Obligations

We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.

— unnamed Apple executive

I’ll bet that guy … does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use [long] supply chains.

— Clyde Prestowitz

In this week’s sift:

  • Where the Jobs Are and Why. Suddenly in the last two weeks, we’ve seen an amazing run of articles about manufacturing, sparking lots of insightful commentary. Fulfilling the President’s pledge to bring manufacturing jobs home will be even more complicated than it looks.
  • Barack X, the Fictional President. Bill Mahr, Jay Rosen, and the New Yorker explain what Obama is up against, and the challenge Mitt Romney has so far dodged.
  • The Return of Death Panels and other Short Notes. No, the ACA doesn’t say old people can’t have brain surgery. Poor English boots a candidate off an Arizona ballot. Do Newt’s infidelities predict a strong presidency? The world’s cutest car. What’s wrong with corporate raiding? Occupy didn’t invent the 1%. Dead people didn’t vote in SC. And Elizabeth Warren explains what’s wrong with Mitt’s taxes.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Property vs. Freedom had 245 views. The most-clicked link was to Democracy Now’s episode on the McDonalds’ coffee case.
  • This week’s challenge. If I’m feeling too challenged to think of a challenge, maybe we all could use a week off.
January 30, 2012 – 1:45 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Where the Jobs Are and Why

In the State of the Union, President Obama emphasized manufacturing, committing his administration to “bring jobs back home”. Perhaps coincidentally, the last two weeks have given us an amazing run of revealing articles about manufacturing: what gets made where and why, who gets a job making it, and how they are treated.

The New York Times focused two articles (Wednesday and January 21) on Apple’s manufacturing in China. This American Life centered an episode on Mike Daisey, whose recently-opened one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” includes much material from his interviews with the iPhone assembly workers in Shenzhen. The current issue of Atlantic includes “Making it in America“, an article that starts with two South Carolina factory workers and goes all the way up the chain to the global pressures on their CEO.

These articles became the raw material for insightful comment from Paul Krugman, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, Slate’s Matt Yglesias, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Alternet’s Robert Cruickshank, Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz,  and many others.

Background. Instead of trying to reproduce all those ideas, I’m going to assume that you’ve either picked up the buzz or are willing to chase some of the links I’ve provided. Doubtlessly you know the general picture: While America continues to create market-dominating companies like Apple or Google, the number of American jobs they provide doesn’t compare with market-dominating American companies of the past like General Electric or Ford.

The reason why is simple: While much of the design and management happens in America, most of the physical products are manufactured in low-wage economies like China. Those factories that remain in America are highly automated, so that our manufacturing employment plummets even as our manufacturing output continues to rise. America still makes a lot of stuff, it’s just not made by people.

The following graphs come by way of the bonddad blog:

Why? The most interesting fact to glean from the articles is that it’s not just the wages. Yes, workers in Shenzhen are cheap, but two other factors are also important.

First, what the NYT article calls “flexibility”. That’s a euphemism for domination. Chinese workers are completely under the thumb of employers like Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple and most of Apple’s competitors.

Almost every commenting article repeated the story of Foxconn workers being rousted out of their dorms in the middle of the night to make a last-minute change to the iPhone. Try to imagine doing that in an American factory.

“Flexibility” also isn’t inhibited by worker safety. If the factory managers come up with a new process, nobody has to analyze it or approve it. They just do it. If it later turns out that workers have been inhaling disabling neurotoxins — one of Mike Daisey’s examples — that’s a shame.

Second,

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The overall result is that Apple gets exactly the product it wants faster — not just cheaper — than if it manufactured in America.

Everything we’ve been told is wrong. Again and again, I’ve read about “the death of distance”. It’s not supposed to matter where things are done now. But in fact it does. Once industries get clustered in a particular place, it’s not easy to move them.

And once they’ve moved away, it’s not easy to move them back. It’s not just the supply chain. Worker skill is a chicken-and-egg problem. No company is going to open a factory someplace where they can’t find the skilled workers they need, but no worker is going to get training on the off-chance that a factory will open someplace that doesn’t have any working factories now.

Free-market economists have encouraged us to look at every job in every factory as an individual issue. If Mexicans or Indonesians can do a job cheaper, move it there. We weren’t supposed to ask what all those individual decisions added up to. That would be “industrial policy“, which was supposed to be bad, because government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.

But the Chinese did worry about the big picture, and now they have all the manufacturing jobs. Prestowitz says:

Asia didn’t always have these supply chains. They were initially all in the United States. Asia got them because its governments and corporations worked hand in glove to get them. There is no reason why the United States government can’t work hand in glove with corporations to get at least some of them back. It’s not rocket science.

Ignorance is Bliss. Bliss has market value. The NYT and Mike Daisey have done a great job cataloging worker abuses in the Foxconn plants in Shenzhen. It’s obvious how to fix this: Consumers put pressure on Apple (and its rivals, who are no better); Apple puts pressure on Foxconn; and Foxconn changes how it treats its workers.

