal any law they don’t like: You file a test case in the judge’s district, and then the president orders the Justice Department not to appeal when the judge finds the law unconstitutional. Bye-bye law.

Imagine, say, a President Palin or Huckabee refusing to defend a suit against the insurance mandate of the health care reform law. We don’t want to go there. The administration should hold its nose and appeal, and I’m sure they will.

Israel, Palestine, and the New York Times

Without any intention on my part, this week’s whole Sift revolves around the virtues and vices of the New York Times. Maybe I’m just reading articles I used to skim or skip over, but it looks to me like the Times made a conscious decision to deepen its Israel/Palestine coverage after the Gaza flotilla raid.

Usually our news media looks at the world through frogs’ eyes. It only sees motion, so issues can drop out of its sight just by standing still. Israel/Palestine is exactly the kind of topic it covers badly: an ongoing situation where one day looks a lot like the next. These situations may be important, but they’re not “news” in the very literal sense that nothing new happened today.

That was the whole point of the Gaza flotilla. The Israeli government has been very good at pressing the Palestinians without making news, and the flotilla was an attempt to create a newsworthy event that would draw attention to the larger situation.

It’s been working, at least at the NYT, which lately has been sending people out to cover Palestine-related situations that lack any eye-catching event. On July 5 it published a long article about American charities aiding West Bank settlements that the Israeli government considers illegal. Israelis would not be able to get tax deductions for making such contributions, but Americans do.

The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Interestingly, some of the most radical of the American groups are evangelical Christians, known as Christian Zionists.

This article was followed up on July 7 by a “Room for Debate” segment where eight writers answered the question: “Do U.S. donors drive Israeli politics?”

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has been spending time in the region. Thursday’s column drew attention to dissident opinion within Israel, like Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis For Human Rights.

Rabbis for Human Rights has helped Palestinians recover some land through lawsuits in Israeli courts. And Rabbi Ascherman and other Jewish activists escort such farmers to protect them. The settlers still attack, but soldiers are more likely to intervene when it is rabbis being clubbed.

Kristof draws attention to something that I also have been struck by as I’ve dug deeper into these issues:

The most cogent critiques of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians invariably come from Israel’s own human rights organizations. The most lucid unraveling of Israel’s founding mythology comes from Israeli historians. The deepest critiques of Israel’s historical claims come from Israeli archeologists (one archeological organization, Emek Shaveh, offers alternative historical tours so that visitors can get a fuller picture). This more noble Israel, refusing to retreat from its values even in times of fear and stress, is a model for the world.

In Kristof’s previous column he visited a smuggler’s tunnel on the Egyptian side of Gaza. He reports that there are many such tunnels running 24/7 — enough that “shops are filled and daily life is considerably easier than when I last visited here two years ago.”

Far from hurting Hamas, Kristof claims, the blockade has created a tunnel economy that Hamas can more easily tax and control, while ruining the Gazan business community that otherwise might be a moderating force.

Short Notes

The Sift has a new look online. That’s partly because I decided to redesign, and partly because changes in Google Docs broke the way I used to do things. Comments are welcome both on the overall look and on things that don’t work they way you expect them to.

More and more people — the NYT, for example — are starting to notice that judicial activism is a conservative vice, not a liberal one.

It’s dangerous to heckle a comic.

Bonddad gives a primer on the lagging employment picture. And here’s another link to that NYT article about long-term unemployment.

Sharon Angle is working hard to blow what should be an easy job: beating Harry Reid in Nevada in an anti-incumbent year. Salon lists her latest blunders.

This one’s my favorite: After winning the Republican primary, she scrubbed her web site of a lot of the wacky right-wing positions that would hurt her in the general election. OK, everybody does stuff like that to a certain extent. But Harry Reid had saved the old Angle web-site material, and when he reposted it, Angle threatened to sue. How dare Reid make Angle’s previous positions available to the voters in her own words!

You know who’s most likely to walk away from a bad mortgage? Rich people.

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Nasty Days

March 1, 2010 – 12:33 pm

Let me tell you now: it is still morning in America. It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding-hung-over-vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day, but it’s still morning in America.

— Glenn Beck, CPAC Keynote Address, 20 February 2010


In this week’s Sift:

  • The Health-Care Reform Endgame. Bipartisanship is dead, but the Democrats can pass reform on their own. It gets more complicated than your civics teacher ever described, but it’s possible. Plus: some historical perspective on how this fits into the long-term breakdown of the gentlemen’s agreements that used to keep Congress on track — closing with the image of heads on spikes.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for The Long Descent by John Michael Greer. Because if you can learn to think reasonably about the end of civilization as we have known it, everything else should be a snap.
  • Short Notes. Speaking of heads on spikes, Digby starts fantasizing about guillotines. Drinking While Brown is a crime in Texas. Vote Whig! Glenn Beck explains why businessmen deserve our sympathy more than the people they fire, making Bill O’Reilly sound reasonable by comparison. And more.
The Health-Care Reform Endgame

Here’s where we are on health-care reform: The House and Senate each passed similar bills some while ago, but they’re not identical. In the basic-civics, how-a-bill-becomes-law process, a conference committee with members from both houses would iron out the differences, so that the identical bills could be re-passed in both houses. That course has been blocked by the Scott Brown election, because now the Republicans have the 41 votes they need to support a filibuster if a conference-committee bill comes back to the Senate.

The next obvious course would be for the House to pass the same bill the Senate already passed. Then you don’t need to go back to the Senate, because they already passed that bill. The question is whether the House has the votes to pass the Senate bill as is and let it go at that. The answer is probably no; the House only passed its own bill by five votes (220-215), and it really needs some of the concessions a conference committee would have worked out if it’s going to hang on to that small majority.
That’s the real point of the 11-page proposal President Obama came out with just before the televised Health Care Summit with the Republicans. It outlines a compromise proposal between the House and Senate bills (heavily weighted towards the Senate bill). In essence, the White House is doing the work that a conference committee would do in the ordinary process.

