Owning and Disowning

We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors.

— Timothy Dwight “The Charitable Blessed” (1810)

The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates “The Case for Reparations” (2014)

This week’s featured article is “Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations“.

This week everybody was talking about yet another mass shooting

Every mass shooting is stomach-turning, but this one has a special feature: the idea that men are entitled to female sexual partners we find attractive, and that if we don’t get them we are justified in seeking revenge on the entire gender. I feel slimed. I can’t imagine how women feel about it.

The guns-make-us-safer arguments of the NRA are almost believable if you picture home invaders who want something rational like jewelry or electronics. But when somebody wants to go out in a blaze of glory, more and bigger guns just make a bigger blaze.

and reparations for the oppression of blacks

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic wrote the article of the year: “The Case for Reparations” and I wrote an almost-as-long article commenting, elaborating, and taking it personally. Centuries of public policy created the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Why is it unthinkable to use public policy to undo that?

and (still) the VA

This is going to go on for a while, because there’s a genuine mystery here that may not have a simple resolution. Some of the basics: The VA gives veterans world-class care once they manage to get in the door. But there have been long-standing problems both with appointment backlogs and backlogs in processing claims. In recent years the VA established metrics to measure how well they were solving those problems, and reported that they were doing remarkably well.

Unfortunately, they were cooking the books. Somebody (or maybe a lot of somebodies) saw their mission as delivering good numbers, not delivering timely medical care. This is a common problem in our data-obsessed times. (See, for example, the Atlanta public schools, which decided its mission was to improve test scores, not education. Or watch just about any season of The Wire.) Of course all those somebodies at the VA need to be found and fired, and maybe some of them should go to jail. But that just gets us back to Square One with the problem of caring for our veterans.

Partly, the problem goes back to the cardinal sin of the Iraq War: The Bush administration refused to let anyone plan for the possibility that the war might be long and costly. Even after the wounded starting coming home, National Journal reports, the Defense Department was cooking the numbers:

Early on, the department was publicly counting only about a third of the casualties stemming from the War on Terror. That was because the Department was only counting servicemen and women immediately targeted in the department’s wounded-in-action statistics. That accounting method left out those who were not targeted but were wounded nonetheless, such as troops injured when they were riding two trucks back from one that was hit by a roadside bomb, or those hurt in training or transportation.The underreporting made it more difficult for the VA to prepare for the coming influx of requests for help.

So the Obama administration knew there was a resource problem — not enough money, facilities, doctors, etc. — when they took office. And they thought they were solving it. Under Obama, the VA’s budget has gone from $97.7 billion in FY 2009 to $153.8 billion in FY 2014.

But already a year ago, Huffington Post reported:

“We’re glad to see the increase in the budget,” said Paul Reickhoff, chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. But he was highly skeptical of the VA claims that it is making progress on reducing the backlog of veterans claims for benefits. “The customers on the ground, our members, don’t see it,” he said.

So where has the money been going? A piece of the mystery is that along with the new money came new responsibilities. National Journal says:

the Obama administration has also changed the rules to give more benefits to veterans. In 2010, the administration expanded coverage related to exposure to Agent Orange, a Vietnam War-era defoliant that has created a vast list of health problems. Veterans have long tied an assortment of illnesses to Agent Orange, and now more of those illnesses are covered. Additionally, the administration made it easier for veterans to get coverage for posttraumatic-stress disorder, a disease less easily diagnosed and adjudicated than physical injuries.

But that doesn’t sound like the whole story, and nothing else I’ve heard so far does either. Nobody has a partisan motive to short-change our veterans. And so far there are no reports of sweetheart deals that sent billions to some favored contractor for nothing, or enormous bridge-to-nowhere facilities that sit empty. This situation calls for a real investigation that is neither a whitewash nor a witch hunt. It will interesting to see if our political system is capable of making that happen.

and another NBA owner talking about race

This time it’s Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks. I find I’m willing to cut Cuban slack, though, because I think he’s clumsily saying something more-or-less right. (In my terminology prejudice is an unavoidable aspect of being human, while bigotry is something we should be trying to eradicate. I hear Cuban confessing that he has prejudices that he is trying to keep from becoming bigotry.) I agree with ESPN’s Michael Wilbon:

If we’re going to have honest conversations about race and bigotry and prejudice, then we’re going have to have some uncomfortable moments. What’s most important to me here is that clearly and without qualification, Mark Cuban condemns bigotry. … This in no way, in my mind, comes into the area code of Donald Sterling’s comments.

Whites have been denying our racial prejudices for a long, long time. (Wilbon again: “I hear people say, ‘I don’t see color.’ And I say, ‘Stop. Everybody sees color.'”) So it’s totally to be expected that when we finally begin to talk seriously about race, we’re not going to phrase everything in the most sensitive way. By all means blacks (and whites with more experience discussing race) should point out to Cuban the ways that he’s still invoking offensive stereotypes — those “uncomfortable moments” Wilbon is talking about — but also give him credit for what he’s doing right.

That’s more-or-less the approach that NYT columnist Charles Blow takes.

Cuban says in the interview, “I know that I’m not perfect.” None of us are, Mr. Cuban, and I applaud your candor even as I correct your assertions. That is how the race discussion must be conducted.

and you also might be interested in …

Chris Hayes is doing a great series on the conservative heartland. This week the show focused on Kansas, which has become a laboratory for far-right policies. How’s that working?

Update on last week’s article “Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth” in which I argued that the business community — especially the insurance industry — is well aware that climate change is real. From ThinkProgress:

Last month, Farmers Insurance Co. filed nine class-action lawsuits arguing that local governments in the Chicago area are aware that climate change is leading to heavier rainfall but are failing to prepare accordingly. The suits allege that the localities did not do enough to prepare sewers and stormwater drains in the area during a two-day downpour last April.

And the NYT:

Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming.

“Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.”

Great article about diet: What if fat isn’t just an issue of excess calories? What if the body is actively looking for foods it can easily turn into fat? When you eat them, you’re still hungry, because they went straight to fat and didn’t give your body any calories to run on.

When Sainsburys dressed a mannequin in a 12-Years-a-Slave outfit, they weren’t really trying to sell their customers the runaway-slave look. Turns out, that was just a tasteless part of their buy-the-DVD display. But for a minute, it seemed like the “Derelicte” scene from Zoolander had burst into reality.

Authors need to slow down: Important books are piling up faster than I can read them. (Yes, Elizabeth Warren, I’m looking at you; or at least at your picture on the cover. Get in line behind Thomas Piketty.) So I haven’t even picked up Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide about his role in the Snowden leaks.

But sometimes you don’t have read a book to know that a criticism of it is off-base. In his review for the NYT, Michael Kinsley writes this about leaking government secrets:

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government.

If government officials have the final say on what information the voters are allowed to know before they pass judgment on those same government officials, then democracy is pretty much a sham: You get to judge me, but only based on the information I choose to tell you.

This situation calls for one of those marvelous Madisonian check-and-balance processes, but unfortunately there’s no prospect of us getting one. So in a broken system, anyone who finds him/herself in a position to take action — Snowden, Greenwald, Julian Assange, whoever — has to use his/her own judgment. Nobody thinks this is ideal, but it’s not Glenn Greenwald’s fault. Glenn should not defer to the government until the improbable moment when the government unveils its ideal information-releasing process.

