What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details?

The IRS scandal is starting to look like one of those movies with a cool title and a heart-pounding trailer that ends up delivering two hours of excruciating boredom.

The initial headline “IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups” promised conspiracy, duplicity, and suspense. Surely we’d find a bloody trail leading towards the White House. Investigating that trail would lead to a series of exciting confrontations, where ever-higher-level members of the administration would face the choice of flipping on their bosses or falling on their swords. Eventually, the story might culminate in a presidential resignation (like Nixon) or impeachment (like Clinton).

Excitement! Headlines! Ratings!

Instead, the unfolding details sound more like scenes from David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (also set at the IRS) which explores the spiritual dimensions of boredom.

Nobody has found any trail pointing towards the White House. More and more it looks like bureaucrats broke the rules for the same reason bureaucrats usually break rules — to make their tedious jobs easier. Like cops profiling black teens, IRS agents profiled conservative groups because (i) from their (possibly biased) point of view, that’s who they expected to be cheating, and (ii) it was simpler than thinking up legal ways to generate suspects.

If you want to take viewers deeper than that, you’ll need describe how the regulations define and treat 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations differently from 527 organizations. You’ll have to send cameras to the offices of victimized Tea Party groups and re-enact them filling out unnecessary forms. I’m sure people will be glued to their TVs.

Thursday on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, Chris Hayes explained how he looks at this as a TV host:

My feeling is that as it comes out — as the media is forced to cover what is essentially a somewhat boring story of bureaucratic malfeasance or overwhelmedness or bureaucratic incompetencies or just bureaucratic bureaucraticness — it becomes less interesting. I’m genuinely curious the degree to which this can have legs.  … I have hopes that just from a sheer I-have-to-produce-a-television-show-every-day level, is this interesting? Like, it’s not. … I think the actual details of it end up not sustaining the drama. … What was in the headline was dramatic. … The third through 15th paragraphs are not dramatic.

But Nate Silver makes a different prediction. His model recognizes that a scandal “having legs” involves more than just whether the charges are important or true. He judges a scandal’s potential by (i) whether the accusation is easier to describe than the defense; (ii) how well the story fits or contradicts some pre-existing narrative; (iii) whether the opposition can push the scandal without getting tarred by it; and (iv) whether the media has anything shinier to pay attention to.

By that measure, the IRS scandal looks to have a future: Again, it’s got that great initial headline. It fits two standard conservative narratives: that conservatives are persecuted, and that government is out of control. It figures in the duel between liberal and conservative narratives about Obama: Is Obama basically a good guy doing his best in a difficult job, or is he a ruthless Chicago politician? Since Republicans don’t have their own IRS, this can’t backfire on them the way the Clinton adultery scandal did. And finally, 2012 is over and 2016 is a long way off, so political reporters are looking for excitement like bored 8-year-olds at the end of summer vacation.

How can we reconcile these two conflicting predictions? I think they describe two different universes: For the general public, the IRS scandal will strangle on its own tedium, as Hayes predicts. But it will reach its full scandalous potential inside the conservative media bubble, where the exciting details necessary to keep it going will be invented from whole cloth.

The best insight into the conservative media comes from a series of posts by Tod Kelly on the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. His theme has been: “America’s conservative media machine is slowly but surely killing America’s conservative party.”

In the late 90s through the early and mid 00s, the GOP found that it could increase both number of voters and voter passion by aligning itself with a media machine that was initially created to build ratings from shock value. … An inherent flaw with this type of model is that while it leads to quick ratings and advertising profits, it can be difficult to sustain. If you spend one week calling the President a liar and an idiot, it’s not going to be long before calling him a lying idiot isn’t really all that shocking. You have to continually push just a little bit more as you go, or risk being irrelevant in the shock-media world.

… Somewhere along the line, however, this model has to break down – partly because you eventually reach a ceiling where the base that believes the ever-increasingly shocking claims is small enough to make the party you’re backing politically irrelevant, and partly because to those that aren’t part of the machine or the base you begin to look increasingly out of touch. Birtherism is a fairly good example of this ceiling being reached, as are the Death Panels and Obama/Hitler youth programs. Unfortunately for the Right, however, once you tie yourself and your success so inexorably to the machine it becomes almost impossible to untangle yourself from it.

Republican politicians initially thought they would define a narrative that their media machine would trumpet to the world. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest would serve their governing agenda and help them win elections.

Instead, the conservative media defines a narrative that is shaped to build ratings, and Republican politicians have had to get in step, even if it ultimately means marching off a cliff. The result is a party that can’t put together a governing agenda and can’t win national elections.

But the ratings are good — because media companies don’t need a majority, they just need a small core of dedicated viewers and listeners. (Glenn Beck’s subscribers pay $100 per year; a tiny fraction of the voting public can make him very rich.)

Kelly outlined how the primacy of ratings shaped four bogus stories leading up to the 2012 election.

the story that the President order[ed] his own people be abandoned in Benghazi, the story that the president started Operation Fast & Furious to overturn the second amendment, the story that UN forces will soon be entering the United States to collect the guns of private citizens, and the story that once reelected, the President is set to enact some kind of national Sharia law.

Each of these started as real stories about actions taken by the current administration.  As we will see, however, in each case a pattern begins to emerge:

1. The original story, while absolutely showing a potential miscalculation by the White House, isn’t really damning as initially reported (usually by FOX).

2. The story is then taken by bloggers, talk radio show hosts, and FOX “expert” commentators and reworked to better fit the narrative of Obama as evil usurper.  The facts are changed entirely, but no real journalism is used to gather new information; instead, the media machine relies on self-referencing its own continually shifting commentaries on the original story until a very different and far more nefarious sounding story emerges.

3. The huge whirlwind of the media machine is assumed to itself be indicative of “unreported” news, and thus the original reporting source (again, usually FOX) re-reports the story with the new “facts.”  (Reminding one of that moment in the children’s game Telephone when the original child announces what their starting phrase has morphed into).

4. The media machine and its audience point to the mainstream media’s ignoring of the new, factually dubious story as “proof” that the new story is true.

It’s not hard to apply that model to the IRS story. Tedium will not be a problem for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity any more than it is for Stephen King. Boredom is never a problem if you let the story generate its own facts.

Republican politicians — even if they know better — will feel that they have no choice other than to pander to the invented story, even if it sounds crazy to most voters. They may even find themselves believing it, until confronted with reality, as Mitt Romney was in the presidential debates.

So even if the trail the White House remains totally bloodless and cold, we may well see impeachment hearings. Beating the drum for impeachment is great for ratings, and what Republican politician is in a position to say no?

May 27, 2013 – 9:47 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Two main articles this week: One covering President Obama’s surprisingly thoughtful speech about the future of the War on Terror, and the other wondering what happens to the IRS scandal now that boring details are starting to emerge. (Prediction: Mainstream media will get bored and move on. Fox News and talk radio will manufacture the exciting details they need to keep their audiences entertained.) The IRS article will be out momentarily, and the War on Terror article a couple hours later.

In the weekly summary: the Oklahoma tornado, the I-5 bridge collapse, a strange coincidence of stories involving atheism, good news for ObamaCare, and a solar airplane.