From there it might go like this: The House passes the Senate bill with the promise that the Senate will agree to the fixes outlined in the Obama plan. The Senate bill becomes law, but before it takes effect it is fixed by a second bill.

But now we have the filibuster problem again, because the Senate still has to vote on the second bill. But the second bill (i.e., the difference between the original Senate bill and the Obama plan) has been designed to fit through a filibuster-proof Senate procedure known as reconciliation. So it could pass the Senate with only 51 votes rather than 60. There’s some trickiness about the timing of all this (in particular how the House can be sure that the Senate won’t just walk away from the deal after its bill becomes law), which leads to some further legislative arcana described here.
Still, it can work, and it might.
So that leads to an obvious question: If the Senate has a procedure for passing bills with 51 votes, why didn’t it do that to begin with? We could have skipped all that nonsense with Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. Ezra Klein explored this back in August, and came to the conclusion that full-scale health reform couldn’t be made to fit within the rules associated with reconciliation.
And this points out the fallacy of the main Republican talking point against this plan, as expressed in the Wall Street Journal by former Majority Leader Bill Frist:

Using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform would be unprecedented because Congress has never used it to adopt major, substantive policy change. The Senate’s health bill is without question such a change: It would fundamentally alter one-fifth of our economy.

Frist ignores one basic fact: The Senate already passed health-care reform without reconciliation. So nobody is talking about “using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform.” Reconciliation would just be used for the second bill, the small number of changes necessary to fulfill a deal with the House. And that’s not unprecedented at all.

That’s the legislative nitty-gritty. Now let’s back up and get some context. The bigger picture of what is going on is this: For decades, the conventions, traditions, and gentlemen’s agreements that made Congress work smoothly have been breaking down, with the result that more and more things happen strictly according to the rules — as power plays, in other words.

To see the difference, compare the Nixon impeachment with the Clinton impeachment. Everyone involved in the Nixon impeachment appreciated that the process had to meet the judgment of history. Both parties did their best to avoid partisan excess: Democrats appointed a two-time Nixon voter to lead the investigation, and 6 of the 17 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted for impeachment.
The Clinton impeachment was a circus by comparison. Republicans spent most of Clinton’s two terms looking for some excuse to impeach him. Their investigation started with the Whitewater real-estate deal, and when that didn’t produce results they kept coming up with new “scandals” until one stuck. Democrats resisted, and the process consisted of one nearly party-line vote after another. Fifty Republican senators and zero Democrats voted for conviction, falling short of the necessary 67 votes.
All the same, no rules were broken. The Constitution gives the House the power to impeach the president. The Republican majority wanted to, so they did. Democrats had enough votes in the Senate not to convict, so they didn’t.
Look at the filibuster in that light. It’s not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but follows from Senate rules adopted in 1806. The first actual filibuster didn’t happen until 1837, and they remained rare until the 1970s. The rules didn’t prevent them, but filibusters were ungentlemanly, so they only happened in extreme circumstances. As this graph shows, the number of filibusters has shot up in the last few decades, no matter who controlled Congress.
In the current Congress, you can take for granted that the Republicans will filibuster anything they didn’t propose themselves, because they can. It has become common to hear journalists say “It takes sixty votes to get anything done in the Senate” — a statement I’m sure the Founders would have found shocking. The Constitution defines a few circumstances (like constitutional amendments) that require supermajorities, and we can assume that the Founders intended a simple majority to suffice in all other cases.

Reconciliation is an ungentlemanly solution to the filibuster problem, a power play. But again, no rules are being broken. And the alternative is what? To accept that Republicans can do anything within their power, but Democrats have to be good sports?

Even so, I wish more people would read Colleen McCullough’s historical novel The First Man in Rome. It deals with a similar period in the Roman Republic, when the traditions and gentlemen’s agreements of the Senate were breaking down. By the end, Marius is mounting the heads of his enemies on spikes in the Forum. But the escalating provocations have gone back-and-forth so gradually that you can’t draw an obvious line and say, “This is where it should have stopped.”

Most embarrassing line of the health-care summit: Eric Cantor talks about “people who are allegedly wronged by our health-care system”. Allegedly?

Glenn Beck’s CPAC speech is worth a look, if you want to understand where a lot of people are coming from:

We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right, you can speak out, you can disagree with me, you can make your own path. But I’m not going to pay for your mistakes, and I don’t expect you to pay for my mistakes. We’re all going to make them, but we all have the right to move down that road. What we don’t have a right to is: health care, housing, or handouts.

Caring for sick people is “paying for their mistakes.” They “make their own path,” so they need to be allowed to fail (and maybe die), so they can learn to do better.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …
… look for The Long Descent: a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age by John Michael Greer. Because you need to have some high-quality pessimism in your head. Seriously. People without high-quality pessimism either get depressed when things look bad or cling to optimism out of sheer panic. In either state it’s hard to think clearly about things.
The Long Descent is a book of clear thinking about the end of civilization as we have known it. And its main point is this: It takes a long time for a civilization to collapse. You don’t go straight from high tea at Buckingham Palace to Mad Max.
Look at Rome again. The peak of the Roman Empire comes during the reign of Trajan, the second of the Five Good Emperors. He dies in 117. Rome itself doesn’t fall to the barbarians for another 350 years. And that’s just the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the east, the Byzantine Empire hangs on for another thousand years after that. There were still Caesars in Constantinople until the Renaissance.

Got the picture? Just because you think we may be headed down the Big Hill, don’t list the good tea set on Ebay just yet. You might get a few more sips in.

