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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What is Job Creation?

Tuesday the Washington Post’s fact-checker awarded three Pinocchios (“significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”) to Mitt Romney’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs through his work at Bain Capital.

Meanwhile, Romney’s opponents were assailing him as a job destroyer, a “predatory corporate raider” according to a pro-Gingrich SuperPAC. Rick Perry accused Bain of looting companies and “getting rich off failure“.

Lost in all this attack-and-defense is the question: What does it mean to create a job, anyway? Let me repeat something I wrote a little over a year ago:

A bunch of factors need to come together to create a job. There has to be something worth doing, a worker willing and able to do it, a capitalist to pull together all the tools and materials of production, and a customer willing and able to pay for the product or service.

So the economic environment needs to supply an opportunity and people need to fill three roles: worker, capitalist, and customer. Conservatives assume that workers and customers always appear by magic, so a job is created whenever a capitalist shows up. If that were true, then conservative economics would make perfect sense: Keep rich people’s taxes low, and they’ll be able to fill the capitalist role in more and more places, creating more and more jobs.

In fact, though, any one of the three roles might be scarce. Picture a rural hospital that would love to have a cardiologist. The money and the customers are there, they just don’t have a worker. (We don’t usually think of cardiologists as “workers”, but they are.)

During construction booms, production might be held up by all kinds of worker shortages — plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Maybe the only thing holding up a new restaurant in Tulsa is that the local workforce doesn’t include the right kind of chef. In these cases, it’s the worker who is the “job creator”, not the capitalist. What triggers the existence of the job is the arrival of the scarce worker, who could be hired by any of a number of interchangeable capitalists.

In the recent recession, workers and capitalists have both been abundant, but customers have been scarce. Business Insider puts it like this:

If a company is going to hire someone, then a crucial question they must ask is: Is this person going to help make or do something that someone is going to buy. You can talk all you want about taxes or regulation, but if end demand for a product or service isn’t there, there’s no reason for a company to hire.

That’s the logic of stimulus: Put more money in people’s pockets and they will create jobs by becoming customers.

(That insight, by the way, provides the proper response to the slogan “I never got a job from a poor person”. You’ll also never get a job from a capitalist with no customers, no matter how rich he is or how little tax he pays.)

Finally, let’s consider the economic environment. Suppose a new interstate gets built, with an exit near a town that has a lot of unemployment. Three local businessmen want to build a fast-food franchise on a choice piece of land near the exit, and the Burger King franchisee outbids the McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts franchisees. So the Burger King gets built and employs 15 burger-flippers.

As soon as the new interstate changed the economic environment, all three roles were abundant. So who “created” those 15 jobs? The government did, by building the interstate. Government infrastructure projects have created jobs as far back as the Erie Canal, which made Buffalo into a grain-processing center.

But wait. Government can’t create jobs. Everybody knows that: Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Eric Cantor, everybody. If you’re too stupid to understand why not, this conservative economist will explain it to you.

Maybe they all need to think it through again.

But let’s get back to the original topic: How many jobs did Mitt Romney create or destroy during the business career that netted him a quarter billion dollars?

Quite possibly none. If capitalists weren’t the scarce commodity in the deals he did, Romney might have been just another interchangeable cog in the economic machine. He probably is no more responsible for the jobs at Staples than the clerks who man the counters or the people like me who get our copying done there. Maybe the store would be in a different place, wear a different name, and employ different people, but as far as the overall economy is concerned it would make no difference.

Ditto for the job destruction in companies like AmPad. Money was there for pirates to capture, and there were plenty of them around. Mitt was the pirate who captured that particular treasure ship (and he’ll have to work out the ethics of it with his conscience and his God) but did he change anything? Ultimately, probably not.

January 16, 2012 – 12:16 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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Truth Vigilantes and other short notes

The most clueless post of the week came from the NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Brisbane was

looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

So if a “newsmaker” says the sky is green, should the Times let that stand? or explain to its readers that the sky is actually blue?

That post drew 327 comments and countless responses from bloggers and other pundits, almost unanimously (except for National Review) saying: If you have to ask that question, the Times is in worse trouble than we thought.

Brisbane wrote a follow-up claiming that we had all misunderstood the question, which prompted another avalanche of responses saying that we understood it perfectly.

Greg Sargent sums up current practice, which is to print a fact-check column once (maybe), but not reference it when a false claim gets repeated again and again. Result: “any Times customer reading [the false claims] comes away misled.”

Glenn Greenwald translates newsmaker to mean “those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems” and points out that critics of the newsmaking elite get a different treatment: “their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.”

Jay Rosen gives a long-term perspective:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years … the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.

Salon’s Marcus Cederstrom asks the question I’ve been wondering about for weeks: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

In all the uproar about American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, one point hasn’t gotten much attention: All the way back to George Washington, America has tried to maintain a code of honor for its troops. (We didn’t always succeed, but we always tried.) Why?

Here’s why: The American ideal is the citizen soldier who eventually rejoins civilized society. America’s fighting men and women are not supposed to be packs of jackals that we unleash on our enemies and then forget about. They are us, and when they’re done with the disagreeable job of war, we intend to welcome them home.

So when Dana Loesch says, “Come on, people, this is a war“, she may think she’s supporting our troops, but she isn’t. By implying that barbaric behavior is normal in our military, she’s undermining our soldiers’ eventual re-integration into civilian life.

If this is how Loesch pictures Marines, how will she feel when an ex-Marine moves in next door or wants to marry her little sister? Or has the distance between Marines and media stars grown so great that such possibilities are unthinkable now?

While I enjoy Jon Stewart’s pokes at our political system from the outside, nothing tops the way Stephen Colbert demonstrates its abusrdity from within.

When it became clear that unaccountable Super-PACs were going to dominate the 2012 election cycle, Colbert started one: Americans United for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. It’s a stunt, but it’s not just a stunt. He really raised money and put ads on TV in Iowa.

This week, Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of Super-PACs that are devoted to one candidate (but allegedly don’t co-ordinate with that candidate’s campaign) by transferring his Super-PAC to Jon Stewart and then announcing his own candidacy for president. Colbert and Stewart worked out their “non-cooperation” agreement on national TV.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And now, the Super-PAC has the absurd anti-Romney attack ad Mitt the Ripper on the air in South Carolina: If Romney really believes corporations are people, then he was a serial killer during his time at Bain Capital.

It was amazing to watch how quickly and effectively the Republican establishment moved to shut down criticism of Romney’s “vulture capitalism“. TPM’s 100-seconds series captured it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The point here seems to be that capitalism transcends good and evil. To make any moral comment on Romney’s business practices is beyond the pale, and puts you on the road to Soviet Communism. Such a nihilistic argument is pretty weird for a party that claims to be the natural home of American Christians.

Dahlia Lithwick: “If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.” We wouldn’t just see a loss of abortion rights, but “a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state.”

If you haven’t checked out Vi Hart’s YouTube channel, you’re missing the Internet’s best example of charming geekiness.

It’s always important on MLK Day, to remember just how radical King was. He didn’t promote a vague be-nice message, but took outside-the-current-mainstream stands on major issues.

January 16, 2012 – 11:50 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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Inventing the Narrative

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly,
not about “the democratic process,”
or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs,
but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized
that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals,
to those who manage policy and those who report on it,
to those who run the polls and those who quote them,
to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows,
to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers,
to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them;
to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out,
the narrative of public life.

– Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” (1988)

In this week’s sift:

  • Escalating Bad Faith, Part I: Recess Appointments. The controversy over President Obama’s recent recess appointments sounds boring and technical, but it’s a symptom of a cancer in our democracy that has been growing for decades.
  • The Four Flavors of Republican. How NeoCons, Corporatists, Theocrats, and Libertarians co-operate and conflict.
  • My Boring Primary Season and other short notes. Ah, for the halcyon days of 2007, when presidential candidates by the dozen vied for my attention all summer. Mitt as “locust capitalist”. Why “equality of opportunity” is a risky meme for conservatives. The real lesson of Kim Jong Il. Santorum’s Grampa was “free” to owe his soul to the company store. Montana’s Supreme Court rejects corporate personhood. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post wasn’t that popular: Under-reported Stories of 2011 got 143 views. The most-clicked link was the Salon Hack List.
  • This week’s challenge: If you don’t already know, find out who the likely congressional candidates are in your district, and whether you have a senatorial election this year.
January 9, 2012 – 1:08 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Escalating Bad Faith, Part I: Recess Appointments

This week conservatives had a new reason to be outraged at President Obama: He appointed Richard Cordray head of the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, plus he added three members to the National Labor Relations Board.

What’s the problem with that? Well, these are recess appointments, a power that the Constitution gave the President so that vital posts wouldn’t go unfilled during the months when Congress was out of session.

In the era of cell phones and jet planes, recess appointments are an anachronism, because it’s quick and easy to call Congress back into session for anything really important. But in the last few administrations they’ve become part of an escalating power struggle between Congress and the President. As the struggle continues, the positions of both institutions (under either party) get further and further from anything the Founders wanted or should have wanted.

The point of this series (for which recess appointments are just the most timely example) is to highlight a crisis that gets very little attention in the mainstream media: escalating bad faith in government. Whoever started it (being a Democrat, I see most fault on the Republican side), these downward spirals are very hard to stop, and they’re extremely dangerous to the future of democracy.

History. The recess-appointment struggle starts with Article II Section 2 of the Constitution:

[The President] … by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law … The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

For years that clause was interpreted to mean that the two branches would work together in good faith: The President would nominate reasonably acceptable people and the Senate would approve them unless they found something seriously wrong. Just disagreeing with a nominee was generally not enough — to reject him or her you needed to find a scandal of some sort. (That’s the plot of the 1959 Pulitzer-winning political novel Advise and Consent.)

Until recent decades, rejections were rare. In 1968, the Senate filibustered President Johnson’s appointee for Chief Justice, pointing to some questionable speaking fees. (The vote was roughly bipartisan, with 19 Democratic senators voting not to end the filibuster.) In 1989, President Bush’s nomination of John Tower as Secretary of Defense was rejected because of his personal life. (Only one Republican senator voted against him.)

President Reagan and the Democratic Senate both escalated the battle in 1987: Reagan slapped the new Democratic majority in the face by nominating the extreme conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and the Senate slapped back by rejecting the nomination on ideological grounds, without finding a scandal.

Filibusters on ideological grounds, at least for judicial nominations, became standard during the Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations, but most posts within the executive branch continued to be filled with only minor friction, on the principle that the President should be able to work with people of his own choosing.

Two major non-judicial nominations the Democrats held up during the Bush years were John Bolton as UN ambassador and Steven Bradbury as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Bush Jr. used a series of temporary recess appointments to put them in office long-term — clearly not what the Constitution meant that power for. The Senate struck back by holding pro forma sessions — leaving a skeleton crew in Washington to open and close the Senate every week, so that it would not legally be in recess — even though it was in recess in any practical sense.

Since their numbers increased in 2010, the Senate’s Republican minority has escalated again: Nominees are filibustered (or their nominations are simply ignored) not even because of their ideology, but because of general policy issues unrelated to the nominee. Republicans don’t want the NLRB or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to function at all. But they don’t have the votes to abolish them, so they refuse to consider nominations for those positions. They have defended that refusal against recess appointments with the same pro-forma-session technique the Democrats used against Bush. (With this added wrinkle: The Senate’s Democratic majority can’t end the session because the Constitution won’t let it as long as the Republican-controlled House is in session.)

Now Obama has re-escalated by refusing to recognize the pro forma sessions and making recess appointments anyway. This, Republicans say, is a “tyrannical abuse of power“.

And it is, in some sense. But without it the Senate minority’s abuse of power stands unchallenged. The Founders never intended any of this.

This is part of a pattern in which all sides are acting in bad faith, and have been for decades. (And it’s not the only example, as I’ll discuss next week. Signing statements are another.) It creates a vicious cycle in which each escalation challenges the other side to either accept a defeat that seems illegitimate or to escalate further. There seems to be no obvious place for this to stop.

Next week: At the end of this road democracy unravels, because democracy depends as much on good faith as on elections and constitutions.

January 9, 2012 – 1:04 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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