Why I Am Not a Libertarian

Of all the political movements out there, the Libertarians have the coolest rhetoric. No matter what the issue is, they get to talk about Freedom vs. Tyranny and quote all that rousing stuff the Founders said about King George.

It’s also the perfect belief system for a young male (and maybe, by now, young females too). You don’t need knowledge or experience of any specific situations, you just need to understand the One Big Idea That Solves Everything: Other than a small and appropriately humbled military and judicial establishment, government is bad. Protect life, protect property, enforce contracts — and leave everything else to the market.

I should know. Thirty-five years ago, I was a 19-year-old libertarian, and I learned all the arguments. Now I’m a progressive — a liberal, whatever — and these days even I have to shake my head at how often I’m tempted to quote Marx.

What happened? Well, I suppose I could stroke my white beard and pontificate vaguely about the benefits of 35 years of experience. But I’m thinking that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires me to be a little more specific.

When you escape a sweeping worldview like Libertarianism, you usually don’t find an equally sweeping critique right away. A broad reframing may come later, but the transformation starts with a few things that stick in your craw and refuse to let themselves be swallowed.

For example, when I was leaving fundamentalist Christianity, one of the first things that bothered me was the genealogy of Jesus. The Bible contains two irreconcilable ones (in Matthew and Luke); they can’t both be the “gospel Truth”. Now, decades later, that issue is nowhere near the top of my why-I’m-not-a-fundamentalist list.

So let me start with some specific, simple things before I launch into more abstract philosophy.

Plague. I recommend that anyone thinking about becoming a Libertarian read The Great Influenza by John Barry. It doesn’t say a word about political philosophy, but it does compare how various American cities handled the Spanish Flu of 1918, which globally killed more people than World War I. The cities that did best were the ones that aggressively quarantined, shut down public meeting places, imposed hygiene standards, and in general behaved like tyrants.

As you read, try to imagine a Libertarian approach to a serious plague. I don’t think there is one. Maybe most people would respond to sensible leadership, but public health is one of those areas where a few people with the freedom to pursue screwy ideas can mess up everybody.

Global warming. There’s a reason why small-government candidates deny global warming: Denial is the only answer they have. Global warming is a collective problem, and there is no individualistic solution to it. Even market-based approaches like cap-and-trade require a massive government intervention to create the market that attacks the problem.

Property. Now let’s get to that more serious reframing.

I had to live outside the Libertarian worldview for many years before I began to grasp the deeper problem with it: property. Every property system in history (and all the ones I’ve been able to imagine) are unjust. So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops is an agent of injustice.

Libertarians tend to take property as a given, as if it were natural or existed prior to any government. But defining what can be owned, what owning it means, and keeping track of who owns what — that’s a government intervention in the economy that dwarfs all other government interventions. You see, ownership is a social thing, not an individual thing. I can claim I own something, but what makes my ownership real is that the rest of you don’t own it. My ownership isn’t something I do, it’s something we do.

[Aside: This is why it’s completely false to say that government programs primarily benefit the poor. Property is a creation of government, so the primary beneficiaries of government are the people who own things — the rich.]

Property and Labor. It’s worthwhile to go back and read the justifications of property that were given in the early days of capitalism. The most famous and influential such justification was in John Locke’s 1690 classic The Second Treatise of Civil Government. Locke admits that both reason and Christian revelation say that God gave the world to all people in common.

But I shall endeavour to shew, how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners.

Locke argues that we individually own our bodies, and so we own our labor. So when our labor gets mingled with physical objects, we develop a special claim on those objects. The person who gathers apples in a wild forest, Locke says, owns those apples.

The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them. … Though the water running in the fountain be every one’s, yet who can doubt, but that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out? His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.

But Locke attaches a condition to this justification: It only works if your appropriation doesn’t prevent the next person from doing the same.

No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst

And that’s where the whole thing breaks down. Today, a baby abandoned in a dumpster has as valid a moral claim to the Earth as anybody else. But as that child grows it will find that in fact everything of value has already been claimed. Locke’s metaphorical water is all in private pitchers now, and the common river is dry.

When that individual tries to mingle labor with physical objects, he or she will be rebuffed at every turn. Gather apples? The orchard belongs to someone else. Hunt or fish? The forest and the lake are private property.

The industrial economy is in the same condition. You can’t go down to the Ford plant and start working on your new car. You have to be hired first. You need an owner’s permission before your labor can start to create property for you. If no owner will give you that permission, then you could starve.