Myths. Greer is at his best early in the book when he goes meta and explains why most of our thinking about the end of the industrial age is so misguided: We’re not looking at facts and theories at all. Instead, we’re having an argument between two diametrically opposed myths. The Myth of Progress says that collapses or long-term declines are impossible now. Something magical happened in the 1700s, and now we’ve got no place to go but up. Science and technology always improve, and so life in general will always improve too.
On the other hand, the Myth of Apocalypse predicts that someday soon our sins will catch up to us in one big, nasty punishment. It’s like Mother Nature saying, “Wait until your Father gets home.”

This Progress/Apocalypse argument may cloak itself in all sorts of science and pseudoscience, but fundamentally it’s a religious dispute. Things will turn out a particular way because they have to. On the Progress side, science is the superhero who will never fail us. On the Apocalypse side, there’s no way we can get away with all the crap we’ve been doing. (That’s why, if you listen closely to some prophets of Apocalypse, you will hear a perverse joy in their visions of doom. They sound like Jonathan Edwards describing the tortures of Hell.)

How Collapse Works. Not only doesn’t civilization collapse overnight, it also doesn’t go straight downhill. You have a jolt and spiral downward for a while; then society regroups and even rebounds a little until the next jolt.

Greer explains the decline process like this: At its peak a society builds a larger capital base than it can maintain. From then on, the deferred maintenance periodically comes due in some big failure, which cascades through the system until things settle down at a lower level. Then the pattern repeats: The lower capital base generates enough resources to maintain itself day-to-day, but not long-term — eventually leading to the next big failure.

Compare post-Katrina New Orleans to a rising city, like London was when the Great Fire hit in 1666. For London (and for Chicago after its fire in 1871), the disaster was also an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better. But New Orleans is only sort of rebuilding. The touristy parts are back, but much remains in ruins. Poorly maintained levees caused the Katrina flood, and you have to wonder what long-term maintenance the city’s lower tax base can’t cover now. How will that lead to the next disaster?

Why Now? Greer believes that what changed in the 1700s was simple: We figured out how to tap the energy of fossil fuels. Now those fuels are running out, so the Fossil Fuel Age is ending, taking progress with it. We can adjust to the new era of decline, or we can try increasingly crazy schemes (like shale oil) to try to deny it.

Greer promotes the Peak Oil Theory, which I’ve described before. A well-established principle in the oil industry says that an oil field’s production peaks when about half the oil has been pumped out. The geologist M. King Hubbert speculated that the same principle holds on larger scales. He correctly predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the late 1960s, something none of the other experts expected. Since his Hubbert’s death, people have been using his techniques to predict when global oil production will peak. Estimates range from about now to as late as 2050, and some people reject the theory entirely.

Peak oil fits well with Greer’s long-decline vision, because it’s not as if the pumps all run dry one day with no warning. Instead production peaks, and no matter what new techniques people come up with, they can’t get oil out of the ground as fast as they used to. Over decades, oil becomes increasingly rare and expensive, and all the economic processes that depend on cheap oil work less and less well. (Greer is a little less convincing when he explains why no other form of energy will fill the gap. He’s not obviously wrong, but his conclusions are more speculative.)

Personal strategies. The Myth of Apocalypse leads to the Myth of the Lone Survivor. (Lot escapes from Sodom to live in a cave. Noah and his family survive on the ark. Jor-El saves his infant son from the destruction of Krypton by rocketing him to Earth.) Apply the Lone Survivor myth today and you get survivalist fantasies about cabins in the wilderness stocked with food and gold and weapons. But Greer believes that if you look at things realistically rather than mythically, you’ll picture something completely different.

First, civilizations fall from the outside in. As Roman power declined, the best place to be was Constantinople; the periphery fared much worse. Unpopulated areas become bandit territory, so you’d better have a lot of weapons if you’re planning to hang onto your stocks of food and gold. In contemporary countries that have had actual declines, like Iraq after the invasion or Russia after the Soviet collapse, the best place to find food, electric power, and medical care was near the capital.
Second, stockpiles of goods just carry forward the Fossil Fuel Age illusion that strength comes from owning things. What will really save you in the long decline are skills and relationships. In other words, what can you do and whose plans do you fit into? What community will claim you as a member? Somebody in town who can set broken arms or keep old machines running will do a lot better than a survivalist Rambo in the hills.
Finally, prepare for decline, not apocalypse. Not: “Could I live without electricity?” but “How would I live if electricity were unreliable and expensive?”

In short: Learn some useful skills, figure out how to be happy at a lower level of consumption, and develop relationships based on real loyalty rather than expedience. Oh, and try to develop a habit of thinking realistically rather than mythically. That’s not bad advice even if civilization muddles through somehow.

Short Notes
Fannie Mae lost $74 billion last year, up from $60 billion the year before. That makes AIG’s $11 billion loss look small. A lot of this money eventually winds up bailing out the big banks and Wall Street firms, many of whose deals were insured by Fannie Mae or AIG. Meanwhile, Morgan-Chase CEO Jamie Dimon whines about a bank tax proposal, causing Digby to comment: “For the first time in my life I’m really beginning to understand why the French went so nuts with the Guillotine.”
Huffington Post collects 16 bad headlines that actually ran. Several are unintentionally sexy, and others suggest false interpretations, like the Boston Globe’s “Man Executed After Long Speech”.

A fascinating example of how different things are considered too risque in different countries: Paris Hilton’s commercial for Devassa beer is too much for Brazil. Brazil? How could anything be too much for Brazil, where bikinis are constructed with nanotech? But it’s not a question of less or more, it’s just different.

This may sound like a clip from Ron White’s “They Call Me Tater Salad” routine, but in Texas a cop can walk into a bar and arrest you for being drunk. No one has to complain and you don’t have to be causing any problems. Giving the police that kind of discretion is bound to lead to abuse, and Mother Jones says it does. Remember the crime of Driving While Black? You can add Drinking While Brown to that list.

But surely police wouldn’t do anything like that. They also wouldn’t murder people trying to get away from Hurricane Katrina and then cover it up. Would they?

