Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes

I had to read three articles before I was sure this story wasn’t somebody’s diabolical hoax. But no: Kellogg has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Maya Archeology Initiative because their toucan logo looks too much like Froot Loops’ mascot Toucan Sam. (The comparison below is from the Lowering the Bar blog, which specializes in strange-but-true legal stories.)

The MAI is a Guatemalan non-profit that promotes local archeology for children and adults. It uses the toucan on its logo, because Guatemala has real toucans.

It also has real Mayan ruins, which Kellogg also objects to MAI using in its logo, because Toucan Sam is sometimes shown in fake Mayan settings.

Says MAI president Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli, “This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians.”

I avoided the 9-11 anniversary coverage. The genuine human tragedy of that day has gotten so abused and debased over the last ten years by bad wars, fear-mongering, hate speech, and authoritarianism that my instinctive response now, when I see images of the smoking towers, is that somebody is probably trying to trick me into doing something bad. I think it will take years for that reaction to fade away.

President Obama made a good speech, and (by most nonpartisan accounts) proposed a good program. But I think this is yet another example of the bad political tactics I talked about two weeks ago.

Obama’s proposal is already bipartisan — full of ideas from both parties. So once again the center has become the leftmost extreme of the possible. Now Congress will push the bill further and further to the right, until we can’t be sure whether it improves the lives of working Americans at all. And then, having made such a strong case that something needs to be done, how can Obama veto it?

If everyone is supposed to be so worried about the deficit, why has the interest rate on 10-year government bonds dropped under 2%?

This sign is apparently genuine, from February, 2010.

Or at least the kind of homeschoolers who can’t spell are for Perry.

This sign fooled me, but a commenter points out it is fake. Still, it’s a good laugh:

Just something to enjoy: Marco Tempest combines the moves of card-magic with some iPod programming to make a very beautiful TED talk.

One of the biggest applause lines of Wednesday’s Republican debate:

[Moderator BRIAN] WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you…

(APPLAUSE)

Williams went on to ask if Perry ever lost sleep worrying that “any one of those might have been innocent.” Perry replied: “No, sir, I’ve never struggled with that at all.”

In at least one case, maybe he should.

Exxon is getting its money’s worth from its climate-denial propaganda campaign: According to Yale’s Project on Climate Change Communication, even Democrats are woefully uninformed about the scientific consensus on climate change. When asked to estimate the percentage of climate scientists who believe climate change is happening, only 18% of Democrats and Independents give the correct answer: 81-100%. Another 20% say 61-80%.

See Kevin Drum for elaboration.

Correct answer: The National Academy of Sciences published a survey of 1372 climate scientists in 2009, and found that 97-98% believed in anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

You’d never know it from the media, but there is left-wing libertarianism also. Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society writes:

Although right-wingers like to present the issue as one of preventing the state from redistributing wealth downward, the real issue is one of stopping the state from redistributing wealth upward.

More technically described as “market anarchists“, I’m not sure why they identify with libertarians at all. But that’s up to them. It’s a free country.

David Atkins explains why conservatives don’t have to win elections to push the country to the right. Rick Perry calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” might cost him the presidency. But now the media treats the Ponzi-scheme rhetoric as if it were a credible point of view. Future “centrist” compromises will allow for the possibility that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

Mike Tomasky does the numbers to show that bipartisanship is a one-way street. On key votes, Congressional Democrats gave President Bush seven times the support President Obama has received from Republicans.

Which GOP candidate is right for you? Use this flowchart.

Nobody seems to know where this motivational poster came from. I got it here.

September 12, 2011 – 11:59 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

Strategies

Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. 

– Mike Lofgren, retired Republican Congressional staffer
“Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult“

In this week’s sift:

  • Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence. Liberals like to use the word holistic, but conservatives are the ones whose ideology connects everything. Why a down-on-the-farm issue like Bt-resistant rootworms has larger lessons to teach.
  • Blowing Smoke About Clouds. If you have enough media power, you can hijack the prestige of the biggest names in science and use it for your own purposes. Witness how climate deniers just hijacked the coverage of an article in Nature by researchers at CERN.
  • A ConConCon and other short notes. Lawrence Lessig tries to make common cause with the Tea Party. Cheney’s book tour. Geo-engineering. Rolling Stone covers voter suppression. Convoluted music copyrights. Relative costs of the Libyan and Iraq interventions. More on Libertarians.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Traffic mostly went back to normal last week, except for continuing interest in Why I Am Not a Libertarian (18K total views) and One Word Turns Around the Tea Party (7K). (Between them they’re still accounting for more than half the blog’s traffic.) Last week’s Barack, Can We Talk? got a more typical 450 views. However, it took off when I reposted it to Daily Kos, where it went to the top of the recommended list (800 recommendations, 800 comments).
  • This week’s challenge. Try to put words around the political message you’re waiting to hear. What could a politician say or do that would give you a surprised reaction of “This person really gets it!”?
September 5, 2011 – 11:38 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence

You know what I envy most about the Right? They’re holistic.