Access to the means of production. In Locke’s hunter-gatherer state of Nature, only laziness could keep an able-bodied person poor, because the means of production — Nature — was just sitting there waiting for human labor to turn it into property.

Today’s economic environment is very different, but our intuitions haven’t kept up. Our anxiety today isn’t that there won’t be enough goods in the world, and it isn’t fear that our own laziness will prevent us from working to produce those goods. Our fear is that the owners of the means of production won’t grant us access, so we will never have the opportunity to apply our labor.

I meet very few able-bodied adults whose first choice is to sit around demanding a handout. But I meet a lot who want a job and can’t find one. I also meet young people who would be happy to study whatever subject and train in whatever skill would get them a decent job. I am frustrated that I can’t tell them what subject or what skill that is.

Justice. A Libertarian government that simply maintained this property system would be enforcing a great injustice. Access to the means of production should be a human birthright. Everyone ought to have the chance to turn his or her labor into products that he or she could own.

What’s more, everyone should get the benefit of the increased productivity of society. No individual created that productivity single-handedly. No individual has a right to siphon it off.

But instead, our society has a class of owners, and everyone else participates in the bounty of the Earth and the wealth of human progress only by their permission. Increasingly, they maneuver into a position that allows them to drive a hard bargain for that permission. And so higher productivity means higher unemployment, and the average person’s standard of living decreases even as total wealth increases.

The role of government. I anticipate this objection: “You want to go back to being hunter-gatherers. We’ll all starve.”

Not at all. I want a modern economy. But a lassez-faire economy that takes the property system as given is unjust. It is the proper role of government to balance that injustice, to provide many paths of access to the means of production, and to compensate those who are still shut out.

To prevent government from doing so, in today’s world, is no way to champion freedom. Quite the opposite, it’s tyrannical.

August 22, 2011 – 12:15 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (284)

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Horse Race 2012

I’m usually reluctant to write about the presidential horserace, because it already gets over-covered in the corporate media, at the expense of covering who the candidates are and what they propose to do.

On the other hand, the media also tends to get the horse race wrong, which tempts me to comment. Recently, for example, pundits have been analyzing “what went wrong” with Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, never admitting that it was a mistake to give him so much coverage in the first place. In truth, they could just as fruitfully analyze what went wrong with your candidacy or mine, since neither of us is going to be president either.

(I wrote about Pawlenty because his campaign videos illustrated an important propaganda technique.)

So (with proper apologies and promises of future restraint) I’m going to plunge into some horserace coverage about the 2012 election.

President Obama. President Obama’s job approval rating hit an all-time low of 40% this week. Still, he is polling well — or at least not badly — against his potential 2012 opponents: In three states a Republican challenger needs to win — North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado — Obama is “edging Mitt Romney and keeping clear leads on the rest of the field”.

So Obama’s approval-rating slump seems less of a personal rejection than a symptom of a general wave of pessimism with the economy and disgust with American politics following the debt-ceiling debacle. Things are bad and the President seems to have no solution, but neither does anybody else.

Nate Silver (who I consider the best poll interpreter in the country) is struck more by the breadth of Obama’s slump than its size. During 2011 his approval rating has fallen among all income groups and in all regions of the country; among whites, blacks, and Hispanics; among conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats.

The drop among liberal Democrats is fairly small — about 3% — something you would never guess from progressive blogs like Hullabaloo. Nate sums up like this:

Although many leading liberal voices were unhappy with the debt ceiling deal that Mr. Obama struck with Republicans this month (justifiably, in my view), this just isn’t showing up in a big way among the liberal rank-and-file.

One thing to keep in mind is that if most liberal Democrats had strongly approved of Mr. Obama’s performance before, then a “downgrade” in their views of him might be toward less enthusiastic approval, rather than to outright disapproval. Although these liberal Democrats might not vote against Mr. Obama, less enthusiastic support could translate into reduced turnout, volunteerism and fund-raising for the president’s re-election campaign.

Count me among that number. I’ve gone from an enthusiastic Obama supporter to someone who says “at least he’s not batshit crazy”.

The Republican Savior Search. Republicans are currently going through what Democrats suffered in 2004, when Bush seemed beatable, but we lurched from one “savior” to the next because we just couldn’t find the right person to run against him. Howard Dean was going to save us, and then he wasn’t. Wesley Clark was popular until the exact moment he entered the race, and then we started longing for Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.