May 27, 2013 – 8:55 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

This Nasty Phase

[This is coming out two days late due to a glitch I still don’t understand.]

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!

— Gene Roddenberry

This week everybody was talking about scandals and pseudo-scandals

As the week went on, though, the scandals mostly fell apart — particularly after it came out that Republicans had faked the “White House emails” that led to ABC’s big scoop.

I summarize the current state of the Benghazi, IRS, and AP stories — and explain why Republicans feel compelled to manufacture these pseudo-scandals —  in Blow Smoke, Yell Fire.

Oh, and I forgot to cover UmbrellaGate.

and Angelina Jolie

If you’d told me last week that Angelina Jolie’s breasts would be front-page news, I’d have pictured a very different scenario. But Tuesday she announced in the New York Times that she had chosen to have a preventive double mastectomy, replacing both of her (apparently healthy) breasts with implants to reduce her risk of breast cancer.

Jolie’s situation is unusual: Her mother died of ovarian cancer at 56, and genetic tests showed a defective BRCA1 gene that is associated with high risk of both breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Still, her decision was a Rorschach test that produced strong reactions of all types, especially among women. (A good collection of links is here.)

Many were strongly supportive and appreciated the fact that Jolie had put a public face on a difficult issue. I was reminded of Magic Johnson’s announcement in 1991 that he had HIV. It’s easy to either ignore a medical problem or demonize the people who have it, until it hits someone you know. Celebrities play the role of someone-you-know for an entire society.

Some people reacted negatively. For people who are generally suspicious of the medical establishment, Jolie’s story is a Minority-Report-style nightmare, where drastic actions are taken based on predictions whose accuracy is unknowable. M.D. Daniela Drake describes her own experience.

Now I know why patients are so mad at us. This is supposed to be patient-centered care. But it feels more like system-centered care: the medical equivalent of a car wash. I’m told incomplete and inaccurate information to shuttle me toward surgery; and I’m not being listened to.

I came to discuss nutrition, exercise and close follow-up.

I’m told to get my breasts removed—the sooner the better.

The other issue this cast a light on is gene patents: Even if you think you might be in Jolie’s situation, getting the genetic test will probably cost about $3000, and insurance often doesn’t cover it. Why is it so expensive? Because Myriad Genetics “owns” the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. It doesn’t just own the testing procedure; it has a patent on the genes themselves. Even a company that came up with a different test couldn’t market it. If that seems weird, that’s probably because it is weird. The Supreme Court is supposed to hear a case about that soon, though it’s hard to imagine the Roberts Court ruling against any form of property.

[Full disclosure: My wife is a breast cancer survivor whose mother died of breast cancer. She recently had the same genetic test as Jolie, which our insurance covered. If it had come out badly — it didn’t — she would have faced a similar choice.]

and the new Star Trek movie

OK, maybe my definition of “everybody” is skewed. Still, lots of people who ordinarily write about other things were writing about Into Darkness, the second step in the J. J. Abrams reboot of the Trek movie franchise. I haven’t seen it yet, but the reactions from people who have center on two themes:

It’s interesting that the serious-fan discontent is coalescing around Abrams’ second film, but I think I know why: For the first, fans were just glad the reboot was happening. They/we wanted the original characters back, but the original actors were too old to carry on. Plus, the reboot’s plot necessarily was about how to get the band back together without trapping them in a narrative universe where all possible suspense is killed by what we already know about the Federation’s future. Mission accomplished well enough to justify a new series of movies. Fine.

But the second movie has to answer the question: What are you going to do with the freedom the new timeline grants? All the challenges faced in the old timeline — Klingons, Romulans, Q, the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. — are still out there somewhere. That invites a long background meditation on fate: What has to turn out the way it did the first time, and what could change? Or we could forget all that and have a lot of starship chase scenes and shoot-outs with phasers.

Which raises the question: What is Star Trek about, really? Matt Yglesias (who usually doesn’t write about this kind of thing) sees the heart of the franchise in the optimistic liberal values of the mid-20th century: envisioning a future where humanity gets past its tribal struggles, overcomes scarcity, and devotes its most powerful starship to seeking knowledge and helping other species rather than aggrandizing its wealth and power. Star Trek celebrates the kind of courage you need to hang in an uncertain situation and not shoot, while waiting for a peaceful solution to emerge.

Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait sums up:

At its best [Star Trek] was a deeply thoughtful mythology about ourselves and our conflicts, an allegory of our modern problems and flaws of humanity—war, greed, bigotry, narcissism—and how we overcome them, told as science fiction. That’s why we’re still telling these stories nearly 50 years later.

This movie wasn’t any of that.

NYT’s A. O. Scott seems to agree:

it’s hard to emerge from “Into Darkness” without a feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. Maybe it is too late to lament the militarization of “Star Trek,” but in his pursuit of blockbuster currency, Mr. Abrams has sacrificed a lot of its idiosyncrasy and, worse, the large-spirited humanism that sustained it.

Atlantic’s Christopher Orr sees the surrender of Star Trek’s “deliberative, technology-obsessed, and science fictive” values to “visceral, imbued with mysticism, and space operatic” Star Wars values. (Abrams is the current custodian of both movie franchises.)

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir recalls Abrams complaining that previous Star Treks were “too philosophical” and accounts for Into Darkness like this:

the Abrams “Star Trek” movies feel as if they didn’t just depict an alternate universe but were created in one – a universe in which the original “Star Trek” was an action-adventure Marvel Comics title rather than a geeky, Enlightenment-saturated 1960s TV series. … There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Star Trek Into Darkness” – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing.

He fantasizes “that those in charge of the ‘Star Trek’ universe could have entrusted its rebirth to someone who actually liked it.”

But hey, Into Darkness will probably make money, and that’s what counts. I think the Ferengi have a rule about that.

and you also might be interested in …

If Europe is proving that austerity economics doesn’t work, Japan is an interesting test case in the opposite direction. The Abe government has decided to stimulate its way out of the country’s decades-long funk, debt be damned.

Japan’s national debt is approaching 245% of GDP, more than double the U.S. ratio and considerably higher than even the famous bad example of Greece. The government has announced its intention to create inflation; it’s goal is 2% per year, reversing the current deflation. To do that it is prepared to double the money supply.

If the deficit hawks know anything about how the world works, Japan should crash and burn. Conversely, if it doesn’t, the Paul Ryans know nothing about how the world works.

Filibuster reform is being discussed again, as Harry Reid is admitting privately that he made a mistake in not pushing it harder at the beginning of this Congress.

It isn’t just the unprecedented number of filibusters that is causing this, but the broader ambitions behind them. In the past, both parties have at times filibustered nominees that they had some personal objection to: the nominee was too extreme, too acerbic, or had some scandal in his or her past.

During the Obama years, though, Republicans have been using the filibuster as part of a global strategy to monkey-wrench parts of the government they don’t like. No one has ever done that before.

For example, Republicans have blocked Richard Cordray’s nomination as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — not because they have uncovered something questionable about him, but because they don’t think the CFPB should exist. As a post on Senator Shelby’s web site put it in 2011: “44 Republican U.S. Senators today sent a letter to President Obama stating that they will not confirm any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) absent structural changes”. The stalemate has continued ever since.