David Atkins reads the tea-leaves of the European Parliament elections: In hard economic times with a lot of immigrants still coming in, the most likely political beneficiaries are the fascists. Centrists preaching austerity have no defense against the far right.

The only possible way that a party of social tolerance survives for long in this sort of economic environment is if it goes hard after the plutocrats truly responsible for the economic malaise. The social liberal/economic conservative mold of Bloomberg is a recipe for political disaster.

Curing cervical cancer is one kind of problem. Curing cervical cancer in Haiti, using tech that a Haitian clinic might be able to afford, is a different problem entirely. The NYT Sunday Magazine recounts the fascinating story of “The MacGyver Cure for Cancer“.

An illustration of what the book Cornered was about: Even when monopolistic power isn’t being used to raise consumer prices, it’s still not benign. Amazon is trying to squeeze book publishers, and those who don’t go along are finding that their books are hard to buy and take forever to ship. Sure, you can distribute your books without Amazon. Good luck with that.

Today our anti-trust laws are only enforced against companies that use their market power directly against consumers. But it can be just as damaging to the economy for a near-monopoly to use its market power against producers, by re-organizing the market around its artificially constructed bottleneck. This is the main reason to oppose the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger, even if it’s true that the two cable giants don’t compete for the same customers.

and let’s close with an amazing catch (sort of)

by the ball girl, not the outfielder.

Snopes says it never really happened, but why let reality stand in the way of a good video? And ball girls and ball boys really have made some outstanding catches. (I also tip my hat to several of the announcers, who were able to come up with their names without missing a beat.)

May 26, 2014 – 11:53 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations

The wealth gap between blacks and whites is the direct result of centuries of policy. Why should using policy to fix it be unthinkable?

Wealth is off limits.

For as long as I can remember, the idea of paying reparations to African Americans has been the boogyman in any discussion of race. Just say the word reparations in any room with more than one white person, and rational discussion ends. And if you can tie any other program to reparations — affirmative action, food stamps, whatever — rational discussion of that ends too. That’s what Rush Limbaugh meant to do when he invoked reparations in an attack on ObamaCare:

This is income redistribution. This is returning the nation’s wealth to its quote/unquote “rightful owners”. This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations — whatever you want to call it.

He didn’t go on to explain why that would be bad, or even why blacks aren’t really the “rightful owners” of more than they own now. He didn’t have to explain, because reparations are literally unthinkable: Just say the word and whites stop thinking.

So The Atlantic‘s senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates was throwing down a gauntlet this week when he wrote the current cover article “The Case for Reparations“: Approve of them or not, reparations are not unthinkable. Here’s the argument. Think about it.

Coates’ article is very good and very long, and you should absolutely read it rather than just my summary of it. (Second best: Watch Bill Moyers interview Coates.) But judging from the comment thread on even a relatively liberal site like The New Republic (not to mention Free Republic , where the most popular reparations offer is “25 grand and a plane ticket back to Africa”) a lot of people are struggling very hard to continue not thinking about it. Rather than engage any of Coates’ arguments, they are going off in response to that one offending word.

In “How to tell who hasn’t read the new Atlantic cover story” NPR’s Gene Demby quoted this Adam Serwer tweet:

How to Read TNC’s piece on reparations: 1. Read the title. 2. Stop reading. Do not read past the title. 3. Explain that racism is over.

So before you react, at least understand these two things about Coates’ article:

  • It’s not just about slavery.
  • He’s not saying, “All you white people need to send me a check.”

What it’s about. Coates’ argument is that the wealth gap between whites and blacks in America has a simple cause: Throughout American history, blacks have been systematically cut off from the sources of wealth. It started (but didn’t end) with slavery: Black labor cleared the forests and drained the swamps to create those southern plantations, and black labor built the planters’ mansions, but after the Civil War all that black-created wealth stayed with the whites. The first reparations proposal — forty acres and a mule — would have been simple justice for the people who built the South, but it never happened.

Instead of restoring some of the Confederacy’s wealth to the people whose labor had created it, or even just starting blacks at the bottom and letting them work their way up, it wasn’t long before whites instituted a new system for building their wealth with black labor. In a story told at length by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name, blacks in the post-Reconstruction South were blocked from owning land, preventing from leaving, forced back into exploitative relationships with whites, and denied access to the courts when they were cheated. Tens of thousands were literally re-enslaved: convicted of bogus crimes and sentenced to hard labor for a white employer. This lasted well into the 20th century.

Blacks who managed to succeed in spite of the system were often the targets of white violence. Today the words race riot evoke thoughts of black uprisings in the 1960s — Watts, Detroit, etc. — but white race riots against blacks had been going on for a long time: New York in 1863, Louisiana in 1873, Atlanta in 1906, Chicago in 1919, and many others. (Add to that the 3,446 blacks who died in lynchings between 1882 and 1968.) Two riots in particular — Greenwood, OK in 1921 and Rosewood, FL in 1923 — destroyed entire black communities that were thriving and building wealth for their citizens.

In a story told at length by Ira Katznelson in When Affirmative Action Was White, blacks were largely cut out of the mid-20th-century New Deal and Fair Deal programs that created the white middle class. Even the benefits of the G. I. Bill were constructed in such a way that blacks had difficulty taking full advantage.

Coates talks at some length about real estate discrimination. Legally until the mid-1960s and practically for some time afterward, blacks were allowed to buy homes only in certain neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration considered those neighborhoods high-risk and refused to insure mortgages in them. Banks followed that lead with red-lining, refusing to issues mortgages at all on those houses. Blacks who wanted to own their own homes were forced to buy on contract from brokers who frequently cheated them.

For most middle-class American families in the post-World-War-II era, home ownership was a wealth-building tool that the government subsidized through mortgage insurance and mortgage-interest tax deductions. But that tool was not available to many black families.

Red-lining concentrated urban blacks in a few neighborhoods. And — surprise! — those neighborhoods often had poor infrastructure and bad schools, a pattern that continues to this day. They are also over-policed, resulting in blacks being far more likely to go to jail for minor crimes (like smoking pot) that whites commit equally often. This story is told at length in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

Taking it personally. On the surface, I have a good case for claiming that this all has nothing to do with me: My family never owned slaves, hired convict labor, or profited from real-estate scams targeting urban blacks. I was a working-class kid who entered the professional class on his own merit, by getting an education that led to a high-paying job.

But look again. My town’s public high school did well by me. I went to a state university in an era when tuition covered only a fraction of the cost. My Ph.D. was paid for by the National Science Foundation. So, sure, I worked for what I have. But I also had help every step of the way.

Now consider: What if my family had been red-lined into a neighborhood with crummy schools? Maybe I never step on that educational escalator to begin with. And what if generations of hard knocks had hammered home the point that even when people like me work hard and play by the rules, somebody just invents a new rule to take it all away from us? Under those circumstances, do I really stick it out all the way to a Ph.D? Or do I grab the first shiny career-bauble that shows up?