This year, Rick Perry is playing the Wesley Clark role. He was supposed to be the answer for Republicans who think that Michele Bachmann is unelectable (like Howard Dean), Mitt Romney is too establishment and too phony (like John Kerry), and (in spite of previous boomlets for Donald Trump and Herman Cain) everybody else just seems too small or too boring.

Then Rick ruined it all by announcing his candidacy. Suddenly he was every bit as crazy as Bachmann, a corrupt crony capitalist, a Shariah sympathizer, a porno investor, “an idiot“, a proponent of “big government overreach” and somehow simultaneously “the second coming of George Bush” and at war with the former Bushies. [In fairness: Think Progress explains why the porno charge is overblown.]

So now Republicans daydream of new saviors: Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan.

The Republican problem in a nutshell is that no actual candidate polls as well against Obama as the generic Republican. This is similar to the phenomenon that generic spending cuts are popular, while specific cuts aren’t. The generic Republican candidate runs on a generic platform that cuts spending without cutting anything important. Actual candidates have to be more specific.

The path to beating Obama is clear: He’s vulnerable on the economy, which everybody is disappointed in. The Republican candidate needs to talk about creating jobs while obscuring the fact that none of the Republican ideas created jobs when President Bush tried them. That’s why I was briefly worried when Perry cast himself as “the jobs governor”. The we-did-it-in-Texas message is deceptive, but it could fly.

The Republican problem is to get a candidate nominated without taking far-outside-the-mainstream positions, particularly on social issues. You can’t run against the gays any more. Prayer is good, but urging the public to pray for rain is wacky (especially if God turns you down). And abortions are strangely like guns: Most Americans think there are too many of them, but they still want their family to be able to get one as a last resort.

Other red-meat conservative issues fail nationally, too. People may not want to make big sacrifices to avoid global warming, but Perry’s scientists-are-frauds claim or Bachmann’s promise to “lock the doors” and “turn off the lights” at the EPA are going to scare more people than they attract. Illegal immigration worries many whites, but Republicans can’t win without at least 1/3 of the Hispanic vote.

So a winning Republican needs to wink-and-nod to the extremists while not scaring everybody else. Only Romney (OK, Huntsman also, for all his chances are worth) is trying to walk that line, and I think he could beat Obama if things continue to look bad economically. But the only way he wins the nomination is if Perry, Bachmann and maybe Palin split the wacko vote in the primaries.

August 22, 2011 – 12:13 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Great Flabbergasting and other short notes

[8/22/2011] Friday, Rachel Maddow coined a humorous term for a serious phenomenon: Republicans’ habit of passionately attacking their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. She called it “The Great Flabbergasting“.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

In her usual manner, Rachel wasn’t content just to float a cute phrase out there, she assembled the research and gave these examples:

  • trade agreements and patent reform that is in the Republican jobs plan.
  • a bipartisan deficit commission
  • pay-as-you-go rules in Congress
  • cap and trade (the original bill was McCain-Liebermann)
  • individual mandate in health reform (Romneycare in Massachusetts)
  • the DREAM Act
“We should have known this was coming,” she says, before playing tape from the 2008 Republican debates where John McCain promises to vote against the immigration bill he wrote.

Thursday Jon Stewart’s show had two brilliant segments. In the first, he answers the charge that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist:

You really have no f**king clue what socialism is, do you? “Eh, that George Clooney, always banging different broads — what a queer.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

In the second, he examines the strange notion that tax fairness should begin with taxing the poor.

So raising income tax on the top 2% of earners would raise $700 billion, but taking half of everything the bottom 50% have in this country would do the same. I see the problem here: We need to take all of what the bottom 50% have.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner zeroes in on the worst thing about Rick Perry’s global warming statement: Without naming a single name or providing an iota of evidence, Perry attacked the integrity of climate scientists in general:

… global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.

To me, this resembles Joe McCarthy’s imaginary list of communists in the State Department. If the media doesn’t pin Perry down on this and make him give at least one example, it’s not doing its job. And if he’s talking about the ClimateGate emails, he needs to address the fact that six separate investigations have cleared scientists of data manipulation.

My advice to reporters with access: The way to get Perry to answer is to attack his manhood. It’s cowardly to slander people vaguely and refuse to back up your claims.


In general I hate the idea that endangered species get better protection if they’re endearing. But damn, sand kittens are cute. Oh, and environmental regulations have brought otters back to England.

You can’ t get much greener than this: a wind-turbine charging station for electric cars. And it looks pretty cool, too.

Happy 90th anniversary to the 19th Amendment and female suffrage.

Were black families more stable during slavery? In a word: no.

Looking at the briefs John Boehner’s lawyer filed to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, you can see why the Obama administration bailed. Here’s what you need to buy to defend DOMA: Gays haven’t faced historical discrimination, sexual orientation is a choice, gays have enough power to defend their interests through the political system, same-sex couples make bad parents, and same-sex marriage damages opposite-sex marriage

August 22, 2011 – 12:09 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (2)

Turn Back

[8/15/2011]

Turn back, O Man.
Forswear thy foolish ways

Clifford Bax (1919)

In this week’s Sift:

  • One Word Turns the Tea Party Around. Want to transform annoying Tea Party rhetoric into motivating Progressive rhetoric? It’s easy: Just replace all occurrences of government with corporations. Who knew that Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, and Ronald Reagan could make so much sense?
  • Building the Rioters of the Future. Pundits tried very hard to stuff the British riots into some simple box: a crime spree, a revolution, bad parenting, mass insanity. When that failed, they proclaimed the violence a great mystery. But is it really so hard to understand why people with little to lose would loot or burn?
  • After Wisconsin. Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats picked up two seats in staunch Republican districts, but fell short of re-taking the state senate. So was that a win or a loss? And now we move on to Ohio.
  • Noah’s Dinosaurs and other short notes. Should a Bible theme park get tax breaks? Is it OK for a county board to begin its meetings by praying to Jesus? How the Republican 2012 field looks after the Ames Straw poll. Global warming in one graphic. Mitt Romney embraces corporate personhood, and the DNC strikes back. What countries are still AAA? Socialist ones, mostly.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Voter Suppression 101 had 464 views at last count. Last week’s most-clicked link backed up my claim (in Voter Suppression) that the League of Women Voters has stopped registering voters in Florida in response to a voter-suppression law there.
  • This Week’s Challenge is only a little self-serving: Figure out how you can draw more attention to the kinds of things you like. If you’ve mostly been a passive user of social media, figure out how to Like or Link or Retweet. Or sign up at Reddit or Digg or StumbleUpon and start trying to influence the wisdom of crowds.
August 15, 2011 – 12:12 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

One Word Turns the Tea Party Around

Did you ever watch one of those football blooper reels, where guys run for touchdowns in the wrong direction?


Sometimes they look really good doing it: fast, agile, determined. None of their teammates can catch up and turn them around.

This last year or two I’ve been feeling that way about the Tea Party — not the corporate lobbyists who run the organizations or the billionaires who fund them, but the rank-and-file types who wave signs and bring their babies to rallies. A few are the stereotypic gun-toting racists, but a lot of others are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:

  • Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
  • The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
  • Our democracy is threatened.
  • The public is told a lot of lies.
  • People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
  • If we stand together, we’re not as helpless as we seem.

I could go on, but you get the idea. They’re on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren’t running the wrong way.

How they should turn around is pretty easy to describe. Tea Partiers think:

The threat to our way of life comes from government, and the solution is to shrink government while freeing corporations from government control.

Just flip government and corporations in that sentence:

The threat to our way of life comes from corporations, and the solution is to shrink corporations while freeing government from corporate control.

Perfect. Now you can explain things like too-big-to-fail banks gambling trillions on the unregulated credit-default-swap market, sinking the economy, and then getting the taxpayers to cover their losses.

And more: Did the USDA put salmonella in our meat? No, meat-packing corporations did. And they’ve got enough lawyer-and-lobbyist power to keep the USDA regulators at bay. Did the EPA dump raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico? No, BP did. They cut corners on safety and no regulator was in a position to stop them. Did the government kill the 29 miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine? No, Massey Energy did, and had enough clout to keep the mine going even after inspectors had found more than 500 safety violations.

By getting the government/corporation thing backwards, the Tea Party has channeled populist anger into the idea that corporations need even more power. Get those mean bureaucrats off the back of poor, beleaguered Goldmann Sachs. If we just let the Koch brothers’ paper plants dump more phosphorous into Wisconsin’s rivers, the economy will be fine. Let’s kill off the unions, and then the corporations that own the mines and the factories will treat working people with more respect. Let corporate money flow freely into political campaigns, and then the voice of ordinary Americans will really be heard in Washington.

Guys! The goal line is over here!

On the other hand, the government/corporate flip fixes just about all the Tea Party rhetoric. For example, John Boehner was trying to pander to the Tea Party when he said:

The bigger the government the smaller the people.

But what if he had said “The bigger the corporations, the smaller the people”? That would have been really insightful, and (among other things) would have explained why the working class needs more unions, not less.

Go to one of those Tea Party web sites full of their favorite anti-government quotes. Do the flip to make them anti-corporate, and you’ve got rhetoric that’s dead-on:

When one gets in bed with corporations, one must expect the diseases they spread. — Ron Paul

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and corporations to gain ground. — Thomas Jefferson

The corporate solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. — Milton Friedman

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where a corporation is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. — Ayn Rand

Ronald Reagan becomes the font of wisdom Tea Partiers believe he is:

In this present crisis, corporations are not the solution to our problem; corporations are the problem.

A corporation is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.

Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the corporations the more corrupt they will become.

Man is not free unless corporations are limited.

“We the people” tell the corporations what to do, they don’t tell us.

After the flip, even Sarah Palin makes sense:

People know something has gone terribly wrong with our corporations and they have gotten so far off track.

Grover Norquist is still a radical, but now he’s attacking the right problem:

We want to reduce the size of corporations in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on corporations so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

Here’s another rhetoric-flipping trick: Replace Washington with Wall Street. Then Rand Paul has it right:

Wall Street is horribly broken. I think we stand on a precipice. We are encountering a day of reckoning and this movement, this Tea Party movement, is a message to Wall Street that we’re unhappy and that we want things done differently.

Go Rand! Go Tea Party!

Now let’s translate the Founders:

A corporation, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. — Thomas Paine

It is error alone which needs the support of the corporate media. Truth can stand by itself. — Thomas Jefferson

If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in our corporations, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. — Samuel Adams

Like fire, the corporation is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. — George Washington

When you understand who today’s powerful elite really is, many of the Tea Party’s favorite Founder-quotes don’t need any translation:

The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. — Thomas Jefferson

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree. — James Madison

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. — James Madison

So true, James. Little by little we are losing our privacy, our access to information, and even our political system to the corporations.

And in spite of the economic collapse Wall Street’s machinations have brought upon us, how do we explain the market-worship we see all over the corporate media? The 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat had that one nailed:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

I got that from the Venango County Tea Party Patriots. Again, no translation is necessary once you know which way to look.

But that’s the real problem with the Tea Party rank-and-file: Like the guns of Singapore, they’re facing the sea when the attack comes over land. They know they’re under somebody’s thumb, but they’re confused about whose thumb it is. So when they strike back, they swing at the wrong guys.

If any Tea Partiers have read this far, I’m sure they think I’m the one who has it backwards. But I ask you, as you run free and clear towards the goal line: Whose goal line is that? Look up in the stands and see who’s cheering for you: The billionaires. The CEOs. The traders on the floor of the big exchanges. The investment bankers.

Isn’t that just a little strange? Have they all suddenly started rooting for everyday middle-class Americans?

Or are you running the wrong way?

August 15, 2011 – 12:08 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (76)

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Building the Rioters of the Future

[8/15/2011] I’m assuming you already know that riots broke out in many English cities this week. If not, Wikipedia has a good summary of the basic facts.

But while it was easy to turn on your TV and see video of burning and looting, getting a half-way decent explanation of what it was all about was quite a bit harder.

Everyone agreed that the riots weren’t “political” like the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tunis or Cairo. No leaders presented lists of demands. Mobs didn’t shout slogans, political or otherwise.

The riots also didn’t seem to be racial, exactly. The unrest started in London’s diverse Tottenham neighborhood, but also jumped to mostly white neighborhoods like Croydon. The Irish Times reported:

Those who were taking part in the looting and fighting, or throwing fireworks at the police, were of many shades, ages and nationalities, but they all had something in common: they felt they had little to lose.

Eliminating politics and race left even less likely simple explanations: Prime Minister Cameron seemed to suggest that lots of people spontaneously turned criminal for no reason. Others blamed bad parenting, though it’s mysterious why that would suddenly become a problem last week rather than the week before. Maybe it was “mob mentality” or “mindless violence” — terms that sound more substantive than “I’ve got no clue”, but may not be. And there were the usual attempts to blame technology, which made no more sense than giving technology the credit in Cairo.

To me, the most disturbing aspects the coverage were the journalists who didn’t want an explanation. In this BBC interview, West Indian writer (and long-time Londoner) Darcus Howe tries to raise underlying issues:

What I was certain about, listening to my grandson and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and a careful hearing, they have been telling us — and we would not listen — about what has been happening in this country to them.

The interviewer then cuts him often, asking if he condones the violence. After a disgusted “Of course not”, Howe tries to talk about police behavior, and how often young blacks are stopped and searched for no reason. The interviewer interrupts to accuse Howe of having been a rioter himself in the past, which he indignantly denies. (“Show some respect for an old West Indian Negro,” he pleads.)

And then time is up. Riots: Are you for them or against them?

The most insightful thing I read about the riots was on the London blog Penny Red. (You may have seen it reposted on AlterNet, Common Dreams, or some other American web site.)

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

As in this week’s lead article, I find myself thinking that people are looking in the wrong direction. Asking why rioters take what they want, hurt people they don’t like, or burn down establishments they resent is like asking Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. (His iconic answer: “Because that’s where the money is.”)

It’s perfectly obvious why people would loot and burn. If you want to get simple, start with the question: Why don’t the rest of us riot every day?

The best answer, I think, is: Because we participate in systems that we believe work better for us and for our loved ones in the long run. We participate in the property system because we also want to own things. We participate in the money economy because we also want to have jobs and buy things. We participate in a system of mutual respect because we also want want to claim respect.

Now imagine that you own essentially nothing, have no job prospects, and are treated with disrespect on a regular basis. What’s the system to you other than a policeman who is too busy to bother with you right now?

Riots may not be organized political actions that make clear demands. But nonetheless they have political causes. If we are leaving people out, leaving them without hope and without any clear way to channel their effort into bettering their lives, then we are building the rioters of the future. When the disorder begins, they will have no reason to restrain themselves.

August 15, 2011 – 11:42 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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After Wisconsin

[8/15/2011] Democrats fell just short of taking the Wisconsin state senate in the recall elections last Tuesday, picking up two Republican seats when they needed three (and once again falling short in a cliff-hanger due to late-breaking votes from Waukesha County). The two last recall elections (both with incumbent Democrats) happen tomorrow.

Republicans tried to spin this as victory, and the national media largely went along. But the only senators eligible for recall were those elected in 2008, a Democratic year. And if Democrats gain two seats over the 2008 results (assuming they hold their two seats tomorrow), it’s hard to see that as defeat.

So what happens next? The recall of Governor Walker, who is so unpopular he did not campaign in the senate recall elections, will likely still happen when he becomes recall-eligible in January. But the next big test of the ALEC agenda is in Ohio.

Ohio’s SB 5 is the same public-union-busting effort that started the trouble in Wisconsin. Opponents collected a huge number of signatures to get an overturn-SB-5 referendum on the ballot for November. This election will draw the same avalanche of anonymous corporate cash that went into Wisconsin, but so far the polls look good.

August 15, 2011 – 11:30 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Noah’s Dinosaurs and other short notes

Dinosaurs on the Ark

[8/15/2011] Tax breaks and other incentives totaling just short of $100 million are going into the Ark Encounter theme park that is supposed to open near Williamstown, Kentucky in 2014.

Ark Encounter is the latest project of Answers in Genesis, the non-profit that already owns the Creation Museum 45 minutes down the road. Unlike the CM, though, Ark is a for-profit venture owned by its investors. (AiG will just manage it.) The two attractions share AiG’s young-earth Creationist view, as you can tell from the dinosaur-head sticking out of the Ark.

This is going to be a tricky separation-of-church-and-state case. On the one hand, as Daily Kos’ Kaili Joy Gray puts it:

you can’t use millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to teach people about Jesus. Pretty sure that building a creationist theme park on the taxpayer dime is actually the textbook definition of what you can’t do.

But a new Six Flags could probably wrangle some tax concessions too, so I think Ark-park opponents will need to argue that it’s getting a better-than-secular deal because state officials want to promote Christianity. As I said: tricky.

Still, try to imagine the uproar if tax breaks helped build a Mahabharata theme park intended to draw millions of Hindu tourists to Kentucky.

A North Carolina county board is going to appeal to the Supreme Court after an appellate court stopped it from opening its meetings with prayers to Jesus. The board’s vice chair says church-and-state isn’t being violated because the board’s “open door” policy would allow members of non-Christian faiths to lead prayers if they wanted.

Like my fantasy of a tax-subsidized Hindu theme park, though, it’s hard to imagine the response a meeting-opening Islamic prayer would draw.

Another 10 commandments fight is brewing in Florida.

Nate Silver interprets Saturday’s Ames Straw Poll. His model makes Michele Bachmann the favorite to win the Iowa caucuses, and has bad news for Santorum, Cain, Gingrich et al. Tim Pawlenty has already seen the writing on the wall and quit.

Now the focus shifts to Rick Perry, who announced his candidacy Saturday. Perry is making a “Texas miracle” case: Under his leadership Texas is creating jobs, and the same policies could work nationally.

As Paul Krugman and an NYT panel point out, Texas’ example wouldn’t scale up even if we wanted it to: Texas has benefitted from a high oil price and from snow-birding retirees who bring in money they earned in other states. Also, Texas is winning a race-to-the-bottom with other states by offering businesses cheap labor unprotected by state government. So Texas leads not just in new jobs, but in minimum wage jobs and in the percentage of people without health insurance.

In short: Texas isn’t creating jobs, it’s taking bad jobs from other states and making them worse. That’s not a route to national prosperity.


Grist boils the evidence that global warming is man-made down to one graphic. “It’s getting hotter” isn’t the whole case for man-made global warming. How and where it’s getting hotter eliminates alternative explanations like increased solar radiation.

Just because a corporation talks green doesn’t mean it isn’t funding climate-change denial through organizations like ALEC.

Mitt Romney’s claim that “Corporations are people, my friend” may have been true legally and even in the sense he intended (that a corporate tax ultimately means some person — most likely some very rich person — has less money). But he’s given the DNC fodder for an effective ad.

Make that two effective ads.

The quips are also piling up. One TPM commenter claims Romney really meant, “Corporations are my friends, people.” And I wasn’t the only person to come up with “Corporations aren’t people. Soylent green is people.”

Now that the United States has lost its AAA bond rating, you know who still has one? Socialist countries, mostly: Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and a few others — all of whom have universal health care.

August 15, 2011 – 11:26 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (2)

The People Repelled

The discussion shows that are supposed to add to public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that “issues” don’t matter except as items for politicians to squabble about. … The press, which in the long run cannot survive if people lose interest in politics, is acting as if its purpose was to guarantee that people are repelled by public life.

James Fallows, Breaking the News (1995)

In this week’s sift:

  • Voter Suppression 101. Imagine you are a politician who serves only the top 1%. What’s your plan for getting enough votes to win?
  • Tea By Any Other Name. After the disastrous end of the Bush administration, conservatives used their money and media power to ditch the wounded Republican label and rebrand themselves as the new (and therefore blameless) Tea Party. Now that the Tea Party’s public image is tanking, how long before they try the same trick again?
  • A Week of Down. Bad as it looked, the debt-ceiling deal was supposed to keep the stock market from crashing and the ratings agencies from downgrading our bonds. Funny how that worked out.
  • The Solar Oil Field and Other Short Notes. Oman uses solar to bring up more oil. Protesting Obama’s 50th birthday. Sponge Bob, propagandist. The E-Trade baby loses everything. Matt Damon sticks up for teachers. The EPA saves money. And a manufactured snub of Easter.
  • Last week’s most popular post. At last count Confessions of a Centrist in Exile had received 240 views on the blog. The most-clicked-link was the solar-powered bikini.
  • This week’s challenge. Six Republican state senators face recall elections in Wisconsin tomorrow. If three of them lose, the state Senate flips to the Democrats. This would send a powerful message to state governments around the country about union-busting and favoring corporations over people. It’s too late for your money to do much good, but they need people to make get-out-the-vote phone calls and you can do it from home.

A special note to RSS subscribers. If you read the Sift via Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you’ve probably noticed all the out-of-date posts you’re getting. Here’s what’s happening: When I moved the Sift to weeklysift.com a few weeks ago, the archived posts didn’t transfer perfectly. So I’ve been fixing them little by little. Unfortunately, those fixes have been showing up in the RSS feed as if they were “updates”. I’m not sure what to do about this other than just get the fixes done as fast as possible. Any Weekly Sift post that shows up on anything other than a Monday is the result of this glitch. My apologies.

August 8, 2011 – 12:03 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Voter Suppression 101

Suppose you’re a politician who represents the interests of the rich and powerful. In any democracy, you have one basic problem: The top 1% is only 1%. How are you going to get enough votes to win?

There are a lot of tried-and-true strategies for convincing at least some of the bottom 99% to vote for you: You can divide the them along fault lines like race or religion. Single-issue groups (guns, abortion) can help you if their issues are harmless to your real constituents. You can run against some minority — gays, immigrants, unions, poor people, teachers, the unemployed — and make your opponent look like the special-interest candidate. You can smear your opponent directly so that you don’t have to say much at all — you’re “the other guy”, the one who isn’t a Marxist child-molesting terrorist.

Sometimes you can convince the peons that your issues are their issues too: Tell them they’re going to pay a “death tax” that only millionaires pay. Tell them they’d have a job if only rich people had the money to hire more flunkies. Make them hate the meddling bureaucrats who want to keep water faucets from burning, or mines from collapsing, or lettuce free from dangerous bacteria.

Fortunately, you’re going to have a lot of money to help you pursue those strategies — even more now that corporations can contribute anonymously to front groups like the Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity. You’ll have the best consultants money can buy, and all the ad time you want.

Plus, you get to build on all the PR the rich do anyway: They aren’t vampires who suck the blood out of the people who make and do things, they’re “job creators“. They’re the winners who bobbed up to the top of the meritocracy on sheer talent and virtue. They work long hours (in comfortably air-conditioned offices with great views) for their millions of dollars a week. (Or, in some cases, more than $10 million a day, all year long.)

But even so, it’s a long way from 1% to 50%-plus-one. A frustratingly large percentage of the electorate wants to be represented by people who look out for their interests rather than the interests of the people who suck their blood.

What can you do?

The final piece of your puzzle is just math. Paul Weyrich nailed it back in 1979:

I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

So you don’t need a majority of the electorate at all. You just need to make sure that a lot of the people who don’t support you don’t vote.

But how?

The first thing you need to realize is: The poorer and less powerful people are, the harder it is for them to jump hurdles. Any hurdles.

Picture a single mother with a minimum-wage job. If registering means taking time off work, it’s not going to happen — she needs the hours, and minimum-wage employers don’t know the meaning of “personal time”. Going across town means taking the bus; it won’t be an extra half-hour at lunch, it’ll be all afternoon. If it means knowing exactly where to go and who to see and what form to fill out — she’s not going to look that stuff up with her home computer.

You know what really slows the poor down? They’re used to being pushed aside. If you tell college-educated professionals that they can’t vote, they’ll say: “That can’t be right.” They’ll talk to a supervisor, they’ll read the fine print, they’ll yell and start writing down names if they have to. Because deep down they believe that the system is supposed to work for them.

The poor don’t think that way — especially if they’re poor and black, or poor and disabled, or poor and non-English-speaking. They’re used to clerks who just want to get rid of them and supervisors who threaten to call the cops. It happens all the time.

New voters — the young, people who just moved to town, new citizens, folks who just got interested in politics — are the same way. Tell them they’re in the wrong office. Tell them the deadline was yesterday. Lots of them will believe you.

See where I’m going with this? Anything that makes voting harder shifts the electorate in your favor. Any confusion you can add … occasionally it will affect one of your voters, but mostly not. You win the numbers game.

So:

Make it harder to register. Florida is your model here. Gov. Scott just pushed through such a doozy of a law that even the League of Women Voters has stopped registering new voters.

Make it harder to vote. Shut down any early voting, restrict the hours on election day, and make sure the lines are long, especially in poor neighborhoods. Look at Ohio. If enough people give up and go home, you win.

Voter ID laws are a must. They don’t prevent any actual fraud, but people without drivers’ licenses — poor people, the disabled, folks in nursing homes — are exactly who you don’t want voting. The Supreme Court makes you offer them some other way to get an ID, but if you make it enough of  a hassle, most of them won’t.

Hassle voters. It’s easy to come up with excuses to challenge voters at the polls. Vote caging is a good one: You send postcards to the addresses on the voting rolls, and if they come back undelivered you remove the names from the rolls or challenge them at the polls. A lot of names get removed by mistake, but that’s all to the good. (If you do it right, college students can’t vote either at home or at school. Score!)

Another great trick from Ohio: If voters show up in the wrong polling place (say because you moved the boundaries), poll workers don’t have to help them! Figuring out where to go is their problem.

Dirty tricks. The Koch brothers’ front Americans for Prosperity, just pulled such a good one in Wisconsin that Stephen Colbert covered it. They sent out an official-looking mailing about absentee ballots that gave the wrong deadline and the wrong address. Anybody who believes it won’t get their vote counted. And when caught, AFP blamed a “printing error”.

Another great trick is to spread rumors: If there’s a warrant out on you, the police will be waiting at the polls. If your home is foreclosed, you can’t vote. You can vote over the phone. The possibilities are endless.

So don’t despair. Democracy isn’t about representing the people, it’s about having more votes than the other guy. That’s not as hard as you think.

August 8, 2011 – 12:00 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (4)