I know that sounds crazy. Conservatives are individualists, liberals are the ones who understand that everything is connected. And yet … liberals get involved in labor issues (if they belong to a union), education (if they have children), race and gender (if they’re black or female), and so on. Otherwise, life is short and energy is finite. We can’t all be into everything.

But conservatives happily take on a wide range of issues, because they’ve got an ideology that pulls it all together.

This week there was a news story about rootworms in corn fields in Iowa. Probably you’re not an Iowan, a corn-farmer, or a rootworm, so your eyes are glazing over. But bear with me. Everything is connected.

Bt and Monsanto. The rootworms are newsworthy because they’re not supposed to be there. The fields were planted with a corn seed that Monsanto genetically modified to kill rootworms. It contains a gene from bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring insect-killing bacteria. Apparently the Iowa fields have evolved a rootworm resistant to Bt, or at least to this particular expression of Bt.

That’s bad — and not just for Monsanto.

This possibility was considered when the Monsanto corn was approved by the EPA in 2003. The remedy was for farmers to plant 20% of their fields with non-Bt corn. Basically, you want to prevent insects with low-level resistance from mating with each other and producing high-level resistance. The 20% “refuge” area keeps non-resistant rootworms in the evolutionary picture, so that the species as a whole doesn’t become resistant.

Now it looks like 20% wasn’t enough. That’s what independent scientists told the EPA in 2003. They wanted 50% non-Bt corn, but Monsanto lobbied the EPA down to 20%. Now it looks like their lobbying screwed up their own product.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 1. Smart government regulations aren’t job-killing or money-wasting. Corporations are short-sighted. In the long run everybody — even industry — does better if government doesn’t let industry do whatever it wants.

Monsanto vs. the farmers who buy its seed. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers have saved some of their crop to plant the following year. Since the dawn of the seed industry that has been a problem, because seed companies always want to sell farmers new seed.

So the 20th-century seed industry developed high-yielding hybrids that were either sterile or would regress in subsequent generations. You could save your seed, but if you wanted the 100-bushel-an-acre corn, you had to buy new.

When it couldn’t figure out how to make that tactic work for genetically modified seeds, Monsanto changed its retailing model to be more like Microsoft’s. Like Windows 7 DVDs, Monsanto’s seeds are just media. What farmers are really buying is a one-year license to use the patented genetic information in the seed. Farmers who replant the descendants of their purchased seeds risk being bankrupted by Monsanto’s patent-infringement lawsuits.

A lot of law had to be changed or re-interpreted to make this scheme work. For one thing, the whole idea that naturally occurring genes can be patented is not obvious, and may even be a little bizarre. Property law could just as easily have settled out the way that seemed like common sense to one unintentional patent-infringer: “I assumed that after I paid the tech fee [the seeds] were mine.”

Everything-is-connected Lesson 2. Conservatives talk about property rights as if they had been sacrosanct since God evicted his tenants from Eden. But in the real world property is whatever corporations want it to be. If centuries-old notions of property get in the way of corporate profits, the rules will be changed.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 3. The term judicial activism is hardly ever applied to cases that expand corporate rights. But patenting life-forms stems from Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), where it is the liberal dissent of Justice Brennan that invokes judicial restraint: “We must be careful to extend patent protection no further than Congress has provided.” He lost.

Monsanto vs. the farmers who don’t buy its seed. Some farmers who never bought Monsanto seed are growing patented plants because birds drop seeds on their property or pollen blows in from a neighbor’s field. Other farmers who stopped using Monsanto seed nonetheless see “volunteer” seeds from last year’s crop sprout in their fields.

Occasionally such a farmer loses a patent infringement suit. And no one knows how many innocent farmers — less determined than this family profiled by CBS — just pay up when confronted with evidence of patented plants in their fields and the threat of Monsanto’s expensive legal team. (Sixty different organic-farming organizations have preemptively filed suit against Monsanto to avoid being sued later for inadvertent patent infringement.)

Farmers who hope to export to countries that ban genetically modified crops are harmed if the wind blows Monsanto pollen onto their fields. But Monsanto’s licensing agreement puts this responsibility on the farmer who plants its seeds. So you can sue your neighbor, but not Monsanto.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 4. Corporatist political rhetoric often emphasizes freedom and responsibility. But it’s all one-way. The corporation has the freedom and you have the responsibility.