If you’re so fed up that not even the Tea Party does it for you, try this. The DespairWear collection (“Clothes make the man. These clothes make the man sad.”) also includes a good anti-TARP shirt.

When you get Bill O’Reilly off his own show, he almost sounds reasonable. (HuffPost pitches his Palin remarks, but that’s a small part of the interview.)

Another snippit from Beck’s CPAC speech:

Small businessmen who work hard, they put their last dollar into it. And if they succeed, they’re demonized and penalized. Why? … When you’re in a small business you feel it when you have to let Sally go. You feel it when you have to let Bob go. How many small businessmen have look in the eyes of their employees with tears and said, I’m sorry. I’ve tried everything I can. Those are the people that are truly, truly struggling. And those are the people that nobody is even noticing anymore. Right?

So, forget Sally and Bob — the businessman who had to fire them is the one who really deserves our sympathy. And note the delusion of persecution: Who is demonizing successful small businessmen? Anybody?

By weeklysift | Comments (20)

Fighting the Devil

January 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui. — Helen Keller

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore ... look for James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren. What if the climate-change problem is actually worse than everybody is saying?
  • The Devil, You Say. Pat Robertson knows why the Haitians have had such consistently bad luck: They made a deal with the Devil. True? Well, in 1791 they did call on the enemy of the being worshipped by the French slave-owners. But which one is the Devil?
  • Short Notes. The Democrats could lose in Massachusetts tomorrow. No Americans died in combat in Iraq last month. The numbers say that marriage is healthier in gay-rights states. You’re safe from 8-year-old terrorists. Discrimination against white racists. Why conservatives hate Avatar. And more.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

Look for James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity. Hansen is the NASA scientist that the Bush administration made famous by trying to censor. He is the main character in Mark Bowen’s book Censoring Science.

Conservatives have pounded on the point that those who warn of a possible planetary catastrophe are “shrill” and “hysterical“. And while I can’t prove it, I suspect that many Greens have responded by pulling their punches to sound “reasonable”. Not Hansen. He believes the problem is worse than most climate scientists think, and he’s not afraid to say so.

This is a valuable book, but I can’t recommend that everybody go out and read it. (That’s why this is longer than my usual book review. I’m trying to capture the important points in case you decide not to read the book.) Hansen writes clearly and sometimes even engagingly, but he really could have used a co-author. The problem is that the book is very uneven in its level of technical difficulty. Sometimes Hansen will be sailing along through anecdotes of his run-ins with the Bushies, and then he’ll throw in ten pages of science without telling you where it’s going or when it’s going to end. And then he’ll have another 15 pages of smooth sailing. And so on. Unless you’re very dedicated or a scientist yourself, it’s easy to get bogged down.

Here’s what I learned:

Global warming is more complicated than just carbon dioxide causing the Earth to retain more heat. That’s the basic idea, but it’s not nearly so simple as X% more carbon dioxide leads to Y degrees higher temperatures. The Earth has a number of feedback loops that make it hard to predict how far a change will go once it gets started. The extreme example of out-of-control climate feedback is Venus, which probably had oceans too once, before they evaporated into the atmosphere and then escaped into space.

What feedback loops? Here’s one: The ice sheets at the poles reflect sunlight, so they make the planet cooler. As the Earth gets warmer, they melt and make it warmer yet (as dark ocean replaces white ice). Worse, they don’t melt smoothly like an ice cube in the sun. Instead, at some point the ice sheets start to break up and melt more quickly. Or if the methane frozen into the tundra or the ocean floor starts to thaw and bubble into the atmosphere, that’s another greenhouse gas that will make the planet warmer still. In either case, nobody really knows when this process will start, but it will be unstoppable once it does.

The evidence is not just from computer modeling. Hansen’s main area of research is in climate history. In particular, he has studied how comparatively small changes in the Earth’s orbit or the Sun’s brightness have led to feedback loops that (over centuries) have made the Earth either significantly colder or warmer than it is now. From the historical evidence, Hansen estimates that the climate is much more sensitive to external changes than the computer models say.

It’s not just an inconvenience. Conservatives like to ask questions like: “What is the ideal temperature of the Earth?” — noting that the Earth has been warmer or cooler in the past, and who are we to decide which is better? This laissez-faire attitude falls apart when you start thinking about sea level. The Earth has been warmer at times — and Florida has been underwater. Is it all relative whether coastal cities (or entire nations like Bangladesh or the Philippines) continue to be viable places to live?

Fossil fuels have to be left in the ground. Hansen is convinced that if we burn all the Earth’s fossil fuels — all the oil, gas, and coal — we’ll start a catastrophe. And if you’re going to leave something in the ground, the best thing to leave there is coal. Even moreso the “alternative” fossil fuels like tar sands.

He’s also convinced that once energy infrastructure is built, the economics of the sunk costs will push us to use it. So: Don’t build more coal-fired power plants, don’t go searching for new oil fields to develop, and stop working on ways to recover the oil in the tar sands. “Drill, baby, drill” is exactly the wrong idea.

Nukes and Big Hydro. As much as Hansen would like to believe that we can do the job with clean renewable energy and increased efficiency, he’s not convinced. He believes that 4th-generation nuclear plants (fast breeder reactors) will not only work and produce less waste than current 3rd-generation reactors, he thinks they’ll actually burn the waste from 3rd-generation plants. (That sounds too good to be true, but what do I know?)

Similarly, he understands that big hydroelectric dams have their own environmental problems and that a lot of Greens would like to shut them down and not build any more. But he’s not sure we have the slack to do without them.

No cap-and-trade. Hansen favors a fee-and-dividend approach, where an ever-rising carbon tax is levied on fuels as they come out of the ground or arrive in our ports. The money collected shouldn’t fund anybody’s pet projects, but should be distributed per capita to the public. Only a plan that simple and transparent will keep the public on board.