Finally: My sister and I just sold the small farm that our grandfather bought in the 1920s. For each of us, that sale put the capstone on a retirement plan. And why shouldn’t it? Grandpa took a risk and worked hard, and my father worked hard after him. Why shouldn’t we benefit?

But family lore tells of a crisis during the Depression. Failing crops weren’t paying the bills, and new bank loans were out of the question now that Grandpa’s $22K farm was appraising at $8K. Fancy footwork by a friendly lawyer stalled foreclosure long enough for a New Deal farm-loan program to become available. Would those breaks have gone in our favor if we were black? Or would the white lawyer have shrugged and the white federal bureaucrat have moved our application to the bottom of the stack? Maybe. And then our family would have lost the farm — totally legally and by the rules — and had to start over in our attempt to accumulate wealth. If I complained about that circumstance now, what would people tell me? “Well, you gotta pay your debts. Your grandfather should have known that.”

As I’ve describe at length elsewhere, the point of that what-if fantasy isn’t to make me feel guilty, and in fact it doesn’t make me feel guilty; it makes me feel lucky. It gives me a more accurate assessment of my success. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper elaborates:

I think what motivates the worst responses to Coates’ piece is … a resistance to being labeled a racist. And that is missing the point. His article is not a personal critique; it is a structural one, which ought to minimize some of its personal sting. Structural racist outcomes (mostly) aren’t the fault of white people alive today; they’re about the foundations of society and the legacy of history. Such analysis isn’t about making white people feel guilty, it’s about providing countervailing structural pressure to right past wrongs.

Why we’re not fixing it. In order to understand where Coates is coming from, you need to appreciate where we are: The Supreme Court believes that any government action for the specific purpose of benefiting blacks (or any racial group) is unconstitutional. To the extent that affirmative action still exists, it has to claim other justifications. (A racially diverse classroom provides a better educational experience, a racially diverse police force can relate to the community better, and so on.) Legally, reparations are the dirty secret of affirmative action. If a program is caught trying to fix the racial injustice of American history, it is thought to violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

That legal situation is reinforced by the political situation: Even colorblind attempts to deal with America’s underclass, or to make life easier for the poor (even the working poor), are undercut by the politics of white racial resentment. If you want to campaign against food stamps or the minimum wage or Medicaid, all you have to do is suggest that this is really a racial transfer from white makers to black takers. It’s no coincidence that Arkansas is the only state of the Confederacy to accept Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare, while all but four Union states have. (And two of those are still on the fence.)

If you ask, whites will explain that if black oppression happened at all, it is ancient history. We have said this in every era. In 1837, Senator John Calhoun argued that slavery was a benefit to blacks:

Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been, to its present compara­tively civilized condition.

In 1883, the Supreme Court explained why further civil rights laws were unnecessary, now that whites had ended slavery through “beneficent legislation”.

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

And in 1896, the Court saw the problem of segregation as existing mainly in black psychology.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

I could go on. The Brown decision leveled the playing field in 1954. Or maybe the civil rights legislation of the 1960s leveled it. The election of Obama proved it was level. And so on down to John Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act last summer by simply saying “Things have changed.”

In every era, whites claim that we have done everything justice demands, and that any remaining problem is due to some inherent black inferiority of either biology or culture. And then a few decades later we realize that wasn’t true then, but it certainly is now.

What Coates wants. In his Atlantic article, Coates doesn’t put forward any specific plan, beyond endorsing a perennial bill by John Conyers to study reparations.

the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced.

Coates fears that the details any specific reparations proposal will become the issue, and allow whites to jump right past the question of whether reparations are justified in principle. And so the history of “multi-century plunder” will continue to be ignored.

But he also wants more than just a hearing or an apology, as he makes clearer in his Moyers interview. What he proposes is not personal reparations — trying to figure out what each individual is owed and cutting them a check — but a reorientation of public policy that holds the history of white supremacy in mind. (As a successful American, Coates expects that any tax increase to pay for this would hit him as well; quite the opposite of expecting me to send him money.) Rather than run away from policies that disproportionately benefit blacks, if we were looking for a way to make reparations we would consciously embrace such policies. We would recognize that black poverty and other social dysfunctions in the black community are not just specific examples of the general problem of poverty or social dysfunction. They are unique problems with a unique history, and they exist because they were created by public policy.

[W]e would not have to retreat to other language like quote unquote class. We would say, no, no, no, this is about white supremacy. And we have a problem with this. And we have had a problem with this for a long time. And we need to be conscious of that in our policy. When we pass a stimulus budget, for instance, we need to specifically think about helping people who have been injured in our past, because they’ve occupied a certain place in our country.

And when the Limbaughs charge that ObamaCare amounts to reparations, there could be simple response: Good.

May 26, 2014 – 10:47 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m not sure how much attention it’s getting in the country at large, but the current Atlantic cover article “The Case for Reparations” hit the blogosphere like a bomb. Reparations for the systematic oppression of blacks is one of those topics that produces knee-jerk reactions from whites, even before they consider exactly what is being proposed or why. Most whites don’t know the history of white supremacy in America — it goes way beyond slavery — and a lot don’t want to know.

It’s rare for a major writer to confront this denial as directly or as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates has in this article. You can agree or disagree, but you can’t keep treating reparations as if the idea were unthinkable. What ought to be unthinkable is the absurd notion that the wealth gap between whites and blacks is some kind of accident, or that it has been caused primarily by some deficiency in black DNA or culture. That gap is the natural result of centuries of policy that prevented black families from building wealth. Any discussion of black poverty needs to recognize that fact.

So the featured article today will be “Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations”. I’ll summarize and elaborate on what he said, plus discuss how it applies to me personally. I still need to look up some historical quotes I only vaguely remember, which takes an amount of time that is hard to predict. So I’m not sure when I’ll post.

Later on, the weekly summary will discuss yet another mass shooting, the VA, Mark Cuban, and a bunch of other stuff.

May 26, 2014 – 8:20 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

The Worth of Ice

We never know the worth of water, until the well is dry.

— Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia #5451 (1732)

This week’s featured article is “Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth“.

This week everybody was talking about Antarctic ice

The apparently slow pace of climate change creates the comforting illusion that we have time to dawdle before we respond: The worst outcomes aren’t due for a century or so, so surely it won’t matter if we twiddle our thumbs for another few years.

But there’s also a long lag time between action (burning fossil fuels) and response (higher temperatures). And so we can pass a tipping point without realizing it: The carbon already in the atmosphere may already make certain outcomes inevitable, even if they take decades to arrive.

Two recent reports say that the melting of the western Antarctic ice sheet has now passed such a tipping point. As NASA’s press release puts it:

the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica “have passed the point of no return,” according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected.

In The Guardian, Rignot elaborated:

We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What’s more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.

Two centuries – if that is what it takes – may seem like a long time, but there is no red button to stop this process.

Chris Mooney at Mother Jones called this “a holy shit moment for global warming“. But it’s also typical in this sense: The Amundsen ice looks more-or-less the same today as it did last week, when we didn’t know it was doomed. Plus, it’s metaphoric: The real damage is happening on the underside of the Antarctic glaciers, where we can’t see. As the glaciers melt, they get lighter and their seaborne edges ride higher. That lets more water seep underneath, and lifts the glaciers away from insulating land, melting them faster.