Why doesn’t that happen? Again, it’s not because there’s not enough money. The NYT says:

various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

Cruickshank (a self-confessed Apple fan) comments, “I would personally pay $65 more per iPhone if I knew it was going to American workers.”

Lots of people would, I imagine. But picture how that would work: Apple offers an alternative all-American iPhone or even a no-workers-abused Chinese iPhone, and sells it right next to the current iPhone for a bit more money.

Now everyone who buys the original feels like a scumbag. Worse, as you stand there dithering about whether workers’ rights or American jobs are worth $65 to you, you’re not having the retail experience the Apple Store is trying to create. The whole joy of Apple products is that they are magic. Picturing the real process that creates them breaks the spell.

Up and down the supply chain, everyone is happier not knowing the extent to which they benefit from the mistreatment of Chinese workers. The market — which just wants to make consumers happy — has been very efficient at providing that ignorance.

“Until now,” you might be thinking. Yes, the recent publicity has brought attention back to the responsibility we shoulder when we buy things: Everyone in the supply chain justifies their actions by claiming that they just want to please the consumer. So when you plunk down your Visa, you’re signing your name to the whole process. If enough of us now decide we want to deal with that responsibility, surely the market will provide some way for us to do it. Won’t it?

Here’s the problem: The market responds to consumers’ true desires, the ones that motivate our purchases, not the desires we claim to have or wish we had. And in our heart-of-hearts, don’t we really just want this responsibility to go away? Don’t we want the Apple Store to go back to being a high-tech Eden, where everything appears by magic?

If that’s what we really want, that’s what the market will provide. Some tiny improvements will happen in the factories, and each link of the chain will exaggerate that change, until the nerd at the Genius Bar can swear up-and-down that it’s all fine now. The workers in Shenzhen are all happy little Oompa-Loompas.

The mechanisms are already in place. Apple already has a shiny code of conduct for its suppliers. Foxconn already has a statement of workers’ rights that satisfies Apple. Supervisors on the factory floor already claim they adhere to that statement. And still workers are maimed or die or commit suicide. The NYT covers it:

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

And like all global manufacturers, Apple is constantly squeezing its suppliers’ profit margins.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

How exactly is that going to stop?

Degrees of moral separation. Atlantic’s Making It In America by Adam Davidson starts by comparing Maddy and Luke, two workers making fuel injectors in a Standard Motor Parts factory in South Carolina. Both are dedicated and hard-working, but Luke is skilled and Maddy is not.

Luke’s job, the article claims, is relatively secure, but Maddy will be let go as soon as machinery costs drop far enough to make replacing her worthwhile. In the meantime, machine costs put a lid on her wages, and she has nowhere to go.

A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

But Standard is profitable, so Davidson raises the same question Apple faces: Why couldn’t the company charge a little more or make a little less money and show some loyalty to its people and to America?

(NYT quotes an Apple executive saying: “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” To which Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz replies: “Apple’s products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I’ll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.”)

So Davidson talks to the guy he thinks could make that decision: Standard’s CEO Larry Sills, grandson of the founder.

It turns out that Sills doesn’t believe he has the power to do Maddy any favors. Sills sees himself as the slave of two masters: the consumer, who looks for price and quality, but doesn’t seem to know or care how the auto parts are made; and the stockholder, who likewise just wants earnings to rise and doesn’t seem to care how it happens.

Once again, we’re seeing one of the major structural problems of the modern economy: We all live many degrees of separation away from the moral consequences of our decisions.

If you had to go down to a Shenzhen-style sweatshop to buy your iPhone, or if owning mutual fund shares meant that you occasionally had to fire somebody like Maddy face-to-face, you might think twice about it. But instead you are wowed at the Apple Store and every month you get a nice clean IRA statement in the mail.

You’re happier that way, and the Powers That Be are happier. And that’s why nothing changes.

January 30, 2012 – 1:41 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

Barack X, the Fictional President

One of the most surprising things The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza learned from the Obama administration’s unreleased memos was this: President Obama really believed he could get Republican support if he based his programs on Republican programs, like Romney’s healthcare plan or Bush Sr.’s cap-and-trade.

Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure.

So how did they do it? Bill Mahr explains:

Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X, and he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who’s coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe, or worse yet Saul Alinsky.

And this is how politics has changed. You used to have to run against an actual candidate. But now you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate.

In the end, Obama couldn’t even get Mitt Romney’s support for Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan, or John McCain’s support for the cap-and-trade system resembling the one in the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003.