Now the monkey-wrenching threatens to shut down the National Labor Relations Board. Legally, the NLRB can’t function without a quorum, and unless some of Obama’s nominees are confirmed it won’t have one when the next member’s term expires in August. So come August, it will be open season on workers’ rights, because the federal government will be out of the picture. You don’t have to change the law if you can shut down the enforcement agency.

Nurses explain the healthcare law in 90 seconds.

Four political scientists did an interesting study about the causes of political polarization. Their research survey describes the polarization process like this:

People are often unaware of their own ignorance (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), they seek out information that supports their current preferences (Nickerson, 1998), they process new information in biased ways that strengthen their current preferences (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979), they affiliate with other people having similar preferences (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1954), and they assume that others’ views are as extreme as their own (Van Boven, Judd, & Sherman, 2012).

Then they did a series of experiments and found that people’s certainty about policy proposals goes up after they’re asked to give reasons why they hold their position, but goes down after they’re asked to explain how the underlying proposals are supposed to work.

Across three studies we show that people have unjustified confidence in their mechanistic understanding of policies. Attempting to generate a mechanistic explanation undermines this illusion of understanding and leads to more moderate positions.

And they suggest:

that political debate might be more productive if partisans first engage in substantive and mechanistic discussion of policies before engaging in the more customary discussion of preferences and positions.

This matches my experience during 29 years of marriage: We’re more likely to come to consensus on where to take a vacation if we first imagine what we would do in a variety of places, and only later express preferences.

To follow up on last week’s discussion of Syria, I found this map at Wikipedia. Red is Assad/Alawite/Shia controlled. Green is rebel/Sunni. Beige is Kurdish.

Since we’re already talking Star Trek, here’s a polarizing graphic:

May 22, 2013 – 10:13 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Blow Smoke, Yell Fire

For a few days, it looked like the Obama administration might actually be in trouble. A week ago Friday, ABC’s Jonathan Karl released excerpts of White House emails that appeared to show the White House engineering a cover-up of the true nature of the Benghazi attack, and at the very least being way more involved in producing the Susan Rice talking points than the administration had claimed.

Across the country, Democrats felt that old sinking feeling. It was Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress all over again. After years of beating back outrageous Republican attempts to manufacture a scandal out of nothing — Bill Ayers, the birth certificate, death panels, Obama’s “real” father, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and on and on and on (just like Vince Foster, Whitewater, Travelgate, and Clinton’s illegitimate black son the last time a Democrat was president) — the long fishing expedition finally had an actual fish.

And even if the rest of it was a typical fisherman’s exaggeration, there would always be that one fish to point to. The conspiracy-theorist’s eternal “What are they hiding?” had turned into the much more reasonable “What else are they hiding?”

Jonathan Chait wrote:

Karl’s report produced among mainstream and liberal reporters a sense of embarrassment at having dismissed the story as a weird partisan obsession.

Worst of all, Obama’s defenders had to wonder the same thing. What blue dresses were hanging in some closet, waiting to be found? If you spoke up, would you eventually look as foolish as all the people who insisted that Bill Clinton “did not have sex with that woman”?

Then came the announcement of an IRS scandal, and an AP scandal, and the sky seemed to falling. So much smoke! There must be a fire under there somewhere.

Then the counter-scandal broke: ABC had been tricked. The “emails” they released had been doctored by Republicans to make the administration look bad. When you read the actual emails, you saw the State Department and the CIA jockeying for advantage, with the White House playing more-or-less the hands-off role it originally claimed.

So there’s still no fish. It’s still “a weird partisan obsession”. It’s still “What are they hiding?” not “What else are they hiding?”

Likewise, as details of the IRS and AP affairs come out, each is disturbing in its own way, but the IRS story seems contained to one IRS office with no White House involvement, and the “scandal” in the AP story is the legal bipartisan policy the administration was faithfully carrying out.

The white-whale hunt for an impeachable offense will no doubt continue, but this pseudo-scandals are not it.

Let’s review where we are:

Benghazi. The four American deaths are a combination of (i) being a diplomat in an anarchic post-civil-war environment is dangerous; and (ii) some screw-ups from which lessons should be learned.  The report of the Accountability Review Board has 24 recommendations. Maybe Congress should be talking about them rather than faking emails and defrauding reporters.

The only intentional wrong-doing anybody has uncovered so far is the forging of the emails and Jonathan Karl’s lie that he had “obtained” the emails when actually Republican staffers had just told him about them. Karl, BTW, is digging in deeper and deeper, which really ought to end his career. He has expressed “regret” about quoting the emails incorrectly, and that he “should have been clearer about the attribution”. But his main regret is that this has “become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.”

No, the story totally does not stand, unless you think the story is that the talking points went through 12 iterations, as talking points probably always do. Karl’s scoop was a smoking gun about White House dishonesty. That scoop was false, and an honest reporter would admit that.

Remember: When Dan Rather failed to properly authenticate documents that made President Bush look bad, people got fired and Rather ultimately had to leave CBS. Smearing a Republican president is a serious matter.

The IRS. The background here is that organizations that educate the public about political issues can receive tax-exempt contributions and don’t have to reveal their donors, while organizations that try to elect specific candidates can’t and do. It’s a fuzzy boundary frequently abused: A group might educate the public about how horrible Policy X is, and then also educate the public about how Yellow Party candidate Smith supports Policy X and the Orange Party candidate Jones opposes it. But as long as they don’t actually say “Vote for Jones”, they might maintain their tax-exempt status.

Citizens United opened floodgates of money for such organizations and a lot of new ones were established. All their applications for tax-exempt status went through one office in Cincinnati. Tuesday, the IRS inspector general issued a report “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review“. Conservative groups, particularly Tea Party groups, were scrutinized more closely.

Everybody agrees that was wrong. The question is why it happened. If the idea was hatched in the White House as a way to hobble its enemies, then it’s a genuine Watergate-level scandal. But there’s not a shred of evidence for that. The practice apparently started with one guy, and so far nobody has asked him why. Atlantic reports:

The crux of the investigation by Congress and the administration will be why that employee started to flag those applications — and why, as the inspector general notes, it soon became an office-wide practice. Was it an attempt to streamline the workflow? Or was it politically motivated behavior meant to target Tea Party groups? So far, it appears to be the former;

A number of side issues crop up in this story:

The damage done is exaggerated. The typical result was that a flagged group needed to fill out some extra forms and provide some additional information. Approval of tax-exempt status took longer than it otherwise might have. Once an application’s review started, there’s no evidence that politics played a role in the ultimate decision.

Tarring ObamaCare. Republicans have been using this issue as a way to attack ObamaCare, because the IRS has a role in it. The worst of these arguments revive the “death panels” hoax, with the added wrinkle that your surgery might be denied because you’re conservative. But in reality, the IRS deals only with the tax issues that arise in ObamaCare: Are you in the income bracket that allows you to claim a health-insurance subsidy, or do you owe the individual-mandate penalty? There’s no mechanism for the IRS to affect treatment decisions, no matter how politically corrupt it might get.