Hansen has a deep skepticism about our political process. Even politicians who seem to be green are far too willing to accept superficial changes while cutting deals with special interests, such as allowing new coal-fired power plants to be built. He’s also skeptical about “offsets” — arrangements where burning fossil fuels is balanced by planting trees or some other green project. He thinks offsets make too much room for bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.

He doesn’t believe that treaty-established caps will hold, as the Kyoto Agreement caps didn’t. This gets back to his infrastructure argument. No matter what treaties are signed, is any country with developed oil wells going to leave its oil permanently in the ground? If not, then what good will the caps do?

As I was saying … Global warming is a good example of the point I was making at the end of 2009: The left/right battle is not symmetric. In order to do something about global warming, people have to be able to trust each other and work together. The scientific community has to produce accurate information and the public needs to trust it. The political process needs to work to turn public concern into viable action. And once action starts to be taken, the public has to trust that the sacrifices they are making are actually solving the problem, rather than just making somebody rich or helping somebody else consolidate power.

On the other hand, Exxon and its allies don’t need to convince us of anything — they just need to disrupt public trust. If the scientific community is corrupted by corporate money, if the public looks on science as just another vested interest, if journalists can’t be trusted to find and report the truth, if politics is just two groups of talking heads yelling lies at each other — then no popular consensus will form and nothing will happen. That’s not a stand-off; it’s a victory for the bad guys.

I’d love to hear the media start calling conservatives on their schizoid attitude towards risk. Regarding terrorism, they believe in Dick Cheney’s one percent doctrine: We have to respond even to small risks as if they were certainties. But on global warming, they would demand 100% certainty before we do anything. The link is corporatism: Corporations profit if we go to war, and they profit if we do nothing about global warming.

Paul Waldman discusses Obama’s rollback of the Republican war on science.

SusanG on DailyKos reviews Sam Tannenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism and Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion.

The Devil, You Say

One of the crazier reactions to Tuesday’s Haitian earthquake came from the televangelist tycoon Pat Robertson: Haiti has such consistently bad luck because the Haitians made a deal with the Devil to throw out the French. (Media Matters has the tape and transcript.)

My first reaction was the same as that of most sane people: What a horrible thing to say, blaming the victims of an earthquake for causing the earthquake!

My second reaction was to wonder what the hell Pat was talking about. I mean, it’s just too imaginative a story for somebody as small-minded as Pat Robertson to make up on the spot. He was clearly remembering it from somewhere, and not remembering it very well. (He uncertainly claimed the revolt happened under Napoleon III, when in fact it happened in 1791 during the French Revolution, a few years before the reign of the original Napoleon.) So where did he get this story?

Fortunately, Matt Yglesias had the same second reaction and did the legwork. Turns out, it’s a twisted version of a story the Haitians tell themselves. To appreciate it, you need to understand the significance of the Haitian slave revolt, which Wikipedia describes like this:

The Haitian Revolution is the only successful slave revolt in human history, and, as such, is regarded as a defining moment in the history of Africans in the new world.

(Did you learn about this in school? I didn’t — until this week my only knowledge of the revolt came from an Anne Rice novel.)

Anyway, according to local legend, the revolt began with a ceremony at Bois Caiman performed by a Vodou priest, Dutty Boukman. In the course of this ceremony he said a prayer to “our god” as opposed to “the white man’s god” by whose power whites had enslaved blacks.

The white man’s god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good.

Matt Yglesias points out how, if you were a white slave-owner, this appeal to the god of the blacks must have sounded Satanic. But this interpretation rests on the idea that the god who justifies slavery is the true God.

Apparently, that’s Pat’s interpretation.

Daniel Kurtzman selects the 10 stupidest things Pat Robertson ever said.

Rachel Maddow interviewed the Haitian ambassador, who schooled us ignorant Yankees on the significance of the Haitian Revolt. He attributes France’s willingness to sell the Louisiana Territory to its failure to hold Haiti, and notes that the great South American liberator Simon Bolivar started his campaign from free Haiti. (Freeing slaves, liberating colonies — aren’t those exactly the kinds of dastardly things the Devil would do?)

Even the Old Testament God isn’t as nasty as Pat makes him out to be. The God of Exodus 20:5 holds a grudge “unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” It’s been 219 years since the Bois Caiman ritual, so the infants dying in Haiti now might be Dutty Boukman’s 9th or 10th-generation descendants. The curse should be up by now.

Jon Stewart (a secular Jew) educates Pat on how to find a more appropriate message in the Bible. He quotes Isaiah 54:10:

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

“Have you read this book?” Stewart asks. “I mean, that almost sounds like it’s about f**king earthquakes!”

Pat also offended the Devil. In a letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Satan writes:

I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. … when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. … Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

Humorist Andy Borowitz quotes from his interview with God, who says that Pat Robertson has become “a public relations nightmare” and “a gynormous embarrassment to me, personally.” Sojourners editor Jim Wallis says more or less the same thing, but in the name of Christianity rather than God:

As I reflected on Robertson’s comments, I was reminded of how many times he has embarrassed so many fellow Christians with his intemperate comments. As a Christian leader, I have had to spend too much of my time trying to overcome an image of Christianity that was created by the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Rush Limbaugh has also outdone himself this week. Almost every day has brought some new zinger.

Wednesday: “We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.” And: “This will play right into Obama’s hands … humanitarian … compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their (shall we say) credibility in the black community.”

Thursday: Commenting on Whitehouse.gov’s link to the Red Cross (which in fact links directly to a Red Cross server rather than handling the donation internally through a White House server), Limbaugh asks: “Would you trust that the money’s gonna go to Haiti?” [Caller: No.] “But would you trust that your name’s gonna end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?” [Caller: Absolutely!] “Absolutely!”