Organic insect control and the genetic commons. Being a naturally occurring bacterium, Bt is one of the few insect-control treatments available to organic farmers. They typically use it sparingly. Their first line of defense against insects is to rotate crops (as all farmers used to do). That way, eggs of corn-eating insects will hatch in a field of soybeans, and vice versa. When organic farmers use Bt, it is applied only to the insect-infested field, and it soon washes away.

Monsanto’s Bt seeds, by contrast, expose the entire field, all season long. And one of the seed’s touted advantages is that you don’t have to rotate. The Iowa fields where resistance developed had been planted in corn for many years in a row.

So, used as directed, Monsanto’s seeds are breeding Bt-resistant rootworms. (It’s not clear yet if the Iowa worms are universally Bt-resistant or just resistant to the particular protein Monsanto engineered its seeds to produce. In any case, they are a step in the direction of Bt-resistant rootworms.)

Once they exist, these rootworms are unlikely to respect property lines. They’ll be a problem for everybody, including the organic farms. So Monsanto has profited by using up a common resource that could have lasted for centuries otherwise.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 5. By their insatiable nature, corporations make all tragedy-of-the-commons problems much, much worse. Antibiotic-resistant disease is a similar story, as the meat industry uses massive quantities of antibiotics without concern for the consequences. Ditto for air quality, water rights, and any other common asset that a corporation can profit from. If there’s a horse in the common stable, a corporation will ride it to death.

How do we connect everything? Urban or suburban liberals may find such farm-based issues uninteresting, but conservatives of all stripes jump into opposition if anyone tries to fix the problem. Why? Because government is evil and industry is good. It’s that simple to them.

If liberals are going to unite efficiently, we need to develop a few reality-based but easy-to-apply lenses of our own, so that we have a common view of many diverse situations.

I propose this one: Corporate rights are driving out human rights.

Even if an issue seems to have nothing to do with you, check whether this lens brings it into focus. Because the battle for dominance between corporations and humans is everybody’s battle, and we need to fight it on all fronts.

September 5, 2011 – 11:35 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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Blowing Smoke About Clouds

Last week an International Business Times article stopped me short: “Alarmists Got it Wrong, Humans Not Responsible for Climate Change: CERN“.

“Wow,” I thought. “CERN. Not some Exxon/Koch-funded stooge. CERN, where the real scientists are. There’s the CERN logo right in the article. I’d better read this and rethink my opinion on climate change.”

I read the article and I learned a lot. But not about science, about propaganda.

Occasionally you need to know some science to spot the BS in a newspaper science article, but most of the time you just need some common sense. Start with: Does the content of the article justify the headline?

Not this time. The article discusses new research about cloud formation that CERN scientists recently published in Nature (another one of the biggest names in science). But nobody at CERN is quoted saying, “Humans aren’t responsible for climate change.”

In fact, the article doesn’t quote anybody from CERN (or Nature). Who are their sources, then? Lawrence Solomon, David Whitehouse, and Nigel Calder. If you’re just skimming, you might assume at least one of them represents CERN, but they don’t.

Who are they? In the Age of Google, that’s an easy question.

So a more accurate headline would be: “Global-Warming Skeptics Claim New CERN Research Vindicates Them”.

Well, of course they claim that. But then any real journalist would have to ask: Does it?

Journalism — even journalism about rocket science — is not rocket science: Punch “CERN cloud experiment results” into Google, and in seconds you’ll be looking at the CERN press release and its supporting press briefing. Spend a few minutes chasing links, and you’ll see the lead author of the Nature article (Jasper Kirkby) quoted in Scientific Computing, Live Science, and — oh, look at this! — Nature News, which is put out by the same people who publish Nature.

So it isn’t hard to find sources closer to the action than Solomon, Whitehouse, and Calder. Do any of them say “Humans are not responsible for climate change”?

No.

So what is this experiment and what does it really show?

CERN made a cloud chamber that simulates Earth’s atmosphere, and tried to figure out where atmospheric aerosols — tiny particles that cloud droplets form around — come from. They discovered that previous theories only accounted for a small fraction of the aerosols observed in the atmosphere. They could account for more when they added cosmic rays to their simulation, but they still couldn’t form a complete theory.

The CERN press release quotes Kirkby:

It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone. Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapours are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds.

The press briefing concludes:

This 
result 
leaves 
open
 the 
possibility 
that 
cosmic 
rays
 could 
also
 influence
 climate. 
However, 
it 
is 
premature 
to
 conclude 
that cosmic
 rays 
have 
a
 significant 
influence
 on
 climate 
until 
the additional 
nucleating
 vapours 
have 
been 
identified, 
their
 ion
 enhancement 
measured, 
and 
the 
ultimate
 effects
 on
 clouds 
have 
been confirmed.

Nothing in the press release quantifies this possibility. Kirkby told Nature News: “At the moment, [our research] actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.”

Live Science also talked to Kirkby:

The research doesn’t call into question the basic science of greenhouse gas warming, Kirkby emphasized, but rather refines one facet of the research. … “It’s part of the jigsaw puzzle, and you could say it adds to the understanding of the big picture,” he said. “But it in no way disproves the other pieces.”

None of that stops Solomon from claiming (in the Financial Post — again published with no comment from the actual researchers) that

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog responds:

There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort.

BA goes on to explain why you shouldn’t expect any future research to support Solomon either:

The problem here is two fold: there doesn’t appear to be a large variation in Earth’s temperatures with solar activity, and also that temperatures are rising extremely rapidly in the past 100 years, when solar activity has been relatively normal.

So, who do you think the conservative media outlets go with: science publications that have done the legwork and talked to the CERN researchers, or a long-time global-warming denier who makes unsupported claims in an opinion piece in a financial newspaper?

Do you have to ask?

Fox Business Channel’s Tobin Smith:

We can report tonight the science of climate change is now all but settled. Yes friends and neighbors, and the global warming alarmists have been dealt a wee bit of a blow, right? CERN, C-E-R-N, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious centers for scientific research, has concluded that it’s the sun’s rays, not human activity, which controls the earth’s climate. Now, that, of course, is horrible news for the greenies who’ve used, you know, for years questionable science to justify more and more regulations against fossil fuels like coal and oil, all the while arguing for more and more for the renewable energy sources they just love so dearly. So are the greens prepared to back down now that the science has proved them wrong?

Media Matters collects similar statements from CBN, the Washington Times, and Investor’s Business Daily — all clearly repeating Solomon’s interpretation rather than CERN’s.

So this is what you need to hijack the well-deserved prestige of a research organization like CERN and a journal like Nature:

  • three zero-credibility cranks to “interpret” the research by making stuff up,
  • two newspapers willing to ignore anybody connected to the research, and instead source their articles to the cranks,
  • an echo chamber of news outlets willing to accept the first two papers as reliable sources, do no independent checking, and instead let false claims grow in the telling,
  • opinion leaders in the echo chamber who shift the onus away from the cranks onto their opponents: What’s wrong with those greenies, that they still hold out now that they’ve been proven wrong?

Result? Rank-and-file conservatives hear the same message from multiple directions. When they confidently tell their friends and  co-workers that CERN has proved Al Gore wrong, people who get their news from the New York Times know nothing about it — because an accurate assessment of these tentative results was not deemed sufficiently newsworthy.

And the conservative nods knowingly: It’s that liberal media, constantly suppressing anything that doesn’t fit its biased worldview.


September 5, 2011 – 11:35 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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A ConConCon and other short notes

In April I told you (“How Money Talks“) about Lawrence Lessig’s organization RootStrikers, which believes that Congress’ dependence on rich donors is the central issue.

Because the Supreme Court has decided that money is speech and corporations are people, Lessig believes the only real change possiblity is to amend the Constitution. And because Congress is the problem, he doesn’t imagine getting an amendment through Congress.

So: a constitutional convention, called together if 2/3s of the states request it. The ConCon’s amendments become law if 3/4s of the states ratified them.

Lessig believes this issue could draw a left-right coalition, which it needs. First step: Together with Tea Party Patriots, he’s hosting a conference at Harvard Law School on the ConCon idea. September 24-25, $40.

I really do want Dick Cheney to tell his story — on a witness stand, not on talk shows.

Cheney and Bush have confessed to crimes: ordering torture, spying on American citizens, denying due process to terrorism suspects like Jose Padilla.

Yes, some dire situations may justify government officials breaking the law and seeking absolution later. But the only American institution that can provide that absolution is a jury. Until 12 ordinary Americans hear all the evidence and conclude that Cheney was justified, I’m going to view him as a criminal at large.

I like Code Pink’s protest: When you find Cheney’s book in a store, move it to the Crime section. Andy Borowitz’s fantasy of Satan writing a foreword is hilarious.

Geo-engineering: If human activity is interfering with the climate, why not interfere some more and undo it? That’s either a brilliant idea or an updated version of “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly“.

What could go wrong? In a few months we’ll start to see: A British research team is going to release a bunch of water-vapor into the stratosphere to see whether (1) they can do it, (2) it makes clouds whiter and reflects more solar energy into space, or (3) it unleashes the wrath of God in some unforeseen way.

I’ve been pounding the drum about voter suppression. This week Rolling Stone published The GOP War on Voting. This is the telling detail:

In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn’t provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop.

A humorous instance of the same phenomenon:

[Kansas Secretary of State] Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard.

While researching genetically modified corn, I found the blog Techdirt. Check out this post on how convoluted music copyrights are.

No American soldiers died in Iraq in August. Meanwhile, 67 American soldiers died in Afghanistan— about half in one helicopter — a new monthly high.

What does amenable mortality mean? This guy.

Libya: Ruthless dictator gone. No dead American troops, costs estimated under $1 billion at the end of July.

Iraq: Ruthless dictator gone. 4400+ American soldiers killed, $750 billion in direct war costs, another trillion in lifetime medical expenses for injured veterans.

Some follow-ups on Why I Am Not a Libertarian.

If all Libertarians sounded as reasonable as this Will Wilkerson article, we’d have a lot more to talk about. Wilkerson sees property rights as “a means to a peaceful society of mutual benefit, not an end in itself.”

Salon’s Michael Lind explains Why Libertarians Apologize For Autocracy. Short version: They’ll never be a majority, so democracy is out. As if to prove Lind’s point, American Thinker published Michael Vadum’s Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American.

September 5, 2011 – 11:23 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (2)

Truth Among Friends

Though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first. 

— Aristotle

In this week’s sift:

  • Barack, Can We Talk? I can live with the budget compromises, even if I don’t like them. But we need you to build a Democratic brand and defend a progressive view of reality. When you start repeating deceptive Republican rhetoric — that’s just wrong.
  • A Primary Issues Guide. As the Republican presidential campaign gets national attention, any misinformation the major candidates agree on is going to get a big boost. Let’s try to head that off.
  • Irene and Uncle Sam, and other short notes. Natural disasters underline the importance of government, unless you’re Ron Paul.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Traffic went crazy last week. Why I Am Not a Libertarian is about to pass 17,000 hits. The previous week’s One Word Turns the Tea Party Around picked up a second wind on Thursday and had over 4,000 hits this week, pushing it above 6,000. (About 400 came from a link on this knitting blog. Thanks, Norma.) Both totals are higher than any previous post in the Weekly Sift’s 3 1/2 year history.
  • This week’s challenge. Add a comment to an article on a news web site. (At some sites you might have to register, but it’s easy and free.) Short comments hit hardest, and there are some simple comparisons worth making: Our Libya intervention was so much smarter than our Iraq intervention. And Irene got handled a lot better than Katrina.
August 29, 2011 – 9:53 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Barack, Can We Talk?

It’s me. I’m here in the Democratic base. It’s been a little testy between your people and my people lately, and I’m concerned that things might get out of hand. Worse, I worry that you don’t understand why.

It’s not that we don’t understand how government works, or that democracy runs on compromise. And it’s not that we thought you were some kind of messiah, who could turn the country around just by pointing in a new direction. (That slam on us was originally a Republican talking point, remember?)

Let me try to explain how it looks from our point of view.

You know I wouldn’t use George W. Bush as an example unless I were desperate, right? Well, in 2005 Bush went all out promoting his Social Security privatization plan. Bankruptcy, personal accounts, blah, blah, blah.

The country hated it. So what did Bush do next? He could have decided that (having put so much effort into raising the issue) he had to “get something done”. That would require Democratic support, so he could have adopted a Democratic idea, like extending Social Security taxes to all wages rather than just the first $100K or so.

And then he could have sold the “compromise” package to the public by adopting Democratic rhetoric — maybe by pointing out how well the wealthiest Americans had done over the past 20 years, and how this bill was just asking them to “give something back” for all the benefits the American economy had given them.

Can’t picture it, can you? Me either — and that’s the point. Dumb as he was, President Bush understood two important things:

  • The Republican Party stands for something. You can’t take any old idea and call it “Republican” without screwing up the brand.
  • The political struggle isn’t just about writing laws, it’s about defining reality. Republican success rests on a collection of public misconceptions and faulty frames. As long as the public believes that stuff, they win.

Brands. Every Republican candidate starts every campaign with an advantage: All he has to do is say “Joe Shmoe, conservative Republican” and everybody knows who he is and what he stands for. Low taxes, less regulation, militarism, traditional social values — love that image or hate it, we all recognize it.

Democrats, on the other hand, have to establish themselves. That takes time and money, and it makes us vulnerable to mud-slinging and swift-boating.

Branding has to start at the top, and Democratic leaders haven’t been up to the job for decades now. Every time a Democratic president sounds like he’s making up his mind on the fly, we’re that much further away from having an effective Democratic brand.

Reality. Listen to the Republican presidential candidates: Global warming isn’t real. Spending cuts create jobs. Rich people are job creators. The unemployed are lazy. Unions hurt working people. Government can’t create jobs. All government spending is waste. The minimum wage is too high. The stimulus failed. Protecting the environment is a luxury we can’t afford. Roads, schools, and parks are luxuries we can’t afford. Medical care for the old and poor is a luxury we can’t afford.

That’s the sound of reality being defined. When we take on issues one at a time, we fight on a terrain Republicans have been shaping for decades. That’s why Bush never adopted Democratic rhetoric, and why it kills us when Republican rhetoric comes out of your mouth.

What we need from our Democratic president isn’t just a few more dollars for infrastructure or the unemployed, we need a defense of reality.

Compromising without fighting. Sure, Congress needs to pass budgets, and you have to compromise with Republicans to do that. But again and again, the Republicans remain faithful to their vision and you come out of the compromise owning the package. If the result turns out to be inadequate in some way, the public thinks the alternative is to do what the Republicans wanted.

Look at health care: Every real Democrat knows that the right answer is single-payer. It works in Europe. It’s cheaper and delivers better care. Sure, you couldn’t have gotten that through Congress. I know. I understand. But because you never proposed it, Democrats had no platform for talking about it. The compromise that came out of Congress is now ObamaCare (even though it’s based on the Mitt Romney/Heritage Foundation plan in Massachusetts), and the only alternative the public knows about is the Republican do-nothing plan.

Look at the stimulus. Liberal economists said it needed to be bigger and have less tax cuts. But because you never proposed that, the compromise that came out of Congress is the Obama stimulus. Here’s what Paul Krugman predicted in March, 2009:

It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

The problem is not that you compromise, it’s that you compromise without fighting. The public never sees the liberal alternative, so whatever passes becomes the leftmost edge of the possible.

Repeating false rhetoric. The reality-battlefield that we’re losing worst on is economics.

To you and me, it’s obvious that the economy has a demand problem: Businesses aren’t hiring because they have no customers. Give them a tax break, let them endanger their workers or dump more chemicals in the groundwater — and they still won’t have any customers, so they still won’t hire.

In these situations, government needs to create demand by spending. We have unemployed people, work that needs doing (bridges to rebuild, an electric grid that badly needs an upgrade), and investors willing to lend the government money at interest rates lower than inflation. It’s a no-brainer: Borrow the money to hire the people to do the work.

You know why we can’t mobilize public support behind that program? Because conservatives have convinced large chunks of the public to frame the problem wrong. The worst frame out there is the government/family analogy: Families have to cut back in hard times, so government should have to cut back too.

You know that’s nutty. Just like Joseph told Pharaoh, government has to save when everyone else is spending and spend when everyone else is saving. So why do you say things like this?

Families across this country understand what it takes to manage a budget. Well, it’s time Washington acted as responsibly as our families do.

And why did you frame the debt-ceiling negotiations purely in deficit-reduction terms, as if job-creation wasn’t an issue?

Another false Republican frame is that businesses aren’t hiring because they lack “confidence”. They then link doubt to debt, and so justify the crazy idea that we can create jobs by cutting spending. This kind of nonsense needs to be called out at every turn.

Instead, a White House spokesman

repeatedly said that deficit-reduction was crucial in generating economic confidence. Confidence—he repeated this word many times.

What Democrats need from you. We need you to be a reality warrior. We need you and your whole administration to resist false Republican frames and never to lose sight of Democratic ideals, even when there is no clear path to implementing them.

If you have to compromise for the good of the country, compromise. But Republicans can’t make you adopt their rhetoric, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Hold them responsible for their part of every compromise — by refusing to stop talking about what you would do if they would let you.

Don’t embrace the compromises, because that lets Republicans make their trade-offs for free: Every bit of deficit reduction costs jobs. Make them own that.

Talk about this: Full employment. Single-payer health care. Clean energy. Racial justice. Carbon reduction. Smart electric grid. Efficient mass transit. Education and opportunity for everyone.

Maybe we don’t see how to implement it all right now, but we should never lose sight of it. If not this year, next year. If not this decade, next decade. Don’t tell us we can’t.

Yes we can.

August 29, 2011 – 9:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

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A Primary Issues Guide

The old conventional wisdom was that competitive primaries are bad for the party. The best strategy was to unite early around a single candidate, so that a long negative campaign wouldn’t turn your nominee into damaged goods before the other party even took a shot.

2008 blew that up. The Obama/Clinton battle went on forever, but it did a lot of good things: registered voters, held the spotlight, and got John McCain out of the headlines from February to June. Any idea Obama and Clinton shared started to sound obvious.

There’s still a chance that the Republican 2012 candidates will tear each other to shreds, but it could also play out the other way: A long primary campaign could make their shared misinformation sound like common sense.

So here are some issues that are already coming up and being distorted. The Republican candidates are unlikely to vet each other on this stuff, so it’s important that Democrats not lose sight of the real story.

The South Carolina Boeing plant. South Carolina is an early primary state, so we’re going to hear a lot about his issue. The National Labor Relations Board is blocking Boeing from opening a 3,800-worker plant in SC. This Rick Perry quote is the standard Republican-candidate spin:

[President Obama] stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-business cronies who want to dictate to a private company, Boeing, where they can build a plant. No president, no president should kill jobs in South Carolina

Two facts are in danger of getting lost: First, this isn’t about creating jobs, it’s about moving jobs from one state to another, as states race to the bottom in worker protection. The Boeing jobs would otherwise be at their existing plant in Puget Sound, Washington.

Second, this is a rule-of-law issue. It’s illegal to move jobs purely to punish your current workers for unionizing or striking. Normally this is a hard rule to enforce, because businesses can fabricate hundreds of reasons why they want to manufacture here rather than there.

Unfortunately for Boeing, though, it is managed by idiots who admitted what they were doing in public. The NLRB’s complaint says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney:

made an extended statement regarding … moving the 787 Dreamliner work to South Carolina due to “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”

and another Boeing official told a Seattle Times reporter:

The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.

A lawyer for the International Association of Machinists writes:

In a case where, as here, the employer has admitted its unlawful motive, the failure of the NLRB to issue a complaint would raise serious questions about the continued right of America’s workers to engage in collective activity.

Regulation moratorium. Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” is one of those ideas that sounds unobjectionable, but is actually a disaster. Why? Start at the beginning: Fundamentally, the government regulates business to prevent it from doing bad things — killings its workers or customers, poisoning waterways, adulterating the food supply, and so on.

Naturally — or at least it seems natural if you’re a sociopath — business resists this narrowing of its options. So it takes advantage of any loophole it can find (or its lobbyists can create) to keep doing profitable damage. The government then tries to plug those loopholes, business finds new ones, and they go round and round. That’s why regulations get so complicated.

A moratorium on regulations means that government surrenders this fight. Any loopholes business finds, it keeps. Good news for them. Bad news for workers, customers, the people downstream, and anybody who eats.

RomneyCare. The model for the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) was RomneyCare in Massachusetts. The basic structure — private health insurance that the government subsidizes and mandates — is a Republican idea that goes back the Heritage Foundation in the 90s.

Romney tries not to talk about his own greatest accomplishment, but all the other Republican candidates insist that RomneyCare has been a disaster. In fact, a recent poll showed 63% in Massachusetts support the law. When Scott Brown won his surprise Senate victory in 2009, he supported the law. You can’t get anywhere in Massachusetts by telling people you’re going to repeal RomneyCare.

Global warming. Mitt Romney used to take the side of science in this issue (even if he dragged his heels about doing anything), but even he is backing down, leaving Jon Huntsman as the only pro-science Republican candidate.

The rest compete to be the most vigorous climate-change denier. So far Rick Perry is winning with his McCarthy-like charge that “a substantial number of scientists” have “manipulated data”. (Name one, Rick.)

Fortunately, fact-checkers are showing some backbone here. (The Washington Post awarded Perry its lowest truth-rating of four pinocchios.) Even Fox News’ Clayon Morris admitted that Fox fact-checkers had found “Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water” before going on to say “but it doesn’t matter.”

The stimulus. Republican candidates unite around the idea that the stimulus failed. But check out this chart of private-sector employment.

Bush-Obama-Jobs-Chart

What’s killing job growth is that we’ve lost government jobs: The federal stimulus was never big enough to counter-act job cuts by the states.

I’m sure I left a few issues out. If you think of them, add a comment.

August 29, 2011 – 9:50 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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Irene and Uncle Sam, and other short notes

Natural disasters like Hurricane Irene demonstrate the usefulness of government. Where would we be without the National Weather Service, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the National Guard, and local first responders?

Everybody pays taxes and everybody gets services — that’s the efficient way when everything hits the fan. If you’re sitting on your roof or hanging onto a piece of floating debris, you don’t have to keep your Rescue Services Corporation membership card handy or remember the PIN they gave you. Just wave at the helicopter.

Of course, there are free-market alternatives, like the one ancient Rome had. The real estate mogul Crassus, trained his slaves to put out the kinds of fires that were common in the Roman inner city, where multi-family wooden structures leaned against each other.

When Crassus saw smoke, he and his slaves came running, just like fire engines do now.

And then they stopped — until Crassus found the owners of the nearest buildings that hadn’t caught fire yet and made well-below-market-rate offers to buy their properties. After they accepted, his slaves put out the fire.

It was a great system, and it made Crassus the richest man in Rome.

Some people would like to go back there — the Crassus wannabees, of course, and also the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which authored this call to eliminate the National Weather Service.

And Ron Paul, who picked this moment to reaffirm his position that FEMA should be eliminated. It’s fascinating to dig into the comments section of articles like this one and watch how Paul’s fans defend his point: by pointing to how badly FEMA handled Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Let’s review: FEMA was doing fine under President Clinton. Then President Bush screwed it up by appointing inexperienced cronies to run it. And the subsequent failure of FEMA to handle Katrina is now proof that government doesn’t work.

The real lesson is: Don’t let people run an agency if they don’t believe in its mission. And people who don’t believe in any government mission shouldn’t be in the government at all.

Yet another investigation into the ClimateGate emails has concluded with no finding of wrong-doing, least of all anything that would justify Rick Perry’s allegation (discussed last week) blaming the global-warming theory on a “substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data”.

The NSF’s Inspector General’s office concludes:

Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.

Why do I believe we haven’t heard the end of this? Because powerful fossil-fuel corporations want to keep the data-manipulation charge alive, and they have lots of money to do it.

Ahh, freedom! New Hampshirites are now free to work for less money. The repeal of our minimum wage took effect Sunday. The federal minimum wage ($7.25) still applies, but (like Michele Bachmann) repeal-sponsor Rep. Carol McGuire would like to eliminate all minimum wage laws so that the market could set wages “particularly for young people. They’re not worth the minimum.”

Jay Rosen is my favorite journalism critic. In this talk in Australia, he says that political coverage should try to separate appearance from reality and arguments from facts.

That sounds so obvious it makes you wonder: What are they doing now? Rosen sees three destructive ideas dominating current coverage:

  • Politics as an inside game. Rather than try to educate the public, journalists cover political insiders’ strategies for manipulating an ignorant public.
  • The cult of savviness. “This is what’s so odd about savviness as a political style performed for the public. It tries to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders.”
  • The production of innocence. Journalists are supposed to be nonpartisan and agenda-free. But what if an established fact becomes part of the dispute? “He said, she said journalism … is neutral on where the reality is, but reality is not something journalists can afford to be neutral about!”

If you’re tired of the country being run by and for big corporations, and you want to promote yourself from disgruntled citizen to activist, AlterNet’s Bruce Levine has a reading list for you.

Now you or your corporation can make unlimited contributions to a political action committee pledged to support a single presidential candidate. Thanks, Supreme Court!

Grist’s David Roberts examines why the environmentalist movement isn’t more powerful:

the decline of the left’s power is closely connected to the decline of institutions that used to create leftists and give them a sense of common purpose. I’d put two in particular foremost among them: unions and liberal churches.

The only institutional source of liberals he (or I) can think of is academia, which is a poor place to generate a populist message.

August 29, 2011 – 9:49 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

Objections

[8/22/2011]

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

– Clarence Darrow

In this week’s Sift:

  • Why I Am Not a Libertarian. I still remember the points I found so convincing when I was a 19-year-old Libertarian. But 35 years later the world looks very different to me.
  • Horse Race 2012. In general the corporate media over-covers the presidential horserace, and I hate to compound the problem. But they also cover it badly, so now-and-then I feel like I have to comment.
  • The Great Flabbergasting and other short notes. Rachel Maddow coined an amusing term for a head-shaking phenomenon: Republicans turn against their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart confronts ideas that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist and that the poor should have their taxes raised before the rich. Plus, some cute pictures of endangered species.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Last week was something of a break-out for the Weekly Sift. One Word Turns the Tea Party Around just passed 1900 hits on the blog, in addition to those who saw it via email or RSS. And when I cross-posted it on Daily Kos, it drew over 800 recommendations and 224 comments. What’s more, these blog visitors showed some signs of hanging around: The second-most-popular post last week was the Who Am I and Why I Started the Weekly Sift post that is always up. The popular posts of previous weeks have been driven by Reddit; One Word was driven by Facebook. Thanks to all of you who linked and liked and otherwise helped get it out there.
  • This week’s challenge. When you hand your money to a big corporation, chances are a slice of it will go to ALEC or the Chamber of Commerce and be used to promote corporate rights over human rights. In the economy as it currently exists, you can’t avoid corporations completely unless you’re ready to live like the Amish. But chances are you can find some way to give them less of your money. This week, investigate whether a credit union could serve you better than a bank. Or patronize a locally-owned shop or restaurant, a farmer’s market, or some other human-scale business rather than a national chain.
August 22, 2011 – 12:33 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)