These kinds of feedback loops are what tipping points are all about. (Another one that’s in the offing, though nobody can date its arrival, is when methane trapped in the Siberian permafrost starts escaping into the atmosphere. Methane is itself a greenhouse gas, so once the escape starts it will warm the planet and accelerate the escape.)

Steven Colbert captured the moment’s dark humor:

Unstoppable melting, it’s out of our hands now. I mean, what a relief! I didn’t think it would happen, but we finally ran the clock out on the possibility of my personal sacrifice making a difference.

The New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert makes the connection to our dysfunctional political debate:

Of the many inane arguments that are made against taking action on climate change, perhaps the most fatuous is that the projections climate models offer about the future are too uncertain to justify taking steps that might inconvenience us in the present. The implicit assumption here is that the problem will turn out to be less serious than the models predict; thus, any carbon we have chosen to leave in the ground out of fear for the consequences of global warming will have gone uncombusted for nothing.

But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be more serious. In fact, it increasingly appears that, if there is any systemic bias in the climate models, it’s that they understate the gravity of the situation.

Try to think of any other risk we treat this way: We’re going to do nothing about it until we’re 100% sure that we’re headed for disaster.

and the VA

VA hospitals have been making veterans wait ridiculously long for appointments, and then have falsified data to hide their systemic poor performance. So far, everyone from Congress to the president to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki claims to be “mad as hell” about the situation, but it’s not clear what happens next.

Somebody who has been criticizing the VA for years is Rachel Maddow. She’s the one I’ll be watching

and the 60th anniversary of the Brown decision

Saturday was the 60th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that proclaimed the end of “separate but equal” as a defensible legal concept.

The best discussion of this I saw was on Chris Hayes’ show, where he interviewed some surviving members of the Brown family.

and the apparent dwindling of the Tea Party

In case you missed it: Friday, tens of millions of “patriot” protesters descended on Washington for an “American Spring“. They overthrew the federal government and sent former President Obama to Gitmo. Or at least that was the plan. The actual turnout was more like a few hundred — far less than what liberal Moral Mondays can turn out in North Carolina. The government is intact and President Obama remains at large.

Chris Hayes interpreted this non-event as end of the Tea Party’s ability to turn out big crowds: “As a grass roots movement, it is no more.”

Similarly, the media narrative for this spring’s round of Republican primaries has been the victory of the Republican establishment over Tea Party challengers. (Notable exception: Ben Sasse in Nebraska, who is being billed as “the next Ted Cruz“.) Establishment figures like Mitch McConnell no longer need to quake in their boots over the prospect of a Tea Party primary opponent.

But while all this is true, one piece of the story is often left out: The Tea Party is vanishing because it won. The “establishment” candidates who are winning these primaries — like North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — have done so by agreeing down-the-line with Tea Party positions on the issues. You’ll know the Tea Party has actually lost if John Boehner brings the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill to the floor, or if Republicans work with President Obama to get the corporate tax reform both sides want. Don’t hold your breath.

and you also might be interested in …

Rockford, IL in 2009

Wednesday, Rachel Maddow did a marvelous piece on the history of tank-car explosions like the recent one in Lynchburg, VA, and the NTSB’s decades-long unsuccessful battle to get safety upgrades to the DOT-111 car that is used for 70% of the energy industry’s rail shipments. As I watched one scene after another of giants balls of flame erupting in various places around the country, I kept thinking: What if Al Qaeda were rolling tankers full of crude oil into our towns and cities, and blowing them up with the same frequency that these tankers are blowing up on their own? What would we be willing to spend to make that stop?

Poor, persecuted Tim Tebow

Remember that televised same-sex kiss (that I posted a picture of last week) after Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams? Well, it generated a new round of Christian persecution claims: The media has a double standard because Sam is getting positive coverage for being gay, while Tim Tebow got negative coverage for his conservative Christianity. (More accurately: Tebow got less than 100% positive coverage; a lot of Tebow-mania was downright worshipful. For a more balanced view of Tebow’s image, listen to another outspoken Christian quarterback, Kurt Warner.)

Rachel191 explains the difference Sam and Tebow:

[T]here is a distinct difference between sharing a celebratory kiss during a special moment with a significant other, and Tebowing. Now, if Michael Sam somehow manages to turn every appearance on the field into a demonstration or endorsement of his sexuality, yeah, they’ll be similar. But nothing of the sort has happened (or is even likely possible).

… Existing as a gay man, including having a family, is not “evangelizing” for homosexuality. It’s just existing. And being uncomfortable at the sight of gay men existing is not evidence that homosexuality is being “forced” on you. It’s evidence that you have issues you need to work through.

If during a blockbuster movie you ever find yourself wondering “How much of that is real and how much is computer generated?”, listen to Godzilla director Gareth Edwards narrating one of his scenes.

Republicans warned you that ObamaCare would cause organizations to shut down. Finally we have an actual example: the Rotacare Free Clinic in Tacoma, Washington. It closed its doors because its volunteer doctors and nurses aren’t needed now that its former patients have real insurance.

 “It happened very quickly. We had to start telling our providers not to come because we didn’t have enough patients,” Mary Hoagland-Scher, a Tacoma family practitioner who served as the clinic’s medical director, told TPM. “It just dried up. Poof.”

Last Monday, a Republican Senate filibuster killed a bipartisan energy efficiency bill that the Republican House had previously passed. The Energy Efficiency Improvement Act was a baby-step forward: It raised efficiency requirements on government buildings, while creating a voluntary certification program for private buildings.

But even that was too much to ask. Senate Republicans wouldn’t consider it without tying it to approval of the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline. Grist’s Ben Adler elaborates:

When the bill passed the House, I concluded that energy-efficiency measures could win Republican support if they avoided any mandates on the private sector and any spending of government money. After all, there is nothing for conservatives to oppose about making government more efficient and offering voluntary programs to help companies save money.

Well, now you can add another condition to the list of Republican demands: Even a modest energy-efficiency measure cannot be passed without including unrelated giveaways to fossil-fuel industries.

And there’s one other motive behind the filibuster: The names attached to the Senate version of the bill are Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Shaheen is running for re-election this year, and being challenged by Massachusetts import Scott Brown. Brown lobbied his former Republican colleagues in the Senate not to give Shaheen an accomplishment to run on.

and let’s end with a big dream

What if the roads were paved with solar panels, creating a decentralized power grid?

May 19, 2014 – 12:01 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth

On Monday morning, the business community knows better.

Probably every religion has what in the Christian world is known as Sunday truth: those comfortable notions that make you nod and shout “Amen!” when you hear them from the pulpit, but which conveniently evaporate from your mind by Monday morning when you have to conduct serious business.

Centuries ago, Sunday truth was mostly moral: Lying is always bad; you should never take advantage of the helpless; charging interest on a loan is wrong; and other sweet ideas that businessmen found inconvenient. But when the scientific revolution got rolling in the 1600s, educated people began to experience a different kind of Sunday truth: You’d agree on Sunday that the Earth was the center of the universe, and then on Monday use Copernicus’ methods to compute the dates of future Easters.