Jay Rosen explains why not:

the [Republican] party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. …

When I say “reality-based Republicans” I mean those who recognize the danger in trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes. … [T]he tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. …

Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012, is a reality-based Republican who cannot run as a reality-based Republican because he thinks he cannot win that way. Jon Huntsman’s campaign is the proof of that calculation. All the candidates, including Romney, have to make gestures toward the alternative knowledge system, with its own facts.

If those “facts” include that the Romney-inspired healthcare plan is an unconstitutional government takeover of the entire system and a step towards socialism, then Romney has to go along if he wants to win. He also has to pretend global warming is dubious, austerity will create jobs, and that we need to get our troops back into Iraq.

If I could raise one off-the-record issue with Mitt and count on getting honest answers, this is what it would be: What’s your Bizarro-world exit strategy? Do you picture bringing your campaign back to reality at some point, say, after the convention? Or if you run a fantasy-based fall campaign and win, do you plan to govern realistically? If so, how do you plan to get your base to put up with it?

Or if not, how do you plan to get Reality to put up with it?

January 30, 2012 – 1:01 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Return of Death Panels and other short notes

Recently this topic showed up on my church’s email discussion list, so I know it’s making the rounds: An anonymous “brain surgeon” called into Mark Levin’s radio show in November, claiming to have seen a unpublished document from HHS describing “what the Obama health care plan would be for advanced neurosurgery for patients over 70.” He said:

Basically what the document stated was that if you were over 70 and you’d come into an emergency room and you’re on government supported health care, that you’d get “comfort care”.

When Levin responds “So Sarah Palin was right. We’re going to have these death panels, aren’t we?” the caller says “Oh, absolutely.”

Tuesday morning, Mariefla on Daily Kos went looking for details after she heard an outraged doctor raise the issue in a hospital staff meeting. She found this letter on the web site of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. The AANS notes “factual inaccuracies” and says the caller was not a neurosurgeon, they are not aware of any such document, and the AANS conference in which the caller supposedly saw this document never happened. They’ve asked Levin to remove the podcast from his web site, which he hasn’t.

HHS unequivocally told rumor-investigating Snopes.com: “No such document exists and no such presentation took place.”

It’s unsettling to realize how easy this kind of fraud is. Anybody can call into a radio show claiming to be anything and to have seen anything. (“I’m a retired Air Force captain and I used to work at Area 51 with the wrecked alien spaceships.”) If their story supports somebody’s propaganda, a well-oiled machine sends it rocketing around the country.

Alejandrina Cabrera was running for City Council in the Arizona border town of San Luis when her ability to speak English became an issue — not a political issue, a legal issue. The mayor filed a lawsuit remove her from the ballot.

The Enabling Act that set up Arizona’s government in 1910 says:

ability to read, write, speak, and understand the English language sufficiently well to conduct the duties of the office without the aid of an interpreter shall be a necessary qualification for all state officers and members of the state legislature.

And Arizona voters declared English the official language in in 2006. However, 90% of San Luis residents speak mainly Spanish. Cabrera is running to represent them, even though she speaks only “survival level English” according to a linguistics professor appointed by a Yuma county judge to test her. Wednesday, the judge ordered her name removed from the ballot.

Reader comments on the various news stories fall into two camps: Those supporting the lawsuit go on to indict local high schools for allowing her to graduate with such poor command of English, while those opposing it want the voters, not the courts, to judge candidates’ qualifications for office.

Fox News psychologist/consultant Keith Ablow explains to us why Newt Gingrich’s infidelities will make him “a strong president“. Steven Colbert observes: “Somebody without Dr. Ablow’s psychiatric insight might misdiagnose Newt as a sociopathic pussyhound.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I can’t predict how practical the Hiriko electric car will be, but it’s got an off-the-scale cute factor. If I were 3 feet tall, I’d really want this half-size prototype.

Until this week, I’ve been having trouble explaining exactly what bugs me about Mitt Romney’s corporate-raider career at Bain Capital. Sure, it looks bad to walk away with a pile of money from deals that leave so many other people unemployed or otherwise holding the bag, but wasn’t he serving the overall cause of efficiency? Doesn’t the profit come from re-purposing assets to more productive uses?

Then a Chris Hayes tweet pointed me to this 1988 paper co-authored by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Starting with the idea that a corporation is a “nexus of contracts, some implicit, between shareholders and stakeholders”, the paper argues that hostile corporate takeovers are profitable because the new owners can renege on the corporation’s implicit commitments to workers, suppliers, retirees, and the surrounding community. The process is “wealth redistributing, not wealth creating”.

It goes on to argue that corporations’ ability to make trustworthy implicit commitments has real economic value. But corporate raids destroyed that trust for all corporations, because now all parties know that managers who try to keep such commitments when they become unprofitable are likely to be raided and replaced.

So Romney’s profit at Bain comes not just from efficiency, but also from selling the social capital of the entire corporate system.

Romney bristles whenever anyone mentions the 99% and the 1%. That’s “dividing America,” he says.