Friday: “The U.S. military is now Meals on Wheels. It always is with Democrat presidents.”

Short Notes

Things are bad in the Massachusetts Senate race. Nate Silver now gives the Republican a .6% polling margin, which implies a 55% chance of winning.

How much notice did this little detail get? No American soldiers died in combat in Iraq in December. (Three died of other causes.) I didn’t notice it myself until this week. Why do I believe that if George Bush were still president, the media would have overwhelmed us with hoopla?

Not sure how much to read into this statistical correlation, but I’ll let Nate Silver describe it:

Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period.

So somebody on the Right needs to explain again why banning same-sex marriage is a “defense” of marriage.

The TSA says it’s a myth that they put an 8-year-old boy on their watch list. Well, maybe not intentionally, but Mikey Hicks is 8 and has the same name as somebody the TSA has on its special-screening list. So Mikey has been patted down in airports since he was 2. The New York Times has a picture of Mikey in his cub scout uniform.

Until now I’ve ignored the Harry Reid he-said-Negro controversy because it just seems stupid to me. Right-wingers tried to draw a parallel between Reid’s explanation of why Obama might be electable and Trent Lott saying that we’d be better off if a racist had been elected president in 1948 instead of Harry Truman. Those are exactly the same thing, right? Lott stepped down as majority leader, GOP chair Michael Steele said, so Reid should too.

The best person to respond to this is probably comedian Elon James White, the host of This Week in Blackness. He devotes Episode 2 of Season 3 to the word Negro, which he says he can’t get excited about. “I didn’t want to talk about Michael Steele this much,” White comments at the very end, “but he bothers me. Michael Steele makes my common sense hurt.”

Matt Yglesias analyzes Sarah Palin’s claim that Reid is benefitting from a double standard:

the complaint she offers isn’t a complaint on behalf of African-Americans. It’s a complaint offered on behalf of white southern racists. It’s not that it would be unfair to black people for Reid to remain majority leader, rather the problem is that it would be unfair to Trent Lott.

If some people get their way, McCarthyism won’t be a smear any more — because schools will teach that Joe McCarthy “was basically vindicated.”

Justin Vaisse doesn’t think the Muslims are taking over Europe.

Interesting thought experiment from Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt:

imagine that … the federal government would grant each senator an identical, flat contribution equal to, say, 72 percent of the average premium paid for the health insurance of all federal employees. Each senator would then have to go into the market for individually sold, medically underwritten health insurance for the rest of their coverage.

Maybe then it wouldn’t be so hard to get some Republican votes for health-care reform.

Scot Herrick asks: What if the old jobs are gone for good? What if we’re all temps now?

Until Wednesday, I was one of the two people in America (maybe the world) who hadn’t seen Avatar. If you’re the last person, you should go. It’s a completely engrossing movie, and conservatives hate it. It sympathizes with indigenous peoples against colonizing militarists. It champions planetary interconnection rather than individualism. And it makes rapacious, resource-seeking corporations look bad. What was James Cameron thinking?

By weeklysift | Comments (5)

Strength and Greatness

November 23, 2009 – 1:42 pm
My biggest regret is all the people who see the symbol but miss the point — that our greatness, our strength, comes from our principles and not our weapons.
— Captain America
Captain America and the Falcon, #14
In this week’s Sift:
  • Trial By Jury is Controversial Now. Attorney General Holder made a brave principled decision to try the 9-11 plotters in federal court in New York. The heat he’s taking is unprincipled and cowardly.
  • Republicans in 2012. I didn’t get to the second page of Palin’s new book, but the speculation it sparked about who Republicans will nominate is interesting. I say Huckabee.
  • The Public is Not Their Party. Conservative Christian leaders want to control who gets to be considered part of the Public. When they threaten to take their ball and go home, I think we should let them.
  • Short Notes. Lithuania schools us on the rule of law. The return of Ted Haggard. How not to pray for Obama. And a surprising source for good-but-unheralded new fiction.

Trial by Jury is Controversial Now

Conservatives and liberals each claim to love America’s fundamental principles and institutions. But we love them in different ways. Liberals love American principles the way we love a reliable car or a comfortable pair of shoes. Conservatives love them like fine china or delicate crystal — priceless objects to be displayed on special occasions, but not actually used.

Ten days ago, Attorney General Eric Holder announced his decision to try alleged 9-11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and four accomplices) in federal court in New York City rather than in a military tribunal. This has brought down a hail of criticism from the Right.

Holder’s logic is fairly clear, though opponents claim to find it mysterious: Crimes in the United States against civilians (like destroying the Twin Towers) should be tried in civilian court, while crimes against military targets overseas (like the bombing of the USS. Cole) should be tried in tribunals. Holder could have justified trying KSM in a tribunal because the Pentagon was also a target on 9-11, but he decided that the civilian crime is the more heinous.

Objections come in three flavors:

  • U.S. courts give defendants too many rights. I’ll discuss this in more detail below
  • The trial itself will become a terrorist target. The assumption here seems to be that Al Qaeda has the power to attack New York City, but just hasn’t been motivated enough since 9-11. The fear-mongering needs to be called out: It’s an appeal to our cowardice.
  • KSM could escape from federal prison or build a terrorist network among inmates who will eventually get out. This is one of the many fantasies that spring from the notion that terrorists are demonic supermen. Merely evil human beings like Charles Manson and the Unabomber have been held safely in federal prison for many years.

The too-many-rights argument has to be taken on directly, because it points to something fundamental: In spite of all their rhetoric about freedom, conservatives don’t really believe in human rights. The Founders never talked about “giving” rights. Human beings, says the Declaration of Independence are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Our courts don’t give rights, they recognize them.

Glenn Beck is fond of cherry-picking quotes from Thomas Paine. He should try this one from Paine’s Dissertations on the First Principles of Government:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Denying the human rights of suspected terrorists isn’t just bad political philosophy, it’s bad war-fighting strategy. Because Captain America is right — our strength comes from our principles. Why weaken ourselves by casting away those principles?