From there it only got worse. Now there are biologists who nod on Sunday to the idea that evolution is a satanic lie, and then on Monday go back to work in a profession that makes no sense without the evolutionary theory that holds it all together. Professors of linguistics teach the Tower of Babel in Sunday school, then tell their secular students something completely different on Monday. Astronomers listen without objection when preachers tell them the universe is less than 10,000 years old, then work out better methods for detecting stars billions of light-years away. Geologists likewise acknowledge a young Earth on Sunday, and then (when they are searching for oil on Monday) look for rock formations millions of years old.

Critics of religion have slang for this tendency to forget everything your profession teaches you when you step inside a church: It’s called “checking your brain at the door” — a colorful phrase that conjures images of brains in cubbyholes waiting to be reclaimed when the service is over, as illustrated here by the Naked Pastor.

When political movements become ideologically extreme, they can develop their own forms of Sunday truth and build their own check-stations for brains. As in religion, you say things not because they are true, but because you want to stay in the community. If the community defines itself by a set of bizarre beliefs, then you loudly confess those beliefs in order to assert your identity as a member in good standing. But you’re not stupid, so you don’t act on those beliefs when people aren’t looking and you have serious decisions to make.

The business community understands this. This week I found myself reading a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch report urging its investment clients to invest in stocks related to water. It outlined the global pressures on water supplies, and then titled a section “Climate change is making things worse”:

Given how closely food, water and energy security are connected, an impending perfect storm of events appears to be looming for the food and energy sectors, in a world constrained by extreme weather and climate change.

No caveats, no footnotes, no if-this-turns-out-to-be-true. Politically, Bank of America’s contribution profile leans conservative; their top three recipients are the Republican National Committee and the national committees to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. But if you’re trusting Bank of America to advise you on investing, they want you to know that climate change is happening and you’d better adjust to it.

And that makes me wonder how many BoA/ML clients are making a similar distinction between Sunday and Monday truths. Your investments are between you and your broker, so maybe at that point Tea Partiers retrieve their brains from the check room and act on what they know is real: climate change.

Insurance companies (who also give more to Republicans than Democrats) have been adjusting to climate change for years, because this is money we’re talking about. It’s serious. You don’t choose ideology over science when there’s money on the line. Evan Mills watches the insurance industry’s response to climate change for Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:

Allstate, for instance, has said that climate change has prompted it to cancel or not renew policies in many Gulf Coast states, with recent hurricanes wiping out all of the profits it had garnered in 75 years of selling homeowners insurance (Conley 2007). The company has cut the number of homeowners’ policies in Florida from 1.2 million to 400,000 with an ultimate target of no more than 100,000. The company has curtailed activity in nearly a dozen other states. In 2008, State Farm—Florida’s largest private insurer—stopped writing new policies in the state (Garcia and Benn 2008). This was after suspending sales of new commercial and homeowners policies in Mississippi the year before (Tuckey 2007). A few months later, after being denied a 47% average rate increase, State Farm announced a complete pull-out, (Hays 2009). About 1.2 million customers will be affected. The Florida Insurance Commissioner referred to the decision as “unnecessary destabilization of the insurance market” (Hays 2009). The editor of trade magazine published an editorial about the problem entitled “Like a Bad Neighbor?” (Friedman 2009).

Also in 2008, Farmers announced that they would stop writing homeowners policies throughout North Carolina and not renew existing ones. Such decisions are not taken lightly; Farmers will forego $55 million in annual premiums but claims that losses would be twice this amount (Hemenway 2008). … Insurers are recognizing that simply raising prices to keep pace with the impacts of climate change may be an elusive undertaking.

Munich Re is a reinsurance company — its clients are primarily other insurance companies, not the general public — whose profitability depends on its accuracy in assessing risk. It describes climate change as “one of the greatest risks facing mankind”.

That’s how the business community acts on Monday mornings, when it’s doing serious work. But business is also an important part of the Republican establishment, and Republicanism has become an extreme ideological movement defined by bizarre beliefs, one of which is climate change denial. And so you have moments like this during the debate between GOP candidates for the Senate in North Carolina — one of those states where insurance companies are cutting back coverage because of climate change. “Is climate change a fact?” asks the moderator. Chuckles are heard in the audience and all four candidates — even the eventual winner Thom Tillis, supposedly the “establishment” candidate — say a curt “no”. (The Rand Paul candidate, Greg Brannon, adds: “God controls the climate.“, upstaging Mike Huckabee’s candidate, Mark Harris, who is supposed to represent the GOP’s evangelical wing.)

This is typical. After Jon Huntsman’s failure as the reality-based Republican presidential candidate, no one wants to take up that banner. Increasingly, rank-and-file Republicans (about half nationally*, including 61% of those who don’t identify as Tea Party) believe climate change is real, and about half of those attribute it to human activity. But what Republican leaders are willing to stand up in public and represent that position? Anybody?

Many of them know the facts. In late 2007, I sat in the front row at a John McCain town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, a few blocks from where I live. He told us emphatically that climate change was happening and the government needed to do something about it. The following May, he still whole-heartedly supported the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. But by fall, his ads were implicitly against cap-and-trade, and by the time he ran for re-election to the Senate in 2010, he was openly against his own bill.

Such Galileo-like recantations are a standard feature of repressive religious environments. (See Romney and RomneyCare.) Did McCain learn something new that changed his mind? Don’t be silly; the scientific support for climate change just keeps getting stronger. But he needed to re-affirm his conservative identity, so he accepted conservative Sunday truth the same way he accepted Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The problem with adopting a Sunday truth, though, is that sometimes it’s not enough to nod and say “Amen!”; you may need to defend the Sunday truth against the infidels. And that can be difficult when you’re smart enough to know that it’s nonsense.

That’s what happened to Marco Rubio this week. He has already wrecked his position in the early presidential polls by trying to solve the immigration problem — a conservative candidate isn’t supposed to try to pass bipartisan legislation that addresses a problem — and even recanting hasn’t restored him to grace. He can’t afford to contradict the right-wing catechism anywhere else, so when conservative-friendly interviewer Jonathan Karl brought up climate change Rubio recited the Sunday truth:

I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. … And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.

But sadly (for him) that wasn’t the end of it. Tuesday at the National Press Club he was asked: “What information, reports, studies or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change?” He had to dodge, because he had been asserting his conservative identity, not championing a coherent theory that he adopted after prudent investigation. Instead, he put forward a new position:

The truth of the matter is the United States is a country. It is not a planet. … But for people to go out and say if you passed this bill that I am proposing, this will somehow lead us to have less tornadoes and hurricanes. And that’s what I take issue with.

In other words, the United States can’t fix climate change alone — a point even Al Gore wouldn’t dispute. So that response wasn’t satisfactory either, and Rubio had to go on Sean Hannity’s radio show and try again. This time he opted for distraction by flashing the big, shiny object of abortion: Liberals deny the settled science that human life begins at conception**, so why shouldn’t he deny the science of climate change?

I can’t imagine Rubio is endearing himself to the conservative base with these awkward gyrations. But that’s the problem when you show up on Monday morning spouting Sunday truth: You can’t give reasons, because you didn’t adopt the position for reasons. It’s about identity, not evidence or logic.