Privileged classes always blame social divisions on the people who call attention to them, rather than the people who cause them and benefit from them. The Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings are honored after they are safely dead, but while they are alive they are denounced as troublemakers. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is his response to those who accused him of creating “tension” between the races.

So, did dead people really vote in South Carolina? No.

And finally, because I never get tired of listening to Elizabeth Warren:
Vodpod videos no longer available.

January 30, 2012 – 12:49 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (4)

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Pulling Up the Stakes

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

– Rousseau, On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

While property in some form is possible without liberty, the contrary is inconceivable. 

—  Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom

In this week’s sift:

  • Property vs. Freedom. You won’t often hear the debate over SOPA/PIPA phrased that way, because Property is supposed to be Freedom’s inseparable partner. But they actually have a fairly contentious relationship.
  • The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes. A wild week of Republican politics tempts me into covering the horserace instead of the issues.
  • We Need More Bureaucrats and other short notes. IRS budget cuts increased the deficit and hurt customer service. One million signatures to recall Walker. Obama wants to see Betty White’s birth certificate. That famous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit might not be what you think. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Four Fantasy Issues of the Right got 167 views. Under the radar, Why I’m Not a Libertarian continues to rack up about 80-90 views a week, and is over 20,000 now. The most-clicked link was What If Tim Tebow Were Muslim?.
  • This week’s challenge. Don’t let the media filter tomorrow’s State of the Union address for you. Watch it yourself before anybody tells you what’s in it.

The sequel to Escalating Bad Faith got crowded out again.

January 23, 2012 – 1:51 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Property vs. Freedom

If you strip it down to its essence, the battle over SOPA/PIPA is Property vs. Freedom: the media companies want to defend their intellectual property, while Internet-users want to defend their freedom.

You won’t often hear it characterized that way in the corporate media, though, because Property and Freedom are supposed to be inseparable, like Love and Marriage. Sing it, Frank:

This I tell you, brother:
You can’t have one without the other.

Or, as Ron Paul more prosaically put it in 2004:

The rights of all private property owners … must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

Simply saying the phrase “Property vs. Freedom” marks you as some kind of extreme Leftist. All right-thinking people know that Property can’t possibly oppose Freedom.

Last summer I wrote Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say. Well, here’s another one: The relationship between Property and Freedom is highly contentious. (On second thought, the Love-and-Marriage parallel isn’t that bad.)

Get off my lawn. Why is that relationship so contentious? It’s simple: The essence of Property is the right to tell people to get off your lawn, and to sic the police on them if they don’t. If you can’t do that, it’s not really your lawn.

So naturally Property increases Freedom for the owner. Once you have the right to sic the police on trespassers, your lawn becomes available for cookouts, gardening, minimally supervised children, and all sorts of other expressions of freedom.

But look at it from the other side. What if you’re constantly being forced off other people’s lawns and own no property you can retreat to? How free is that?

Free to be Jim Crow. Now read the Ron Paul quote in its full context. On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Wikipedia entry, text of bill), which banned racial discrimination in “any place of public accommodation” (like the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro) and in hiring, Paul portrayed the law in this light:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.

In other words, business owners lost some of their right to tell black people to get off their lawns. Definitely it was a diminishment of Property. But was Paul right that it was a net loss of Freedom, or did the freedom gained by blacks more than make up for the freedom lost by businesses?

Why is it your lawn anyway? Post-slavery America may look like an exceptional case, but actually it was just a particularly egregious example of a general rule: Never in the history of humankind has private property been fairly distributed. By the time American blacks stopped being property themselves, all the good stuff was already owned by whites.

Welcome to Freedom, suckers! Now get off my lawn.

One standard pro-property response to this point is that in a free economy property tends to move to the people who earn it through hard work and ingenuity, so mal-distributions even out over time. Maybe the newly-freed slaves did get a raw deal, but that was a long time ago. According to this point of view, by now their great-great-grandchildren must be pretty much where they deserve to be.

But far from an exception, the race problem is a convenient color-coding that makes the general historical pattern easier to see. Michael Hudson described that pattern like this:

The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage.

In other words, the typical trend is not for things to even out after a few generations, but for unfair distributions of property to get moreso. Sing it, Billie:

Them that’s got shall have.
Them that’s not shall lose.

The only exception I can think of is post-World-War-II America and Europe, where property tended for decades to become more evenly distributed. But far from the natural workings of a free economy, that outcome required inheritance taxes, progressive income taxes, public education, laws to break up monopolies and protect unions, a significant social safety net, and many other government interventions.

Freedom and public property. America’s two greatest symbols of freedom are the Cowboy and the Indian, both of whom own little, but live in a vast public common where they can hunt in the forests, drink in the streams, and swim in the lakes without worrying about ownership.