Johann Hari interviewed a number of British Muslims who have turned away from terrorism to find out what changed their minds. One former terrorist said that recruiting briefly got harder after 9-11 because

there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. “That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster.”

Bush took Bin Laden’s worst propaganda and made it true. Hari writes:

Every one of them said the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this.”

By contrast, they found acts of kindness and decency towards Muslims hard to square with their jihadist worldview.

Militarily, one of the best things we can do is demonstrate our commitment to human rights, particularly the rights of Muslims who think we’re evil. Trial by jury in a legitimate court of law is not some priceless-but-fragile heirloom from the 1700s. It’s the American way, and it works.

The most effective legal defense of Holder’s decision is a WaPo op-ed by former leaders in the Bush administration Justice Department: Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith. (I’ve mentioned them before. Comey was the acting attorney general during the famous John Ashcroft hospital-room scene, and Jack Goldsmith was the Office of Legal Counsel head who invalidated some of the more outrageous opinions written by John Yoo. In short, they are conservative lawyers who served in the Bush administration without becoming Bushies. I reviewed Goldsmith’s book The Terror Presidency.) They write:

One reason [military] commissions have not worked well is that changes in constitutional, international and military laws since they were last used, during World War II, have produced great uncertainty about the commissions’ validity. This uncertainty has led to many legal challenges that will continue indefinitely — hardly an ideal situation for the trial of the century. … Holder’s critics do not help their case by understating the criminal justice system’s capacities, overstating the military system’s virtues and bumper-stickering a reasonable decision.

Republicans in 2012

Standing by the first display table in my local Barnes and Noble, I toyed with the idea of reviewing Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Besides, I’m fascinated by opening lines and opening scenes, so I wondered what kind of call-me-Ishmael hook the ghost-writer had prepared for us.

If you tell Palin’s story chronologically it takes forever to reach the interesting part, so I figured any good writer would jump into the middle of something exciting, then wander back into mundane biographical details later. A call-to-greatness scene — where John McCain asks Palin to be vice president — would be a cliche, but off the top of my head I couldn’t come up with anything better.

It turns out I was right, but I didn’t read far enough to realize it. Chapter 1 has the Palins at the Alaska State Fair, being the all-American family they are. In an attempt to capture Palin’s voice, the ghost-writer has made the sentences just slightly too long — not run-on exactly, but with one-too-many adjectives or clauses or prepositional phrases. I found the style irritating, and by the end of first page (still being adorable at the Fair) I was bored. I put the book down.

Wikipedia told me later that Palin got McCain’s call at the state fair, so that must have been where that scene was going. If you really want to know, you can go look for yourself. I’m willing to make certain sacrifices for the Sift, but reading Going Rogue cover-to-cover is not going to be one of them.

There are plenty of other reviews you can read or watch: Steven Colbert’s is my favorite. Fox News has been 24/7 Sarah, including once again switching tapes to make an event look more popular than it really was. (They used 2008 campaign footage as if it were book-tour video.) Jon Stewart explains to right-wing pundits why liberals like him don’t like Palin — and no, it really has nothing to do with her family. AP  and Max Blumenthal fact-checked, which Frank Rich considers a pointless exercise because “Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts.”

2012. I’ve been more interested in the speculation Palin’s book sparked over the 2012 Republican nomination. In the 2008 cycle all my best predictions were about the Republicans: Already in October 2007 I predicted Huckabee’s rise, but said in early December that McCain would be the last man standing. (On the Democratic side, I thought John Edwards would be our strongest candidate, and that New Hampshire would seal it for Obama. Let’s not talk about that.)

My 2012 crystal ball says Palin will not be the Republican nominee. A lot of pundits make a Palin-Obama comparison: He didn’t have presidential credentials either, but his personal charisma carried him through. That view overlooks two big factors. First, Obama didn’t beat Clinton on charisma, he out-organized her. Obama and Clinton were neck-and-neck in primary votes, but his margin of victory in delegates came from caucuses, where organization is key. So I’ll buy the Palin-Obama parallel only if you can establish that Palin is a master strategist and organizer, or that she is willing to stick to the script of somebody who is. Looking at an early glitch in her book tour, either seem unlikely to me.

Second, the “unqualified” charge never works by itself, because experience is only a stand-in for two qualities voters are really looking for: Does the candidate know his/her stuff? And will s/he lose his/her head in a crisis? Clinton couldn’t make Obama’s lack of experience stick because he stood next to her in 20-some debates and proved that he knew the issues as well as she did. And McCain couldn’t make it stick because when the economy started falling apart, it was McCain who seemed to be losing his head.

Palin is no Obama. She does not know her stuff, and does not stand up well under pressure. When the campaign starts, that will quickly become obvious. The “unqualified” charge will stick, and her fans will think it’s terribly unfair. And she won’t persevere through initial failure; she’ll explode in a nova of maverickiness.

If not Palin, then who? Not Bobby Jindal, for a reason no Republican strategist can admit: The teabagger base will never trust someone as smart as Jindal. He’s a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake. Like Bill Clinton was. The reason Jindal looked so terrible when he gave the Republican response to Obama’s speech in February is that he tried to dumb himself down. He can’t.

What about somebody coming from nowhere, like Jimmy Carter in 1976? Nope. Republicans haven’t gone that way since Wendell Wilkie in 1940. You can’t do the come-from-nowhere thing without picking up an image of cleverness as you out-manuever your more familiar rivals — and the base distrusts cleverness.

Maybe somebody pushing a Bush restoration, like Dick Cheney or Jeb Bush? Too soon. The Bush administration was an across-the-board disaster.  They started wars they didn’t know how to win. They doubled the national debt. They broke the economy. Republicans know that, even if they can’t say so in public, and it’s going to take more than four years for people to forget. If we suffer another 9-11-style attack, there might be space for someone not directly connected to Bush — General Petraeus, say — to claim the he-kept-us-safe part of the Bush record. But it’s a long shot.