So that’s how you have to defend it. It’s simple, Marco: The Koch brothers said it. I believe it. That settles it.

* The recent trend line here might be suspect. A lot of polls that track opinion by party identification show a similar divergence between Republican and independent opinion. The reason isn’t that people in those camps are changing their minds in opposite directions, but that a lot of Tea Partiers have begun telling pollsters they’re independent rather than Republican.

** In addition to putting forward a two-wrongs-make-a-right argument — my denial of science doesn’t justify your denial of science — Rubio was also attacking a straw man. I’ve never heard any abortion-rights activist deny that a zygote is alive or that its DNA is human. The argument is about the point at which a fetus has developed sufficiently to merit the moral status we accord to a person. A typical abortion-rights position — mine, for example — is that a fetus grows into its personhood rather than being a person from conception. The disagreement is entirely moral and spiritual, and is unrelated to the science Rubio cites.

May 19, 2014 – 9:29 am Categories: Articles | Comments (23)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Climate change was hard to ignore this week. Not only did we learn that a big chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf is doomed, but Marco Rubio picked a bad moment to come out publicly as a climate-change denier. Every day or two he found a new way to stumble over follow-up questions that weren’t much more complicated than “Seriously?”

By coincidence, this week I found myself looking at a research report from an investment firm that gives most of its political cash to Republicans. It said in no uncertain terms that climate change is happening, and suggested ways to invest accordingly. And that got me wondering: How many conservatives cheer when a candidate denounces all this climate-change nonsense, and then apply a completely different worldview when they’re making decisions about something they take seriously, like money?

There’s an obvious parallel to religion, where a man might yell “Amen!” during a Sunday-morning sermon about young-Earth creationism, then Monday go to work as a geologist and look for oil in rock formations that he knows are many millions of years old. In religion, such things are called “Sunday truths”, and scientifically educated believers handle them by “checking your brain at the door”. And that led to this week’s featured article: “Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth”. It should be out in an hour or so.

Later this morning, the weekly summary will say more about that Antarctic ice, the scandal at the VA, the strange apparent outcome of the Republican Civil War (the establishment is winning at the ballot box by surrendering to the Tea Party on policy), and a number of other short notes, closing with a couple who have a big dream: paving the roads with solar panels.

 

May 19, 2014 – 8:22 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Present Danger

Climate change is not a distant threat. It is affecting the American people already. On the whole, summers are longer and hotter, with longer periods of extended heat. Wildfires start earlier in the spring and continue later into the fall. Rain comes down in heavier downpours. People are experiencing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies. And climate disruptions to water resources and agriculture have been increasing.

— Dr. John Holdren, presidential science advisor

This week’s featured articles are “New Evidence that ObamaCare is Working” and “Privilege and the Bubble of Flattery“.

This week everybody was talking about the kidnapped Nigerian girls

If you’re like me and know next to nothing about the internal politics of most African nations, Vox’s “Everything You Need To Know About Nigeria’s Kidnapped Girls” is a good place to start. “Everything you need to know about …” is a one of the standard formats on Vox (Ezra Klein’s news start-up), and it’s perfect for a story like this.

and Ukraine

Likewise, I can’t claim any deep understanding of the Ukraine/Russia conflict. I’m following the day-by-day developments via the NYT and CNN, like everyone else.

In Foreign Policy, Peter Pomerantsev wonders if Putin has re-invented war for the 21st century, something he calls “non-linear war”.

The NYT’s Ukraine Crisis in Maps feature helps.

BBC compares the relative military strength of Russia and Ukraine: Ukraine has about half the troops of Russia, and the other numbers are far more lopsided. If it comes to war and Ukraine doesn’t get NATO help, Russia will win on the battlefield. (As we saw in Iraq, whether it would be able to control the populace afterwards is a different matter.)

and the national climate assessment

The White House published the 2014 National Climate Assessment. The full report is enormous (841 pages), so I suspect most people will do better with the 148-page highlights. As in this week’s Sift quote, it is emphasizing that the effects of climate change are already visible, and fighting the impression that climate change is some distant threat that may never arise.

and a privileged Princeton freshman

Tal Fortgang became something of a sensation when Time published his essay “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege“. On the Left, it seemed like everybody had to respond, including me. I thought Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams covered it pretty well:

Young man, if you honestly think this country doesn’t care about religion or race, then you are privileged. You have grown up in an America that has enabled you to not know otherwise. And I don’t need to you to be sorry about it, because you didn’t create that. I’d just love for you to someday understand it.

and separation of church and state

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision (it’s the usual 5 against the usual 4) in Greece v Galloway follows the same pattern we saw in the affirmative action case two weeks ago: If you’re in the majority and you want to lord it over the minority, the Court thinks you should dot your i‘s and cross your t‘s first, but otherwise, go ahead.

In this case the majority is religious rather than racial. The town board of Greece, NY started opening its monthly meeting with prayer in 1999, each time inviting a different local minister to be “chaplain of the month”. Except for a few months in 2008 when it was trying to avoid this lawsuit, all the chaplains have been Christian and many of them have delivered sectarian prayers. The town claims no malice towards non-Christian faiths and they haven’t been barred from delivering prayers, but it just didn’t make any particular effort to include them or let them know how they might volunteer to lead prayers.

The majority opinion makes all this sound perfectly reasonable and in line with precedents where the Court has given its blessing to Congress and the state legislatures opening with prayer, respecting a long tradition. (And as in the affirmative action case, it makes any alternative sound fraught with issues beyond the ken of any court: Somebody would have to specify prayers acceptable to everyone, or dictate codes of conduct for the invited clergy.) But Justice Kagan’s dissent (beginning on page 56 of the 80-page PDF file) destroys that argument completely, pointing out two major differences:

  • Chaplains for Congress and the state legislatures lead prayers for the legislators who hire them, and citizens who attend the sessions are neither addressed nor expected to participate. By contrast, in Greece the chaplain stands with his back to the Board, facing the citizens, who the chaplain calls to stand and pray — usually without any acknowledgment of their right to opt out.
  • The meetings are not just legislative; they are also a prime way that citizens bring their concerns to the Board. So the result of the practice is this: Before you can raise your concerns with the Board — asking them, say, to put a crosswalk on a street your children use or repair the potholes in your neighborhood — you either have to pray with them first or refuse their invitation to pray.

Kagan invites us to consider other public venues where it would clearly be wrong to ask you to pray a sectarian prayer: before a judge will hear your case, when you ask for a ballot, or before you are granted citizenship. You shouldn’t have to jump a religious hurdle to exercise your rights.

That’s not at all a difficult concept to understand or implement, if you really want to.

and the changing politics of ObamaCare

The longer ObamaCare is in place, the more evidence that it’s working as designed, and the nightmare scenarios laid out by its opponents aren’t coming to pass. (Has anybody you know faced a Death Panel yet?) In “New Evidence ObamaCare is Working” I sum up the most recent information.

It’s happening slower than it ought to, but politicians on both sides are beginning to adjust to the changing politics of ObamaCare. The GOP had expected to turn the confirmation of HHS Secretary Katherine Sebelius’ successor into an anti-ObamaCare show trial, but now that it’s happening, they are becoming shy. Instead, incumbent North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan was on offense over the refusal of Republican legislatures to extend Medicaid.