The laws about political activity and tax-exempt organizations are screwed up. Jeffrey Toobin claims that the real scandal is what’s legal, and the way big-money organizations game the system.

Anecdotal reports of audits prove nothing. Now any conservative who gets audited can claim political persecution, in the same way that any white guy who applies for a job and doesn’t get it can claim to be a victim of affirmative action. The WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel claims victim status for the big Romney donor Frank VanderSloot based on … well, nothing really.

Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

How can you argue with that? Peggy Noonan then picks up the ball and runs further, claiming victimhood for Billy Graham and a couple other people, and then concluding:

It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party’s foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently.

It’s true: If you imagine a systemic set of violations, then you need a systemic conspiracy to account for it. But again, it would be nice to have just a shred of evidence before going there.

Nate Silver brings some sanity to the topic.

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

AP. I’ll let AP itself make the charge:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. …

The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

Like the IRS story, this is bad. But once again the badness is what is legal: During the Bush administration, Congress changed the law to give the government the power to do this kind of stuff. It ought to be unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has managed to either excuse it or dodge cases where it might come up — and the worst justices on this issue are the conservative ones like Thomas and Scalia.

Just like the overall policy, the AP case has a bipartisan origin:

The two leak inquiries were started after Republicans in Congress accused the Obama administration of orchestrating news stories intended to demonstrate the president’s toughness on terrorism and improve his chance for reelection. The Republicans sought a special prosecutor, but Holder instead named two veteran prosecutors to handle the inquiries.

Jonathan Chait sums up:

The AP story is a more audacious step in a long government campaign, spanning two administrations, to ruthlessly prosecute leaks about the fight against Jihadi terrorism. In every single step of this fight before this one, Republicans occupied the far-right flank. They voted down shield laws; they demanded more vigorous prosecution of leakers than Obama was carrying out.

So absolutely, let’s have a new shield law and let’s get some people on the Supreme Court who take the First Amendment seriously. Let’s reverse the get-the-whistleblower policy that has stood since 9-11. But this is not a political scandal, it’s Obama carrying out a bipartisan policy.

Why? Finally, we need to examine why the Republicans are doing this. Why is everything that goes wrong force-fit into a now-we-can-impeach-Obama frame?

Heritage Action, a PAC associated with the conservative Heritage Foundation, explained in a letter to John Boehner and Eric Cantor:

it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican Conference. To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference.

In other words: Don’t try to legislate, because Republicans can’t agree on any legislative agenda. The only thing they can agree on is that they hate Obama. So stick with that. Investigate everything. Make mountains out of molehills if you have to. Just don’t try to do anything constructive, because that will divide the party.

May 20, 2013 – 12:07 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s main article “Blow Smoke, Yell Fire” will describe the fizzling of the latest Republican attempts to find or manufacture a scandal they can use to impeach Obama. With the base getting ever-more-radically conservative and the party establishment beginning to realize how suicidal that is, impeaching Obama is the only agenda they can agree on. Now they just need some high crimes and misdemeanors.

In addition to the wannabee scandals, everybody was talking about Angela Jolie’s breasts — everybody except the people who always talk about celebrity breasts. They were strangely silent. Lots of people (in my world, at least) were also talking about the true meaning of Star Trek and whether this new movie gets it or not.

Maybe we should have been talking about filibuster reform, the bold economic experiment happening in Japan, and some fascinating research about how to keep political discussions from polarizing.

I’m moving slowly this morning, so stuff may appear a little later than usual. The main article somewhere between 10 and noon, New Hampshire time, and the weekly summary not long after.

May 20, 2013 – 7:43 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Magical Deliverance

 The statement that God won’t allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that—no matter what we do—some undefined presence will, through some undefined measure, make things right, clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles. So is God really here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence?

— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, 5-8-2013

This week everybody was talking about the Cleveland captives

Last Monday, Amanda Berry, Georgina “Gina” DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were rescued from their 9-to-11-year captivity after Berry escaped and contacted police. The story has been all over the news ever since (to the undoubted consternation of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who saw his mega-hyped Benghazi hearings upstaged).

Perversely, when a story gets this much coverage it’s hard to keep track of the facts. Coverage focuses on whatever new detail has just come out, seldom taking a step back to put it all in context for the non-obsessed viewer. The 24-hour news channels feel that they have to keep covering the story or lose viewers, so rather than endlessly repeat the few known facts, they fill the air with speculation. As a result, it’s easy to lose what-actually-happened inside the cloud of what-at-some-point-looked-like-it-might-have-happened.

I rely on Wikipedia to sort it out. We’re not used to thinking of “encyclopedia” and “current events” at the same time, but Wikipedia ends up doing exactly what you need: telling the whole story from the beginning, while constantly updating it with the latest details.

A sub-genre of the Cleveland-kidnapping articles are personal reflections about why stories of captivity and sex-slavery are so arresting, both in real life and in fiction. Slate’s Emily Bazelon expresses just how disempowering this dark fascination can be.

These ordeals are our gothic horror stories, our Bluebeards come to life. I fight my own obsession with them because it fills me with morbid fear and not much else. … [The Silence of the Lambs] terrified me so much that I turned down a summer job I’d wanted as a caretaker on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Suddenly I couldn’t handle the idea of being alone and exposed.

What particularly disturbs Bazelon is the thought of being tamed, of reaching the point where you cooperate with your captor. She recommends the novel Room by Emma Donoghue. Being older and male, I flash back to the related horror of John Fowles’ The Collector, where insane fantasies gradually come to seem like plans any guy might carry out if he had the opportunity.

and whether to intervene in Syria

The situation in Syria just keeps getting worse. NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis estimates the number of killed around 100,000, with 1.4 million refugees leaving Syria and another million displaced within the country. That’s from an original population around 22.5 million (just slightly less than Iraq).

What started out as a revolution against a secular dictator has little by little turned into a religious war. The Assad government has never been particularly devout, but the Assad family is from the Alawite branch of Shia, which lives mainly in the coastal areas north of Lebanon. Alawites are 12% of a majority-Sunni country that also has a sizable Christian minority (13%). Alawites dominate Assad’s secret police, and the revolution’s initial support came largely from the inland Sunni areas.

Worse, the war is starting to look like Al Qaeda vs. Hezbollah, as the roles of the primary Sunni and Shia terrorist groups keep growing. The Guardian reports that “entire units [of the rebel Free Syrian Army] have gone over to [Al Qaeda-linked] Jabhat al-Nusra”.

“Fighters are heading to al-Nusra because of its Islamic doctrine, sincerity, good funding and advanced weapons,” said Abu Islam of the FSA’s al-Tawhid brigade in Aleppo. “My colleague who was fighting with the FSA’s Ahrar Suriya asked me: ‘I’m fighting with Ahrar Suriya brigade, but I want to know if I get killed in a battle, am I going to be considered as a martyr or not?’ It did not take him long to quit FSA and join al-Nusra. He asked for a sniper rifle and got one immediately.”

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s long-rumored involvement in the defense of the Assad regime is getting more explicit. Which is why Admiral Stavridis asks: “Who do you arm? And what happens to those weapons afterward?”

As reports increase that Assad is either using or planning to use chemical weapons, the pressure for the United States to intervene is growing. But Russia is Assad’s main backer, and China also blocks a UN resolution that an anti-Assad international coalition might gather around. So at best this would be another coalition-of-the-willing, not a true international police action.

I don’t pretend to know how things should play out, but I keep thinking of what General Petraeus said about Iraq in 2003: “Tell me how this ends.” American hawks have a bizarre tendency to think of war as a stabilizing force, when history shows the exact opposite. I’m plenty convinced that the situation in Syria is bad; what I’m waiting to hear is how American intervention makes it better.

Here’s Admiral Stavridis’ assessment:

We do have a fairly recent situation that’s somewhat similar to Syria, and that does not fill me with optimism: The Balkans in the 1990s. If you look at Yugoslavia — a nation that was constructed of different ethnic and religious groups. Tito departs the scene, and the region goes through a 10-year process throughout the 1990s. Several million are pushed across borders, requiring the intervention of tens of thousands of Western and Russian troops to bring the situation under control. I think that might be where Syria is headed.

but I wrote about Benghazi

I’ve been ignoring Benghazi, because as best I can tell there’s no there there. Like most things that turn out badly, you can look back and find bad planning, you can wish it had played out differently, and you can find examples of people spinning in hope that they won’t get blamed. But it has turned into yet another episode in the GOP’s Captain Ahab quest for The Scandal That Brings Down Obama. Just like Solyndra and Fast&Furious before it, Benghazi can’t carry that weight.

In Benghazi Hearings: Congress as Reality TV, I compare Republicans’ handling of Benghazi with Democrats’ treatment of 9-11, where there were plenty of conspiracy theories they could have winked at, but didn’t. I speculate about why: Democrats didn’t want to pander to a minority, because it takes a majority to win elections. But Republicans calculate differently, because their party has been taken over by the Conservative Entertainment Complex. A third of the country is a losing voter-block, but it makes one hell of an audience.

and you also might be interested in …

The death total in the collapse factory complex at Bangladesh has reached 1127 as the search for survivors ends. What I said last week here — that we need to act politically as citizens and not just individually as consumers — gets expanded and elaborated in an article I wrote for UU World.

Wednesday, Senator Whitehouse did something more liberals should do: He used religious rhetoric to denounce religion-based global-warming denial.

So why then, when we ignore His plain natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason, why then would God, the tidy-up God, drop in and spare us?  Why would He allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove, but protect us from this lesson?  Why would He allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would He allow cholera to kill in epidemics, until we figure out that the well water is contaminated?  The Earth’s natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God’s great gift to us, allowing us to learn, and build great things, and cure disease.  But God’s gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has, as an integral part of that gift, consequences.

And he closed by pointing out where the real opposition to protecting the planet comes from:

We need to face up to the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money.  The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt.  The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence.  The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting.  That’s it.  That’s it.  Not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality.  Nothing supports climate denial.  Nothing except money.

Meanwhile in the Halls of Mammon, the Wall Street Journal published Harrison Schmitt and William Happer’s “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide“. Unprecedented-in-human-history levels of atmospheric CO2, they tell us, “will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

So who are these guys? Botanists? Climate scientists? Specialists in global agriculture? No. One is a geologist and the other a physicist, and neither has done research in any field relevant to the claims they’re making. But the WSJ sees fit not to mention their most illuminating credentials: Both are connected to think tanks that get funding from the oil industry.

Media Matters debunks their article in detail, including this graphic from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Conservatives hate it when anyone implies they’re racists, but then they go and do stuff like this: The Heritage Foundation hired a new Ph.D. with a racist thesis, ignored his posting on white nationalist web sites, and made him a co-author on their study denouncing immigration reform.

Kevin Drum (extensively quoting Jonathan Bernstein — a political scientist not to be confused with economist Jared Bernstein) notes the “hack gap” between liberal and conservative economists. There are plenty of bogus correlation-implies-causation points liberals could be making that are comparable to the discredited Reinhart/Rogoff debt-kills-growth argument. For example: Medical costs have been slowing since ObamaCare was passed.

You don’t read stories like “Economist: ObamaCare Already Cutting Health Costs” in the newspaper, though, because liberal economists don’t bend that way. (The recession is the biggest reason for slowing healthcare inflation, and beyond that something is going on that we don’t understand yet.) But conservative economists do. Hence the apparent respectability of austerity economics despite the complete lack of evidence that it has anything to do with reality.

Speaking of austerity, the Washington Post showed its conservative economic bias in an article last Monday. The article reports (correctly) that revenue is up and spending is down, so the government won’t hit its debt limit until October — months later than originally predicted.

That might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break.

Say what? A smaller deficit is bad because it’s “unraveling Republican plans”?

If you’re up for some intellectual heavy lifting, Corey Robin’s article in The Nation about the relationship between Nietzsche and the Austrian school of free-market economists (Hayek, Von Mises) is very illuminating.

I had never thought much about whether the economic concept of “value” is connected to the moral concept of “values”, or what the will-to-power has to do with economic power. But the connections are fascinating.

Christian parents of 6th-graders who attend a public school in Arkansas are canceling the official class graduation ceremony (and holding an unofficial one in a church) because they’ve been informed that they can’t do what they did last year: open and close the ceremony with prayer.

In a classic example of privileged distress, the parents have managed to turn things around so that they are the persecuted ones. They’re not being exclusive; they’ve invited everyone to their Christian graduation ceremony. Says one parent: “We’re not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them. … We just want to take a stand for God because we felt like our rights were taken away.”

To everyone else, it’s obvious that the “right … taken away” from the Arkansas Christian parents is actually a special privilege that no other religious group in America has ever had: the option to insert their religious messages into government-sponsored programs. (I’m sure a lot of Buddhists and atheists also have some uplifting thought that they “just want people to know” and would like the government to provide a platform for.) American Christians are privileged, not persecuted; but their privileges are shrinking, so it feels like persecution to them.

I started with one sermon, so I’ll end with another one: Astronauts explain “the Overview Effect“, the way your point of view changes after you’ve seen the Big Blue Ball from space.

May 13, 2013 – 12:57 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Benghazi Hearings: Congress as Reality TV

I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to write about Benghazi without becoming part of the problem. So much nonsense has been spouted that simply saying “Benghazi” in certain circles is code for “impeach President Obama“. And that puts the rest of us in the don’t-think-about-an-elephant zone, where even explaining why something is nonsense reinforces it.

This week it got worse. Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held new hearings on Benghazi, showcasing what Chairman Darrell Issa referred to as “whistleblowers” who “revealed new information that undermines the Obama Administration’s assertion that there are no more questions left to answer about Benghazi.” (When has there ever been a subject with “no more questions left to answer”? If that’s the goal, hearings will continue forever.)

In anticipation of those hearings, apparently without knowing exactly what the witnesses would say, Mike Huckabee predicted on his Fox News show: “I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term.” (Senator Inhofe at least waited for the hearings to happen before he predicted impeachment.) Repeating a talking point I heard elsewhere on Fox and saw in comments all over the internet, Huckabee claimed Benghazi was “more serious” than Watergate “because four Americans did in fact die” — a statement that could only make sense if President Obama had been part of a plot to kill them. (As Bob Cesca has pointed out, American embassies and consulates were attacked 13 times during the Bush administration, with far a death total far beyond four. You probably don’t remember any of those incidents.)

If you listened to such predictions at length — and they were made 24/7 on Fox and the rest of the conservative media — you were primed to jump straight from “new Benghazi revelations” to “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

Then we get to Wednesday. Three State Department insiders did testify, and they did provide new information that made the Obama administration look bad. However, none of the new information is on the scale that the hype predicted, and much of it contradicted conspiracy theories popular on the Right. But their testimony did give an excuse for headlines about “new Benghazi revelations” that then fueled even more discussion of some of the same conspiracy theories that the testimony directly contradicted.

Let’s see if we can sort this out. Before listening to anybody’s commentary, I recommend looking at the Wikipedia article on the attack as a whole. Seeing the basic outline of what-happened-when will immunize you to a lot of the obvious nonsense being thrown around.

Like any event that turns out badly, Benghazi leaves three avenues for criticism: lack of preparation and precautions before the fact, debatable decisions made during the event, and inaccurate statements made after the event. (A comparison to the “other” 9-11 is useful: The government ignored warnings that attacks were imminent; in hindsight, you can imagine pulling first-responders out of the second tower as soon as the first one collapsed; and clean-up crews were given bad information about the toxicity of the debris.)

At Benghazi, you can argue that the State Department sent people into too dangerous a situation with too little protection. You can blame the administration for the deployment and Congress for not appropriating enough for security.

You can also wish that some kind of rescue force could have been sent to save the four American lives. That’s the gist of the most quoted testimony Wednesday: Gregory Hicks talked very emotionally about four special forces soldiers who wanted to get from Tripoli to Benghazi, but couldn’t. When you look at actual timelines, though, the transport plane they failed to get onto arrived at Benghazi after the four victims were already dead. Hicks also wished an F-16 could have flown over Benghazi as a show of force that might have discouraged the second attack. But the Pentagon has made it clear that the nearest planes, based in Italy, are not on 24-hour alert and actually could not have been scrambled (together with the needed in-air refueling tanker) in time.

And finally, you can criticize what the administration said about the attacks afterward. This is probably the most legitimate criticism, but it’s also the least consequential, because at that point the attack had already happened and the four Americans were already dead. You can accuse the administration of making misleading statements — like no administration ever did that before — but nothing in the aftermath is remotely criminal or actionable. (It’s even arguable that what we see in the changing talking points is an ordinary bureaucratic turf fight, unrelated to the November election.)

Only a charlatan can say that Benghazi is “worse than Watergate” and then focus on Susan Rice’s performance on the Sunday talk shows. Nobody died because of what Rice said on “Meet the Press”.

To me, a story that is every bit as important as as Benghazi itself is: What has happened to our national conversation that has caused us to discuss Benghazi in such an outrageous way? It’s tempting to say, “Oh, that’s just politics.” But it really isn’t, or at least it didn’t used to be. Try to imagine the Democrats in Congress treating 9-11 this way: “It’s far worse than Watergate; thousands of Americans are dead.”

There was certainly no lack of 9-11 conspiracy theories that Democrats could have winked and nodded at. Plenty of crazies put up web pages claiming that 9-11 was an inside job. One poll claimed that a third of the country believed the Bush administration had at least some role in letting the attacks happen.

Democrats in Congress could have pandered to that view. The model Republicans have used with Benghazi (and Solyndra and Fast & Furious, both of which have fizzled as scandals, despite being “worse than Watergate” for a time) would have worked just as well: Don’t endorse any specific theory with checkable details, but announce over-the-top general judgments that only the most extreme conspiracy theories could justify. Lump all the theories under one vague label (Benghazi!) and leave your rhetoric slippery, so that you can encourage all the nutcases without pinning yourself down. Turn every new detail into a promise that more revelations are coming.

The Democratic leadership never went down that road. 9-11 was a national tragedy, not a political football. There were hearings and investigations, and some people in both parties asked tough questions, but that’s where the comparison ends. Getting tagged as a Truther was the kiss-of-death in the Democratic establishment. (Ask Van Jones.)

But the Republican leadership has gone down that road with Benghazi. And the result is that lots of the Republican rank-and-file will tell you that Obama should be impeached for Benghazi!, even though they can’t quite say what Benghazi! means, beyond “four Americans are dead”. On the Reality-Based Community blog, Andrew Sabl spelled it out:

At this point in the career of a scandal, or attempted scandal, there are often disagreements over whether the charges are true. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a scandal where I don’t even know what they are.

Sabl described what specific charges would look like and challenged his readers to come up with some. None did.

Steve Benen made a similar point:

Eight months after the attack itself, I know Republicans think there’s been a cover-up, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is they think has been covered up. For all the talk of a political “scandal,” no one seems capable of pointing to anything specific that’s scandalous. For all the conspiracy theories, there’s no underlying conspiracy to be found.

And so Wednesday, Chairman Issa advertised “whistleblowers”. But he never said what exactly they blew the whistle on.

Again, compare to Democrats during the Bush administration. Lots of liberals called for Bush’s impeachment, but they offered specific grounds: breaking the laws against torture, or fabricating evidence to invade Iraq. You could argue with their reasoning or their evidence, but you knew what it was. Democrats in Congress could have made hard-to-pin-down code words out of Abu Ghraib or Katrina, and linked them (deniably) to wild conspiracy theories, but they didn’t.

It’s tempting to stop there, with the implication that Democrats in Congress have more honesty or civic virtue than Republicans. But I think there’s a deeper level to examine. Democrats didn’t pander to the third of the country that was open to a 9-11 conspiracy theories because it was only a third of the country. You can’t win elections with 33% of the vote.

Republicans are clearly not thinking that way. As I listen to Republican politicians talk about Benghazi, they seem to be making no effort at all to speak to the majority of Americans or to offer evidence that might convince a swing voter. They are talking to their base, which is probably about a third of the country.

What’s going on? I think David Frum had it right: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” The point of Benghazi! isn’t to deliver a majority of votes for the next Mitt Romney. The point is to get ratings for Fox and subscribers for Glenn Beck. The Conservative Entertainment Complex has taken control of the Republican Party and is managing the Party for its own purposes. A third of the country? It may not win many elections, but it’s a fabulous audience for an entertainer.

May 13, 2013 – 11:43 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The featured article this week is about Benghazi, which I’ve been reluctant to discuss because it has been so blown out of proportion that anything you say about it just makes it worse. But then the circular logic of conspiracy theories says that you’re participating in the cover-up. So I’ll talk about Benghazi, but I’ll call attention to the way the story is being driven by the conservative entertainment complex’s search for ratings and subscribers.

The weekly summary mentions what everyone has been talking about this week: the Cleveland abductions and whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria. You should also read Senator Whitehouse’s sermon denouncing global-warming denial as bad religion, and watch a 20-minute video of astronauts talking about “the Overview Effect” — how seeing the Earth from space changes your point of view.

May 13, 2013 – 8:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Enough

Three things are never satisfied. Yea, four say not “It is enough”:
the grave, and the barren womb, and the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire.

— Proverbs 30: 15-16

This week everybody was talking about industrial accidents

The death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh keeps rising, now at 650.

All week, liberal web sites have been full of socially-conscious shopping tips about what brands may or may not be involved in corner-cutting third-world factories like the ones that ordered their workers back into a building whose walls were cracking. But that’s a band-aid at best.

The fundamental problem here is that workers have no power. Without their jobs they’d be so desperately poor that going back into a crumbling factory seems less risky than standing up to their bosses. As long as that is true, all the incentives in the capitalist system work to circumvent the consciences of shoppers. The most “efficient” way for the system to deal with the current situation is not to improve safety, but to fool socially conscious consumers into thinking something is being done. The system will keep working on that “efficient” solution until it figures out a way to do it, because that’s where the money is.

Just ask Walmart, whose greenwashing campaign is working great for the corporate image, even if it isn’t doing much for the environment.

So sure, change your buying patterns in whatever way seems appropriate. But if you’re doing that instead of pushing for worker rights, the corporate power structure thanks you.

Oh, and in case you think this is just a third-world problem, don’t forget about the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas. We hear so much about the costs of government regulation, but the costs of non-regulation are even higher.

and Jason Collins

Basketball player Jason Collins became the first active professional athlete in a major American sport to announce he is gay. His article in Sports Illustrated talks about the pressure of hiding a major area of your life not just from the public, but from teammates as well.

Collins is a 12-season NBA veteran who has never been a star and seldom starts, but consistently fills a role a lot of teams need: a 7-footer who can come off the bench and provide defense and rebounding when your starting big guys are in foul trouble or need a rest. He played for the Celtics and Wizards last season and is currently a free agent. He is in his declining years as an athlete, but Nate Silver’s comparisons to similar players in the past indicates there was a somewhat better than 50-50 chance he would have a job next season before his announcement. (So whether he gets signed next year is not necessarily proof of either prejudice or favoritism.)

Comparisons to Jackie Robinson are appropriate in some ways but not others. Robinson was a uniquely talented athlete whose statistics (compiled over only half a career, since he was kept out of the majors until age 28) could have put him in the Hall of Fame even without his off-the-field significance. Obviously, Collins is not in that class. And I’m sure Robinson would have had an easier time if he could have played 12 years in the majors and then announced he was black.

Still, Collins’ announcement required courage. (Anyone who thinks it didn’t needs to explain why no one has done it before.) He has made himself a symbol. Like Robinson, Collins will be cheered and booed for what he is, not who he is.

Some commenters clearly resent the fact that Collins is being cheered by many. There’s an intentional cluelessness in Ben Shapiro’s tweet: “So Jason Collins is a hero because he’s gay?” What’s striking, though, is the way such views are being rejected in neutral forums. Check out the comments on this anti-Collins editorial by a small-town Illinois sports editor.

Naturally, this popular rejection of bigotry is being spun as some kind of unfair discrimination against bigots. There’s a name for that: privileged distress.

But the biggest significance of Collins’ announcement (and the generally positive response) is on the many closeted gay athletes in high school and college, like the one profiled by Sunday by the Portland Press Herald.

But I wrote about sustainable economics

I reviewed the recent book Enough is Enough in Prosperity Without Growth?

and you also might be interested in …

The observatory at the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii is recording atmospheric carbon dioxide approaching 400 parts per million “for the first time in human history“. The graph tells the story.

This re-emphasizes a point I’ve made before: When someone says they don’t believe in global warming, or don’t believe humans cause it, ask them which part of the argument they doubt. Here are the steps:

  1. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (Duh.)
  2. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up more-or-less continuously since the Industrial Age got rolling. (That’s this graph.)
  3. Atmospheric carbon dioxide warms the Earth through a greenhouse effect. (Infra-red radiation that would ordinarily dissipate into outer space gets reflected back to the planet surface.)

Given these rising carbon levels, which we can measure directly, global warming is what a rational person would expect. The argument against it needs to be a little stronger than just “maybe something else will happen”.

The public got its first look at the George W. Bush Library this week. I had been hearing about the Decision Point Theater game, where visitors supposedly hear the kind of advice Bush got at some key point in his administration, then get to make a decision. Now we finally see what that looks like.

You know what it looks like? The whole Bush administration. The single thing most typical of Bush was his shameless spin — rhetoric that made you think of one thing, but then if you challenged it as a lie, his people would explain that it was true because of something else entirely. So Saddam “supported international terrorist organizations” — which was supposed to make you think he was helping Al Qaeda plan the next 9-11. But if you pushed back you’d hear about connections to Hamas or Abu Nidal, not Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. They’d talk about Al Qaeda affiliates “operating in Iraq”, but if you pushed you’d find they were talking about a Kurdish zone Saddam had lost control of. And so on.

Bush is still spinning in exactly the same ways. Rachel Maddow shows clips from the DPT section on invading Iraq, calls BS on it, and then comments:

The case to invade Iraq was not “mistaken”. The case to invade Iraq was cooked up. It was a hoax perpetrated on the American people. And they are still cooking it up, right now.

Here’s one of those polls that makes you wonder if people really believe what they say. By a 44%-31% margin, Republicans agree with the statement “In the next few years, an armed rebellion might be necessary to protect our liberties.” (Democrats disagree 61%-18%.)

If I actually believed that, I think I’d be doing more than just stockpiling assault rifles. (After all, the government has tanks and planes.) I’d for sure have my escape route out of the country planned and a stash of money at my planned destination. Are people really doing that kind of stuff? In large numbers? Or has answering polls become part of some big fantasy game?

If there’s anyplace in America that might need an armed rebellion to maintain democracy, it’s North Carolina. The Republican leadership in the legislature is so intent on getting rid of the state’s renewable energy program that they declared victory in a voice vote and refused requests to have votes actually counted.

Mitch McConnell is catching on to this social-media thing. If your campaign video is getting as many hits as you want, you can buy the extra hits.

I often find myself telling non-religious people that right-wing Christians really aren’t as bad as they think. Well, the science education at Blue Ridge Christian Academy in South Carolina is worse than you think.

It’s been a heavy week. Let’s end with some entertainment:

May 6, 2013 – 1:28 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

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Prosperity Without Growth?

When you take a very-long-term view of the future of civilization, the one option that seems most unlikely is that we can continue the patterns of the last few centuries: an ever-increasing population consuming ever-more stuff, using ever-more natural resources to produce it, and leaving ever-more waste products for the planet to absorb.

Futurists embarrass themselves when they predict precisely when and how that pattern will break, but still, it defies my imagination to picture how this could all continue indefinitely down the millennia. Eventually — whether by wise planning, cataclysm, alien conquest, or the return of Jesus — the exponential growth is going to stop.*

What will that look like? If you stipulate those steady-state conditions — stable population, stable resource use, and each generation leaving the planet’s natural environment more-or-less the way they found it — what kind of society can you construct? Can you come up with one that has a place for people more-or-less like us? Or does the whole concept involve making over the human character completely? Could the people in such a no-growth society feel prosperous? Or is prosperity-without-growth a contradiction?

A number of fairly smart, reasonable people have been asking those questions for a while now, and they’re starting to come up with some visions — sketchy ones, to be sure, but sketched-out well enough that the rest of us should start paying attention. One such vision is in Enough is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill.

Disclaimers. Growth has gotten to be such a religion that no-growth smacks of heresy. Like most heresies, it has been caricatured by the faithful to such a degree that any discussion has to start with a few denials.

Two examples of non-growing economies leap to mind: growth-oriented economies that are failing to grow (as the American economy has failed since the housing bubble burst), and aboriginal hunter-gatherer economies. The first example is characterized by despair, lack of opportunity,  and increasing poverty; the second, by discomfort, lack of technology, and vulnerability to disease and famine. Aboriginal societies may live in harmony with Nature, but they also live at the mercy of Nature. One thing you can say for the global economy is that Iowa can have a drought without Iowans starving to death.

Neither example is what the no-growth visionaries are proposing. A society without growth could continue to have antibiotics and the internet — and could even continue innovating, as long as the innovations-as-a-whole didn’t increase the consumption of resources or the production of waste.

A growth-oriented economy that doesn’t grow is the worst of both worlds. It consumes resources unsustainably, and yet fails to provide opportunity and hope. If that were the goal, it could easily be achieved: Just instruct the Fed to keep interest rates high enough to choke off new investment.

The challenge, though, is quite different: To envision a steady-state relationship between Nature and a stable population of humans, while providing those humans the opportunity to lead satisfying lives.

Outline. The book is in three parts. The first discusses the overall idea of “enough”. The second breaks this down into specific areas: How could we achieve a stable population? How could a non-growing economy deal with poverty? What would banking and investment look like? And the third discusses strategies for changing the culture and the political system.

Problem-solving attitude. Because it covers so many topics and is intended to further an open-ended discussion, the book really can’t be condensed. Its strength is in its details, not in a sound bite that gets elaborated over 200 pages.

But the other important aspect of the book is the attitude it projects: It takes the problem of planetary depletion seriously and approaches it with a problem-solving attitude. So it is not a jeremiad, or a prophesy of doom, or a denial that anything really needs to change — three categories that take in most of the debate on these topics. It’s easy to find reasons why a stable economy can’t happen, but comparatively rare to find people who accept that it must happen eventually, and then bring a problem-solving attitude to the question of how.

A number of factors evolved with the idea of economic growth, and they will have to change or be replaced to achieve stability: a money-creating banking system, measuring the economy by GDP, and corporations devoted to constant growth are just a few of the ones discussed in more detail. An example of the kind of change a stable economy would need: Much of what is done today by profit-seeking corporations could be done by consumer-owned co-ops focused on providing service rather than producing an ever-increasing profit for investors.**

The poor held hostage. To me, the most significant argument against a stable economy says, “Morally, how can we rein in economic growth when so many people still don’t have enough?” My problem with that question: I have lost faith that the capitalist economy will ever provide enough for everybody, now matter how high global GDP gets. Over the last few decades, the top 1% has gotten better and better at capturing economic growth for themselves. From the point of view of a CEO seeking higher profits for his corporation, a better life for the poor is an inefficiency to be avoided. Across-the-board wage increases are a capitalist nightmare, not a fulfillment of the capitalist system.

In the Dietz/O’Neill view, we need to turn this kind of thinking around: Rather than continuing to grow the economy in hopes that some of the new consumables will filter down to the poor, we need to solve the problem of inequality so that we can achieve a stable economy. Poverty is a political problem, not an economic problem. Growing the economy without changing the politics won’t solve it.

Rather than putting the entire burden of proof on the no-growth vision, I think we also have to stop accepting a “someday” vision of ending poverty through growth. Anyone who makes the anti-poverty argument for growth needs to explain exactly how growth is going to help the poor, and offer a projection of how much more growth it will take to eradicate poverty before we can stabilize the economy’s toll on the planet.

Trustworthy governance. Again and again, I was struck by how the Dietz/O’Neill vision requires that we work together as a species. The easiest way to envision that unity is via some Hunger-Games-style tyranny, which no one (least of all Dietz and O’Neill) wants. But even the most free and democratic vision of a stable economy depends on establishing some trustworthy global institutions.

For example, a global cap-and-trade system to stabilize the CO2 in the atmosphere would work only if people can’t cheat anywhere in the world, if the tradable CO2 certificates can’t be counterfeited, and if you can’t “earn” them by creating bogus carbon-offset projects — trees that are never actually planted, etc.

Similarly, population could be stabilized through incentives and voluntary cooperation rather than one-child mandates and forced sterilizations. But someone would have to monitor all that and adjust the incentives accordingly, and the rest of us would have to trust the fairness of that monitoring agency.

This is the part I worry about most: If you have money and power and you want to derail the vision of a stable future, all you really have to do is create distrust. What could be easier?

Not a lone voice. Another striking thing about Enough is Enough is the extent to which it builds on the work of many others. For example, the view of money, debt, and banking will be familiar to Sift readers from David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5,000 years and Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.

I’m sure many people will look on this as cranks quoting other cranks, but I don’t. I’m starting to see a unifying view develop.

Virtual consumption. Futurists have to be wary of a technology-will-save-us argument, which is always too easy and is often a mirage. But I think Dietz and O’Neill miss one important way that technology can contribute to a sustainable future: virtualization. We’re already seeing some of it: My book collection is gradually turning into patterns of electrical charges rather than shelves of paper.

Dietz and O’Neill point out (appropriately) that such changes are meaningless if they just make paper cheaper and allow somebody else to consume more of it. But recent sci-fi (starting with Snow Crash and continuing into more recent works like The Quantum Thief or Ready Player One) points to the greater possibilities.

You can think of consumption as serving four purposes: survival, comfort, entertainment, and competition for status. It is easy to imagine “enough” when we talk about survival and comfort, and maybe even entertainment. But the really open-ended consumption happens when we compete for status. I can imagine wanting a boat for entertainment, but the only reason to want a 400-foot yacht is to out-do the guys who can only afford 300-foot yachts. (As far back as the Roman sumptuary laws, the essence of the moral argument to limit consumption is that some people are starving so that others can raise their status.)

Survival and comfort require real-world resources. (You can’t eat pixels.) But if the culture evolved so that we got most of our entertainment inside virtual worlds and competed for status there, then a sustainable economy would be much easier to achieve.

* Space travel is sometimes presented as a far-future solution. While I can imagine a Noah’s-Ark-style spaceship seeding another planet with humans, I can’t imagine inter-stellar travel ever being so cheap that emigration has a significant impact on Earth’s population. (At least that’s not a future I’m willing to count on.) So Earth’s remaining citizens would still have to come to terms with the planet’s limitations.

Think about the colonization of the New World. Except for a few temporary situations (like the Irish Potato Famine), Europe’s population continued going up, even as it sent more and more people to America. Europe today is more crowded than ever.

** This got me thinking. Back when cable TV was being established, we all took for granted the model of a privately financed network made economically feasible by granting a monopoly. But the New-Deal-era model of the rural electric co-ops also would have worked: government-guaranteed loans to establish consumer-owned co-ops. If we’d done that, every year you’d get to vote on the leadership and policy of your cable system.

May 6, 2013 – 10:57 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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