Somebody might be able to walk the same road Bush did in 2000: The 1998 election was a Democratic victory because the Republicans were identified with the unpopular Clinton impeachment. Meanwhile, Bush won in Texas as a “compassionate conservative” who could work with Democrats. He was a familiar name and a breath of fresh air at the same time. Gary Hart did something similar in 1980; he rose to national attention when he was re-elected to the Senate while all the other Democrats were going under.

That will be harder to do if the Republicans pick up seats in 2010, as 538.com expects. But somebody who is sort-of-familiar could become presidential timber by symbolizing what the party did right. If there’s a true teabagger revolt, maybe Michelle Bachman gets a boost. (I think Palin would be confused if she had to debate another conservative woman. Bachman would shine through as the more authentic lunatic.)

Otherwise, you’re left with the 2008 hold-overs: Romney and Huckabee. They represent two sides of the old Reagan coalition. Romney is the Club-for-Growth tax-cutter and Huckabee is the evangelical family-values guy. Romney’s problem is that his economic plan sounds too much like Bush, and we know how that worked out. So Huckabee will have an easier time re-uniting the coalition. The evangelicals will gather around him after Palin flames out, and he’ll be nominated.

The Public Is Not Their Party

Have you ever had one of your friends announce: “If you’re inviting her to your party, then I’m not coming”? Well, translated a little, that’s what 145 conservative Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical leaders just said about gays and lesbians: If they’re going to be part of “the public” then we can’t be.

More specifically, they signed the Manhattan Declaration, composed by Watergate-felon-turned-minister Charles Colson and two other guys. Here’s the conclusion:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

That part after the semi-colon is all about “conscience clauses” which allow Christians (theoretically anybody, but in practice Christians) to offer their services to the public, but still deny them to people they think are immoral. NPR covers several widely-discussed cases, including the ones referenced in the Declaration. No case involves forcing someone to “bless immoral sexual partnerships” in a religious capacity. In each case, the religious group is claiming its right to exclude gays and lesbians from something that is otherwise available to the public, and threatening to withdraw its services from the public sphere if it can’t continue to discriminate. FDL’s Peterr, describing himself as “a Christian and a pastor” comments:

This isn’t about religious freedom — it’s about churches asking for special rights: the right to legally discriminate in workplace practices and the right to legally discriminate in the delivery of publicly funded social services.

The legal principle here was established during the Civil Rights era: If you’re offering something to the public, you have to offer it to the whole public, not just to the people you like. That’s what the Greensboro lunch counter thing was about. So the Manhattan Declaration’s position boils down to this: They refuse to recognize that gays and lesbians are part of the public.

Dear Abby usually gave this advice to a host facing a don’t-invite-her ultimatum from some friend: Invite both; tell each that the other is invited; and if either chooses to exclude herself from the party, that’s her decision. That’s the right course here. Charles Colson and Ellen Degeneres should both be invited to be full-fledged members of the public. If Chuck chooses to decline the invitation because Ellen might accept it, that’s his decision.

To me, the most irritating part of the Manhattan Declaration is the way it invokes not just Martin Luther King, but also the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements. Let me add this historical perspective: In every generation, conservative leaders attempt to coopt the liberal reforms of the past, claim the prestige of them, and use that prestige to thwart the liberal reforms of the present.

And so today, representatives of the most conservative wing of the Catholic church pose as the champions of religious liberty, and representatives of the most conservative Protestant sects pose as the inheritors of the women’s suffrage and anti-slavery movements. Is there any doubt that if these 145 leaders could be transported back to the 1500s or 1850s or 1880s, they would side with their conservative brethren in that era against the reforms that they now claim credit for?

Short Notes

If liberals did this, it would be seen as treason.

Imagine: A new president is elected, takes seriously the accusations that the previous president’s war-on-terror actions broke the law, and demands an investigation with possible criminal penalties. It’s President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania. She believes that the people who OK’d Lithuania illegally hosting a CIA black prison should be held accountable.

“What kind of a backwards, primitive country,” Glenn Greenwald asks, very tongue-in-cheek, “would do something like this?”

A surprising source of good new fiction: the book departments of those big odd-lot stores like Building 19 or Ocean State Discount. Novels often get remaindered not because they’re bad, but because somebody at a publishing house let his own good taste overwhelm his business judgment. Each year I find three or four excellent novels that I would never run into otherwise.

My latest discovery: One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead by Clare Dudman. It’s a novelization of the life of Alfred Wegener, the guy who postulated continental drift. That may sound dull, but the novel includes several Greenland expeditions, World War I, and a first-person prose style based on Wegener’s expedition diaries. It’s the style of a sharp observer who communicates his feelings through detail and metaphor rather than by using emotion-laden words. I was entranced by it.

Disgraced megachurch pastor Ted Haggard is back. He didn’t complete the “spiritual restoration” process he undertook after being fired, but he has started holding prayer meetings at his Colorado Springs home — just a few miles from his old church. Members of the board of overseers of that church recall Haggard promising them he would not start a new church in Colorado Springs. About 100 people, many from his former church, attended his first prayer meeting.

The Onion nails the whole teabagger defend-the-constitution thing.

A new bumpersticker-and-tshirt slogansays: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.”

Psalm 109:8 says, “Let his days be few.” Hilarious, isn’t it?

Matt Yglesias explains the counter-intuitive nature of testing for rare conditions — like profiling Muslims for terrorism. Even if the test is fairly accurate, the false positives will vastly outnumber the true positives. So the main result is to hassle a lot of innocent people.

I haven’t read the recent report on how the AIG bailout was mismanaged. Next week.

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