On the campaign trail, it’s often the Republican candidate who runs into difficult questions about ObamaCare.

which lead to new Benghazi hearings

The GOP was supposed to coast to a Senate majority this fall by talking about nothing but what a disaster ObamaCare is. But as more and more people get affordable health insurance and some already have ObamaCare-saved-my-life stories to tell their friends and relatives, that strategy looks increasingly suspect. What’s a party to do? Tout the accomplishments of the Republican Congress? Run on a job-creation plan that is more than just the tax-cuts-will-solve-everything notion nobody believes any more? Come up with their own ObamaCare alternative?

Don’t be silly. The new plan is to run on Benghazi, even though the questions they’ve been raising were answered a long time ago, and there is no new evidence — or any evidence to speak of — of wrong-doing. Meanwhile, Democrats have to decide whether they want to boycott the new House Select Committee on Benghazi. It’s pretty clear the committee’s Republican majority has no intention of running an impartial investigation — Chairman Trey Gowdy has already slipped and called the hearing a “trial”.

and you also might be interested in …

To this New England Yankee, Georgia’s new open carry law seems insane. One example: A man wandered around a public park in Forsyth County showing his gun to people at a Little League game. According to a local parent:

He’s just walking around [saying] “See my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing.

I remember some of the weird guys who hung around Little League games when I was a kid. We could ignore them because they were no threat with our parents around. Of course, they weren’t armed. But this guy caused Forsyth parents to halt the game because they didn’t think their kids were safe. And guess what? He was right. When police came, there was nothing they could do.

In Texas, members of Open Carry Texas staged a demonstration in a plaza with a Home Depot and a Jack in the Box. When men came into their store with semi-automatic weapons, the Jack in the Box workers got sufficiently scared that they locked themselves in the freezer. Digby comments:

All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all. 

The Pope called for a redistribution of wealth. Sean Hannity seems shocked to discover that the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t about abortion.

and let’s end with something you wouldn’t have seen last year

Openly gay football player Michael Sam got picked by the St. Louis Rams in the final round of the NFL draft (which, according to Nate Silver, is about where he should have been drafted, given that his size and skills are a difficult fit for a typical NFL defense). He reacted the way straight players have reacted for years, by kissing his sweetheart.

May 12, 2014 – 12:47 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Privilege and the Bubble of Flattery

a response to that unapologetic Princeton freshman

Eighteeen-year-old Tal Fortgang became a national sensation this month when his essay “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege” got published in Time. In the last week and a half it’s been linked and emailed and responded to all over the internet. (I first noticed it because of a bump in the hits on my essay “The Distress of the Privileged“. Privilege, I realized, must be hot for some reason.)

Let’s glide past the question of whether any 18-year-olds whose parents weren’t able to send them to Princeton might have written better, more thoughtful essays that haven’t gotten national attention, and instead dive into the content of Fortgang’s argument. He is tired of having his opinions and accomplishments diminished by people who tell him to “check his privilege”, so he does check his privilege and determines that it’s all quite justified: His Jewish great-grandfather was killed by the Nazis. His grandfather escaped Hitler and languished in displaced-persons camps before making it to America and starting a business. His father got a graduate degree and worked hard, and Tal himself has put considerable effort into making something of himself.

What he finds is not that he has been blessed by some “invisible patron saint of white maleness”, but that he benefits from a family legacy of values like self-sacrifice and entrepreneurialism and faith and resolve, and the habits that pass those values down from generation to generation. He is also privileged that his ancestors made it to America

a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.

So, he concludes, “I apologize for nothing.”

How to respond to that? First, I don’t know who at Princeton has been telling Fortgang that there is a patron saint of white maleness handing out success like a Sicilian godfather, or that “nothing you have accomplished is real”, but I hope that sooner or later someone gives Tal a more accurate metaphor: Privilege is like a tailwind. You have to handle the sails, but if you handle them moderately well, you get further. The places you get to are quite real, but … you had a tailwind and a lot of other people had a headwind. Sometimes that’s the difference between arriving at your destination, being lost at sea, or never getting out of port.

In short: Lots of people studied in high school and have strong values and characters. Lots of people’s parents and grandparents were smart, long-suffering, plucky, and hard-working. Not all of them are where Tal is or have the prospects he presumably does.

Recognizing privilege shouldn’t make a person apologize — which wouldn’t do anybody any good anyway. But it should raise humility, as well as compassion for those born to less favorable winds.

Second, I hope Tal takes some courses in cultural history, and learns that in every era privileged youth grow up in a bubble of flattery. In ancient times, the poets would trace your ancestry back to the gods, philosophers and theologians would explain how your slaves had been born with a servile nature or bore the mark of some ancient curse, and historians would glorify the battles of the valorous warriors who conquered the lands to which you now fall heir. And all of them would emphasize that blood is thicker than water: Worthiness flows down the family bloodline in precisely the same way that property does.

Today, well-funded think tanks and endowed chairs and glossy magazines and news networks and at least one-and-a-half of our two political parties are devoted to extolling the virtues of the rich: They are on top because they deserve to be. They are smarter, harder-working, wiser, more entrepreneurial, and just generally better than everyone else. The rest of us should be grateful to them, because they create our jobs, and their inventiveness is the engine that powers our economy. Without them, the rains would fail, the Earth would refuse to produce its bounty, and the rest of us would forget how to provide goods and services to each other.

Rather than asking scions like Tal to check his privilege, our gratitude should flow down the genetic line just as it always has, crediting the virtues of the fathers to the sons to the third and fourth generations (and, conversely, letting those born in the gutter wallow in filth like the animals they are).

As of old, this is flattery. People say and write these things because powerful people want to hear and read them. (Or, as in your case, Tal, people in privileged classes say and write such things for their own justification, and then are rewarded. You are well on your way to a fine career flattering people even more privileged than you.)

I haven’t been in the room when people have asked Tal to “check his privilege”, but I doubt they were asking for an apology. I would guess they were asking him to grow up, to poke his head out of the bubble of flattery, and to stop repeating what his flatterers told him as if the rest of us should believe it.

We don’t believe it, and we never will … even though some of us will echo those ideas if we’re paid well enough.

May 12, 2014 – 9:42 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

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New Evidence that ObamaCare is Working

More people have insurance, insured people are less likely to die, and hospitals are making fewer mistakes.

Already this month we’ve seen three major pieces of evidence that ObamaCare is working, is improving healthcare generally, and will save lives. First, Gallup says that the number of uninsured people is dropping, and is now clearly below where it was before the Great Recession started.

Here’s why I suspect Gallup’s report understates ObamaCare’s impact: Prior to ObamaCare, a lot of people had junk insurance; it covered everything but the pre-existing condition that threatened to bankrupt them, or the insurance company could cancel it if they got sick, or it had a yearly or lifetime cap that would make it useless in the face of a major illness. (Those “cancelled policies” that got so much attention a few months ago were mostly either the replacement of junk insurance or the normal churn of the health insurance market.) A lot of those people probably didn’t tell Gallup they were uninsured, but if they got seriously ill their options were to forgo treatment or declare bankruptcy. Now they have real insurance.