Contrast that freedom with economic blogger Noah Smith‘s account of downtown Tokyo.

there are relatively few free city parks. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). … outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money. Public buildings generally have no drinking fountains; you must buy or bring your own water. Free wireless? Good luck finding that!

Does all this private property make me feel free? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite – the lack of a “commons” makes me feel constrained.

To me the lesson is clear: For all but the fabulously wealthy, freedom is maximized by balancing public and private property. It’s nice to have your own lawn, but public property you can’t be chased off of — roads, parks, sidewalks — is even more important. It’s also nice to have public access to water and sanitation, and not to be at the proprietor’s mercy whenever you enter a store, restaurant, or theater.

Intellectual property. Applying that logic to intellectual property gets you to the kind of public/private balance we used to have: Copyrights and patents grant creators and inventors valuable temporary rights, while producing a rich public common allowing fair use of recent creations. And since everything eventually becomes public, a balanced copyright law increases the value of the public domain by encouraging the creation of works that otherwise might be impractical.

Protests of SOPA and PIPA make no sense until you understand that we have lost that balance.

Consider how the music-downloading problem arose: By controlling distribution, media corporations inserted themselves as toll-collectors between creators and users. You’d pay $20 for a CD you could easily copy for $1, knowing that precious little of the difference made it back to the artist. Napster-users had few moral scruples against “stealing” music because the system was already amoral. (Call it the Leverage Principle: “The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.”)

Also, endless copyrights have dammed the flow of material into the public domain. When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928, he was granted a 28-year copyright with the prospect of renewing for another 28 years. Evidently, the prospect of Mickey entering the public domain in 1984 didn’t deter Walt from creating him.

But every time that expiration date approaches, the Disney Corporation leans on Congress to extend the length of existing copyrights. Tom Bell illustrates how copyrights lengthen as Mickey ages.

Unless corporate money loses its primacy in our political system, nothing created after 1928 will ever enter the public domain. Unlike Mickey, the vast majority of that cultural treasure-trove will be orphan works that no one has the right to use. (For a book-length treatment of these issues, see The Public Domain, which the author has graciously put in the public domain.)

As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out, extending an existing copyright does nothing to promote creativity or otherwise advance the public interest:

No matter what the US Congress does with current law, George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.

In short, the Infosphere is slouching towards Tokyo. Gradually the public common is shrinking towards the day when almost everything of value will be corporately owned.

SOPA/PIPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the equivalent Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate are two more corporate attempts to buy laws that serve the private interest but not the public interest. (Interestingly, Politico covers the SOPA protests as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as if the public were not involved.)

These laws would make search engines, internet-service providers, and other middlemen responsible for blocking access to web sites that copyright-holders claim are pirating their works. Since they bear no comparable responsibility for defending fair use, their safest course will be to block any site Disney or Time-Warner complains about.

Consider the quotes and images in this article. Traditionally, they would be considered fair use. But what if somebody complains? Is WordPress really going to pay a lawyer to read this article and write an opinion? Or are they just going to shut the Weekly Sift down?

The protests worked, for now. Websites like Wikipedia went dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA/PIPA, and a massive public response forced many lawmakers to change their positions.

But it’s naive to think that’s the end of the story. Corporate money is relentless. When public outrage dies down, we’ll soon see the basic ideas of SOPA/PIPA back in some other form.

In addition to protests, we need a fundamental rethinking of intellectual property. As long as we’re just talking about theft and how to prevent it, we’re missing the point. The right question is how we restore the public/private balance to intellectual property.

We need intellectual property lines that are widely seen as legitimate. When we have that, the problems of trespassing and theft will become much, much smaller and easier to police.

January 23, 2012 – 1:47 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes

I don’t want to make a habit of focusing the Sift on the horserace for the Republican nomination. I often criticize the corporate media for indulging in the horserace’s drama and conflict (as if democracy were really all about personalities) and ignoring the serious business of governing the world’s most powerful nation (as if public issues were just bludgeons for candidates to swing at each other). I don’t want to fall into the same trap.

But then a week like this past one blows away all my virtuous intentions.

After New Hampshire, Mitt Romney’s nomination was supposed to be inevitable, and South Carolina was about to give him the final stamp of approval. But by Saturday, Carolina’s landslide winner had turned into a Newt. And by this morning the witchcraft is nearly complete and Gingrich is leading the first post-SC poll of Florida as well.

InTrade still gives Romney a 62% chance of being the nominee, but that’s crashing from over 90%. If that first poll holds up and Gingrich really does win Florida, he’ll be the frontrunner.

A number of things came together to cast this spell: Gingrich turned a devastating personal story into a counter-attack against the media. He also effectively dog-whistled to racists, taking advantage of an almost all-white SC primary electorate. Plus, Romney fumbled the tax-return issue (Ruth Marcus said he was “choosing to pull off the Band-Aid with excruciating slowness”) and did a poor job of parrying attacks related to health care and abortion.

In the short run, Sarah Palin was right about ABC’s interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife on Thursday. Mrs. Gingrich II claimed that Newt asked for an “open marriage” so that he could continue his affair with the future Mrs. Gingrich III. Palin said the interview would

incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction, because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more.

Gingrich played it that way in Thursday evening’s debate, launching a crowd-pleasing counter-attack against CNN’s John King. Gingrich already had momentum, but that debate performance locked up South Carolina for him. His anti-media tirade was the lead on all the news shows (even though I thought Rick Santorum had a much stronger debate overall).

Remember, though, that the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain also gave Cain a short-term boost. In the long run, I think the “open marriage” phrase will stick in the public mind and be a slow-but-steady drag on Gingrich. At a minimum, his rivals have a new rhetorical hook to use. Expect to hear metaphors about Newt’s open relationship with the truth, with conservative principles, and with anything else opponents want to raise doubts about.

Rush Limbaugh may think “everybody has an angry ex-spouse“, but it’s equally true that every woman has a man who done her wrong. (For at least three women, that man is Rush Limbaugh.) If they start identifying Newt with that guy, it’ll cost him.

The NYT’s Charles Blow:

Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift.

In short, Gingrich has been dog whistling. He doesn’t openly say: “Lazy blacks expect you hard-working white taxpayers to support them.” But if you believe that already, you listen to Gingrich and think, “That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about!”

Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Gingrich by quoting Jane Austen:

when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

Hence the sense of injury when politicians like Gingrich are accused of pandering to racists, when in fact they are and know that they are.

A few facts about Gingrich’s “food-stamp president” rhetoric and the way he tries to make the issue food stamps vs. paychecks:

  • White food-stamp recipients outnumber blacks almost 2-to-1. Percentage-wise, blacks are more likely to be on food stamps than whites, but it’s not a black issue.
  • About half of food-stamp households with children already have jobs.
  • Nationwide, the average per-person food stamp benefit is $134 a month. That might keep you from starving, but it’s not going to replace a job.

In short, there’s no reason to believe that cutting food stamps would motivate people to get jobs. And looking at the causality the other way, liberals also hope for a job-rich economy that makes food stamps unnecessary. The question is how to get there. If conservative policies created jobs, we wouldn’t have been on the brink of a depression at the end of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, open marriage (or polyamory) is topical again. Salon explores the ups and downs, and the NYT has a free-for-all.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is freaking out. Josh Marshall explains why with Gingrich’s national favorable/unfavorable graph (which doesn’t reproduce here).

As he galvanizes the most extreme elements in the Republican electorate, Gingrich’s unfavorability with the general electorate is spiking. Nate Silver referenced the same graph while saying Gingrich “would be one of the most unpopular candidates ever to be nominated by a major party.” (Gingrich’s favorability numbers have only gotten worse since Nate dismissed his chances last March.)

Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls has Obama narrowly ahead of Romney (47%-45%), while crushing Gingrich (50%-40%). But in the CNN exit polls, the South Carolina primary voters mainly looking for an Obama-defeating candidate picked Gingrich over Romney by a wider margin. He got 51% of those votes compared with 41% overall.

This is what happens when people believe their own propaganda. Tea Party Republicans claim they’re not a far-right fringe, they’re mainstream America. Believing that, they think mainstream America hates President Obama like they do. Gingrich does the best job of inspiring and channelling their hatred, so they think he must be the best candidate to send into the general election.

They’re kidding themselves. In the real world, even people who doubt Obama’s competence tend to like him personally. So going after Obama (or his wife or his kids or his dog) with nasty and racially polarizing rhetoric will backfire on the national stage. And while Republicans love to make fun of Obama’s teleprompter— another dog-whistle about the intelligence of blacks — Obama actually thinks on his feet quite well. In a debate, he won’t be the punching bag Gingrich supporters imagine.

Despite his disappointing showing in South Carolina and low national poll numbers, Rick Santorum is right to stay in the race. Here’s his scenario: Gingrich will crash again, Romney will be damaged goods — and then it’s Santorum or a brokered convention, which hasn’t happened in half a century.

Through the magic of video editing, Mitt Romney debates Martin Luther King.

January 23, 2012 – 1:08 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (2)

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We Need More Bureaucrats, and other short notes

Guess what happens when you cut the budget of the IRS? The government collects less in taxes, with a net increase in the federal deficit. Plus, the IRS relies more on automation and less on people, so a taxpayer with a legitimate complaint has a hard time getting the ear of anybody who could fix the problem.

That’s the gist of the 2011 report of the National Taxpayer Advocate, and it’s a microcosm of what’s wrong with anti-bureaucrat rage.

When your car runs badly, you could say, “Damn that car! I’m going to cut its maintenance!” But that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Ditto for government. If you have to deal with a stressed-out clerk after waiting an hour in line at the DMV, cutting budgets and firing clerks might be a satisfying revenge fantasy. But it’s not exactly a solution.

Similarly, if you find yourself wasting time and money complying with some regulation that should never have applied to you to begin with, the problem probably isn’t that too many bureaucrats are making too many rules. More likely, bureaucracies have made sweeping rules and don’t have time to make exceptions for special cases because they’re understaffed.

The battle is on in Wisconsin. The petition to recall Governor Scott Walker got a million signatures. Officials are having problems hiring people to review the signatures, because they have “had trouble locating job seekers in the Madison area who did not sign the petitions”

In President Obama’s video message to Betty White’s 90th birthday celebration, he asked to see her long-form birth certificate.

The new Birtherism: Did Obama get “foreign student” loans? And is there any reason to raise this question other than the evidence that factcheck.org called “a hoax” in 2009?

The documentary Hot Coffee takes another look at the anti-McDonalds lawsuit that has been distorted into evidence for tort reform. What if what everybody knows about that lawsuit is false?

Republicans in Congress forced President Obama to make a fast decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline, and he surprised a lot of us by deciding against it. But naturally, that’s not the end of it.

Senator Scott Brown asks about the “teachers, firefighters, policemen” who will be affected if the Bush tax cuts go away for households making more than $250,000 a year. TPM tries to figure out if there are any such people and how affected they would be.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich raises the spectre of NY janitors making “an absurd amount of money” which turns out to be $37,710 after two years.

Batteries for electric cars might get much better.

The idea of America as a “nation, under God” may go back to Lincoln, but the phrase has a little known history after that: It was revived in the 1930s by monied interests looking for religious cover in opposing the New Deal.

January 23, 2012 – 12:52 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

Profit and Property, or People?

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

— Martin Luther King

In this week’s sift:

  • Four Fantasy Issues of the Right. It’s hard to have the political debate our country really needs, when so much of what we end up talking about is baseless: creeping Sharia, things Obama never said, voter fraud, and lies about Obama’s birth, religion, or political philosophy.
  • What is Job Creation? What keeps our businesses from hiring isn’t lack of capital, it’s lack of customers.
  • Truth Vigilantes and other short notes. The Times gets an earful from its readers.  Defending corpse desecration doesn’t support our troops. What if Tebow were Muslim? Colbert’s Super-PAC demonstrates the absurdity of our campaign-finance system. The Republican establishment shuts down criticism of Romney. The charming geekiness of Vi Hart. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. The Four Flavors of Republican got 441 views on this blog, and was also popular on Daily Kos. The most-clicked link was Explaining Socialism to a Republican.
  • This week’s challenge. Friday is the anniversary of the Citizens United decision that expanded the corporate personhood doctrine and let corporate money flood into our elections. Occupy the Courts is organizing a national day of protest at federal court buildings around the country.

The sequel to last week’s Escalating Bad Faith is delayed to next week.

January 16, 2012 – 12:32 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Four Fantasy Issues of the Right

In 2012, the two parties differ on a number of issues that voters really should be thinking about: the role of government in the economy, inequality of wealth and income, climate change, what to do about the 50 million Americans without health insurance, how to handle the 11 million undocumented immigrants, and so on.

It’s hard to have any of those debates, though, because in addition to the legitimate issues that divide Republicans from Democrats, conservatives have trumped up a number of issues that are pure fantasies — they are based on nothing that is really happening.

The construction of pure fantasy issues is a tactic so outrageous that most Americans have trouble grasping it. Voters are used to hearing exaggerations, rhetoric that makes mountains out of molehills. But making a mountain out of the pure flat plain is something totally different and relatively new. “Surely,” the average voter thinks, “there is some fire under all that smoke.”

But these four issues are pure smoke. There is absolutely no fire under there anywhere.

1. Creeping Sharia.

Supposedly, Islamic law (i.e. Sharia) is being surreptitiously introduced into the American justice system “with the goal of transforming American society from within”. This is sometimes called a stealth jihad.

At first, this fake issue was confined to a fringe represented by Pamela Geller, Chuck Norris, or the American Family Association’s talkradio host Brian Fischer. But like Birtherism and other fringe issues, it has crept into the Republican mainstream, with endorsements by Republican presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann. A constitutional amendment against Sharia passed in Oklahoma, and similar amendments have been proposed in other states.

The reality? In a decision denying Oklahoma’s appeal of a lower court’s injunction against the Oklahoma law, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote:

Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve.  Indeed, they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.

In examining instances where “creeping Sharia” is alleged outside Oklahoma, I haven’t found a single one that stands up to scrutiny. (The “halal turkey” is no more creeping Sharia than kosher franks are creeping Judaism.) Typically, the cases involve Muslims demanding the same respect that Christians and Jews take for granted, and say nothing at all about Sharia.

In this case, for example, a small-college adjunct professor cherry-picked offensive quotes out of the Quran and presented them as representative of all Islam. When Muslim students objected and the college administration refused to discipline them, he resigned. Brian Fischer then presented him as “a victim of Sharia law“.

In truth, there is no court in America where Sharia is being granted the force of law, and neither party is proposing that there should be.

2. Things Obama never said.

Mitt Romney’s New Hampshire Primary victory speech was full of references to things President Obama has “said”.  For example:

this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, “It could be worse.”

I went looking for this quote. Several Republican blogs and radio hosts attribute “It could be worse” to this event, where the words “It could be worse” actually don’t appear. In spite of the quotation marks, it’s a paraphrase. Obama was actually saying that, while unemployment was still too high, it would have been higher without the stimulus.

So a paraphrase of something that Obama almost sort-of said a year and half ago has become a verbatim quote that he says “every morning”.

What else? Obama “believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past.” That’s a quote from a right-wing book about Obama, not Obama himself.

“He apologizes for America.” Back in February, the Washington Post fact-checker awarded this claim its lowest truth rating — four Pinocchios, reserved for “whoppers”. But Romney keeps repeating it because … well, he’s running a post-truth campaign.

When caught misquoting Obama in an ad, the Romney campaign admitted the deception, but defended doing it.

The Romney campaign was forthcoming about the entire context of the quote in its press release and in its comments to the press Monday night. And indeed, they seemed to be reveling in the fact that we were now talking about that particular part of the ad.

And then Romney said Obama had called Americans “lazy” — another four Pinocchios.

So in general, if you think President Obama has said something that makes you angry — especially if you heard it from Mitt Romney — look for the YouTube or the transcript. (The transcript of every official Obama speech is on the whitehouse.gov site.) If you can’t find it, chances are excellent he actually said nothing of the kind.

3. Voter fraud.

No one denies that America has a colorful history of vote fraud. Election officials have been known to lose or find ballot boxes, mis-program voting machines, fake absentee ballots, or otherwise misrepresent electoral results.

What we don’t have, though, is a history of widespread voter fraud. Americans do not often show up at polling places claiming to be someone else. Why would we? It’s time consuming, and there’s always a risk that somebody at the precinct knows either you or whoever you’re impersonating. (One conservative trying to prove how easy voter fraud is recently got caught this way.)

Even if you get away with it, all you’ve done is steal one vote. If you’re that committed, you can probably change more votes through legitimate campaigning. Go work a phone bank or something.

Nonetheless, it has become a truism on the Right that this kind of fraud is so widespread that we need a whole new system of voter-ID laws to prevent it. But even advocates of these laws can’t provide examples of actual voter fraud. When Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach claimed illegal immigrants were voting by impersonating dead people, he gave one example. The Wichita Eagle then found the “dead” guy raking leaves in his yard. Another allegedly dead voter turned up right here in Nashua this week.

If these laws were just useless, we might shake our heads at the waste. (Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates their new voter-ID bill will cost $5.7 million.) But they’re actually sinister. People who don’t already have drivers’ licenses, passports, or other recognized photo-IDs are mostly in groups that vote Democratic: the poor, the disabled, the very old, students, and recently naturalized citizens. Discouraging them from voting is the real point.

4. Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist.

The Birther lie has been widely debunked, but it still gets winked at by folks like Donald Trump, one of the Romney sons, Rick Perry, and Fox News. In the 2010 cycle, most Republican congressional wouldn’t go full-on Birther, but would instead call on Obama to settle the “legitimate questions” that the Birthers raised. John Boehner expressed his personal belief that Obama was American, but wouldn’t rein in the Birthers in his caucus.

All that, in spite of the fact that there was never any reason to doubt that Obama was born where and when he said he was. Not one.

Muslim? Again, no reason at all to raise that question. Obama and his long-time church agreed that he was a Christian.

Marxist? Other than gay rights (where he has been following public opinion, not leading it), Obama’s program is what moderate Republicanism used to look like. Is it Marxist to roll out RomneyCare nationwide? to attack global warming by the same cap-and-trade system Bush Sr. used to fight acid rain? to want to restore the tax rates Bill Clinton negotiated with Newt Gingrich?

It’s tempting to say, “That’s politics.” But it isn’t. There are no comparable lies in the mainstream of the Left. Obscure liberal blogs might have promoted the fact-free tabloid rumors that 9-11 was an inside job, or that Bush had started drinking again, but high-ranking Democrats never pandered to them.

All these charges are attempts to give substance to the vague feeling that there’s something “not right” about Barack Obama. But you know what the substance really is? He’s black. That vague sense that there’s something “wrong” with him that you just can’t put your finger on — that’s what subconscious racism feels like. Deal with it.

January 16, 2012 – 12:30 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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