Insurance saves lives. Second, a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine says that the program ObamaCare was modeled on, RomneyCare, has lowered the death rate in Massachusetts. The Incidental Economist blog (“Contemplating health care with a focus on research, an eye on reform”) summarizes the results:

[The authors] estimate that overall mortality in Massachusetts declined 2.9 percent relative to control counties between 2007 and 2010; mortality amenable to health care declined 4.5 percent. This translates to one death prevented for every 830 people who gain insurance, and the effects were larger in counties with low income and low pre-reform insurance rates—the counties we would expect to be most favorably impacted by reform.

Another fact that points to insurance being the key factor: The study also didn’t find any drop in mortality among the elderly, who were already covered by Medicare.

Amenable mortality is the right measure. The quick sound bite for criticizing the American healthcare system is that we have the world’s highest costs but lower life expectancy than any other wealthy country. (We’re 35th in life expectancy, well behind countries like Canada and Australia that are culturally similar, but have universal health care.) If you do that, though, opponents of socialized medicine will explain that those other countries have healthier lifestyles or less violence or better genes or something.

But “mortality amenable to health care” — in laymen’s terms “people who die from things we know how to treat” — avoids that rejoinder: No matter why you get sick, if you have something curable the healthcare system should cure it. That’s why I keep harping on this statistic (here and here and here).

No country gets amenable mortality down to zero, but a 2011 article in the research journal Health Policy said:

If the U.S. had achieved levels of amenable mortality seen in the three best-performing countries — France, Australia, and Italy — 84,300 fewer people under age 75 would have died in 2006–2007.

I have never seen politicians opposing ObamaCare confront the amenable-mortality numbers with anything but denial. As Rick Santorum put it: “I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.”

The Incidental Economist article goes on to say that RomneyCare’s drop in amenable mortality is an indication of more than just saved lives:

“mortality amenable to health care” does not just magically decline. If fewer people are dying, that is almost certainly because diseases are being better treated, managed, or prevented—because of improved health.

How much is a life worth? The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon is up to the challenge Rick Santorum dodged: He recognizes lives are being saved, but says the saved lives cost too much.

this Annals study also suggests that success has come at a very high cost. The authors estimate that “for approximately every 830 adults who gained insurance [under RomneyCare], there was 1 fewer death per year.” If we assume the per-person cost of covering those 830 adults is roughly the per-person premium for employer-sponsored coverage in Massachusetts in 2010 (about $5,000), then a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that RomneyCare spent $4 million or more per life saved…. As an economist might put it, this means there are likely to be policies out there that could save a lot more lives than RomneyCare does per dollar spent.

A different Incidental Economist article points out two fallacies of this argument: (1) It assumes that saving lives is the entire benefit of health insurance.

Health insurance gives you access not just to live saving care, but also to the rest of medical care, including things like hip replacements that allow you to walk and run, and free you from chronic pain. Insurance also protects your family from financial ruin. It’s the total contribution of health insurance to well-being that needs to be considered in deciding whether we should support universal coverage. If Cannon is going to place a value on being insured, he needs to consider the total benefit a person experiences from having health insurance, not just the chance that it will save her life.

And (2), the opponents of ObamaCare aren’t proposing any of those “policies .. that could save a lot more lives … per dollar spent”. They’re just proposing saving the money and letting people die.

How many [states] refused to expand Medicaid, but then did nothing else for the health of their uninsured? If politicians in those states just refused the money and let the poor die, they do not have standing to make Cannon’s criticism about paths not taken.

How are lives being saved? A NYT article on the new study provides some suggestive anecdotes about how insurance saves lives:

In the waiting rooms of the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, bustling with a working-class clientele, doctors said much had changed since the state insurance law passed in 2006. People are less likely to put off care out of fear of unaffordable bills, and patients with diabetes can get medication regularly.

Dr. Stelios Maheras, medical director of the emergency department, said some patients used to ask for prices “like at the supermarket.” He recalled one patient who was having chest pains but refused an ambulance because he was afraid of the bill.

… Dr. Catherine Silva, a primary care physician at the East Boston health center, said some fatalities might have been prevented by helping people control their high blood pressure and cholesterol, which can increase the risk of heart attacks. She recalled a patient who had hypertension, but dropped out of treatment when she lost insurance, and came back three years later with breast cancer that proved tricky to treat because she had uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes.

“That conversation about why did you leave me for three years, that doesn’t happen anymore,” she said.

Keep these examples in mind when conservatives argue that the way to cut costs is to make the consumer more cost conscious. These are the kinds of costs that wind up getting cut.

The NYT article ends by pointing out that an even bigger study is coming in a few years: About half the country has expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare and half has refused. Eventually public-health researchers will be able to estimate how many lives that refusal has cost.

Structural changes are working. Third, the part of ObamaCare that has gotten the least press is its attempt to restructure how healthcare is delivered. The system prior to ObamaCare had perverse incentives: If complications of treatment caused a person to be hospitalized longer, or to come back after a few days, the hospital might make more money. No one is suggesting that hospitals made mistakes intentionally, but they had negative financial incentive to root out the processes that were likely to produce mistakes.

But ObamaCare has changed some of those incentives. For example, ObamaCare

penalizes hospitals that have the highest readmission rates. Hospitals can now lose as much as 2.5 percent of their Medicare revenue if they have lots of patients turning up in the hospital again. One analysis showed that hospitals have lost $227 million in fines because of this program.

Result? Hospital readmissions are falling after having been flat for years.

and hospital-created conditions are dropping, coinciding “with health law programs that try to penalize these exact types of events.”

So that’s what the evidence is showing: The things ObamaCare was created to do — insure the uninsured and underinsured, save the lives of people who otherwise might go untreated to save money, streamline and restructure the incentives to deliver good care — are exactly what it’s doing.

May 12, 2014 – 8:20 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Two featured articles this week: “New Evidence ObamaCare is Working” pulls together three new pieces of information: Gallup’s report that the percentage of the population claiming to be uninsured is dropping sharply, research demonstrating that the death rate in Massachusetts has fallen post-RomneyCare, and an encouraging bit of data suggesting that ObamaCare’s reforms are changing healthcare delivery for the better — the rate of hospital re-admissions is falling.

A second article (which I haven’t titled yet) responds to the Princeton freshman whose essay in Time says he won’t apologize for his white male privilege because he and his family have worked hard and suffered hardship to put him where he is. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say I think he misses the point about the nature of privilege.

The weekly summary links to the best summaries I could find about the kidnapped Nigerian girls and the continuing Ukraine/Russia unrest. (I don’t claim to understand either situation myself.) I’ll briefly tell you what I got out of reading the Supreme Court’s new decision on prayer at public meetings, expand on how the shifting politics of ObamaCare leads to another Republican effort to beat the dead horse of Benghazi, link you to the new National Climate Assessment, and pass along stories from Georgia and Texas about the craziness that ensues from open-carry-of-firearms laws.

The ObamaCare article should be out shortly, and the privilege article by 10 EDT. Expect the summary before noon.

May 12, 2014 – 7:31 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment