Now Look What You Made Me Do

The last two weeks have seen a widespread violent crack-down on non-violent protesters, the like of which has not occurred in the United States in many years. So far the police have been using non-lethal weapons like pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, sonic cannons, and the old-fashioned nightstick, so there is not a body count to report. But the difference between this suppression of dissent and the ones in Cairo that President Obama denounced as far back as last January is largely of degree and not of kind.

You would not suspect this from the coverage in the mainstream American media, which has been doing it’s usual even-handed he-said/she-said thing. Protesters “clash with police” reports the New York Times, not specifying that protesters’ eyes clashed with police pepper spray or that protesters’ heads and stomachs clashed with police nightsticks. “Violence erupted” said New York Magazine, as if violence were some volcanic process independent of human decisions.

AllVoices anchor Veronica Roberts reported that Iraq veteran Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull “after he was caught in the violence that erupted between police and protesters”. Olsen was not “caught” in anything; he was protesting peacefully when police shot him in the head with a tear gas canister (perhaps intentionally). (He may have suffered brain damage and was still unable to speak several days later.)

(Even this morning’s NYT article about the coverage of Occupy Wall Street says nothing about the coverage of police attacks. The Times seems unaware that there could be an issue here.)

But this shouldn’t be a contest between my rants and the rants on Fox News. The only way to appreciate what is going on is to look at the pictures and watch the video for yourself. In this video, the camera-holder is slowly walking parallel to (and maybe 60 feet away from) a line of unthreatened Oakland police when one of them decides to shoot him with a rubber bullet — apparently just because he can.

Here, a UC Davis policeman calmly pepper-sprays students who are sitting on the ground, immobile. Other police watch and do nothing.

BTW, you should see how this incident ends: Starting at about the 5 minute mark, the police see that the crowd is neither retreating nor attacking, and they start to lose their spirit and look confused. Using the human mic device, a protester invites them to retreat, and they do, leaving the quad in control of the protesters. It’s a stunning example of how nonviolence works.

At UC-Berkeley, students are peacefully behind a line of police who suddenly start using their nightsticks.

Here, a young woman with her hands at her sides, surrounded by people armed with nothing more than cameras, is pepper-sprayed in the face by police in riot gear. The LA Times reports the incident in he-said/she-said terms: “Occupy Portland organizers allege law enforcement took an inappropriate and heavy-handed approach.”

In Seattle, police pepper-sprayed this 84-year-old former school teacher. Local TV news even-handedly reported that “mayhem took place” and “chaos erupted in downtown Seattle”.

Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis (who was arrested in New York Thursday) put it a little differently: “Corporate America is using our police departments as hired thugs.”

I have read many claims by police that protesters threatened or assaulted them in some way. With all the video cameras out there, you’d think someone would capture assaults on police if they were really happening with any frequency. I’ve looked for such video, but I can’t find it.

On YouTube, the query “occupy protesters assault police” led me to this local TV-news report from Toledo, which shows two protesters at a city council meeting “assaulting police” by flailing helplessly as they’re being dragged away. So far that’s the worst protester violence I’ve found video of.

In public-opinion terms, this “even-handed” coverage is anything but. Obviously, the reason there is an incident at all is because people are protesting, so if “violence erupts”, the reader’s natural inclination is to think that protesters caused it. Similarly, when ABC News reports that nine cities have already spent more than $10 million responding to the protests, the protesters seem to be to blame.

What actually costs money, though, is the cities’ extreme now-look-what-you-made-me-do over-reaction to the protests. The protesters are not demanding to be surrounded by armies of police in riot gear earning overtime. City mayors and police chiefs are making those choices, which are justified by what, exactly? Where is the bad example of a city that under-responded and suffered some awful consequence?

Virtually every “problem” offered as an excuse to break up the occupation protests is actually made worse when the police attack. Are the protesters “trashing” the public parks? Well, here’s what the Occupy Oakland site looked like the morning after the police violently “cleared” it.

Mayor Bloomberg has cited complaints about noise as a reason to drive protesters out of Zuccotti Park — with noise cannons. As the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof observed:

Sure, the mayor had legitimate concerns about sanitation and safety, but have you looked around New York City? Many locations aren’t so clean and safe, but there usually aren’t hundreds of officers in riot gear showing up in the middle of the night to address the problem.

When the unprovoked and counter-productive violence of the authoritarian reaction is masked by “even-handed” coverage, though, the natural reaction of the news-watching public is to grumble at the protesters who are causing trouble and wasting their tax money.

And as the mainstream media coverage suffers from false equivalence and fake even-handedness, the coverage from the right-wing media — Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Weekly Standard, and (now that Murdoch owns it) the Wall Street Journal — drips with vitriol.

For weeks, Fox News has pushed two related lines of propaganda on a daily basis: invoking a Woodstock drug-taking dirty-hippy stereotype of the protesters, and de-humanizing them by focusing on their animal functions — urination, defecation, sex, etc. Karl Rove’s Crossroads PAC has put out an anti-Elizabeth-Warren ad tying her to the occupations, where “protesters attack police, do drugs, and trash public parks.”

Unsurprisingly, when one side’s propaganda goes uncorrected, the other side’s public image suffers. A PPP poll shows Occupy Wall Street’s popularity declining.

This combined police-and-media attack exposes a long-term weakness in the Left: We lack solidarity. When media coverage goes against some group we sympathize with, we distance ourselves rather than stand up for them.

The Right has dug-in, billionaire-financed infrastructure, so it will defend its clan from media attacks (as it has done with Herman Cain) even if the target is clearly in the wrong (like BP). Compare the Left’s reaction to the Dean Scream: Objectively, the scream meant nothing, but suddenly it was embarrassing to be associated with Dean, so his support melted.

It’s important that those of us who sympathize with the goals of Occupy Wall Street not melt away. Ordinary Americans have started protesting against the way that the rich (especially the parasitic financial community, which on the whole adds little if anything to our economy) have captured all the economic growth. In response, the rich have leaned on City Hall to call out the police to rough them up (except in New York, where no leaning was necessary because a finance-industry billionaire already is City Hall), and the corporate media has covered these events in a way that distributes the blame unfairly on the protesters.

We can’t let that be the end of the story.

November 21, 2011 – 1:13 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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Will the Court Throw Out Obamacare?

Last Monday, the Supreme Court announced something that’s been obvious for a while now: It will rule on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, nicknamed the ACA or Obamacare. This was inevitable, because four appeals courts have ruled on the Act and disagreed: three said it was constitutional, and one said not. Since a federal law can’t be constitutional in some parts of the country but not others, the Supreme Court needs to straighten this out.

The rulings so far. At the district court level, rulings tended to be political: Judges appointed by Republican presidents invalidated the law while those appointed by Democrats upheld it. (The most polemic invalidation was Reagan appointee Judge Roger Vinson’s in the Pensacola District.) Fortunately, the appellate courts were more, well, judicious in their rulings. In particular, the D. C. appeals court ruling two weeks ago gives a good model of the two most likely ways the Supreme Court might go.

Like the Supremes, the D.C. court had a conservative majority: a Reagan appointee (Laurence Silberman), a Bush II appointee (Brett Kavanaugh), and a Carter appointee (Harry Edwards). Both the majority opinion and the dissent were written by the conservatives.

The majority opinion (by Silberman, supported by Edwards) upheld the constitutionality of the ACA. The dissent (Kavanaugh) didn’t rule on the constitutional issues, saying that the courts could not intervene until the law has fully taken effect in 2014.

Both opinions are well thought out, and I believe the Supreme Court will back one or the other of them.

The issues. The controversial part of the ACA is the individual mandate: It requires people to buy health insurance and penalizes them if they don’t. This notion was proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s as an alternative to Medicare-like proposals for universal health care, because it keeps the health insurance industry private. Newt Gingrich supported the mandate then, and Mitt Romney made it the center of his Massachusetts healthcare plan.

Now, however, conservatives claim it is unconstitutional for this reason: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution lists the powers of the federal government, and conservatives hold that none of those powers can be stretched to cover the individual mandate.

Supporters of the law claim that it is authorized by Section 8’s Commerce Clause

Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

plus the Necessary and Proper Clause

Congress shall have Power … To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers

In other words, Congress can regulate the interstate market in health care, and in carrying out that mission, Congress has found it necessary and proper to mandate that people buy health insurance.

It’s not a tax. The annoying thing about this whole debate is that Congress could have avoided it by wording the law differently. If it had called the mandate a tax instead of a penalty (in other words, we’re going to tax people who don’t have insurance) it would have fallen under the sweeping power to tax that Section 8 gives Congress:

The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes

One reason Judge Kavanaugh gives for delaying a ruling until after 2014 is that in the meantime Congress could make the whole issue moot with this minor rewrite of the law.

The who-pays-what-to-whom would be identical. The difference is purely moral: Under the ACA as it stands, an uninsured person is breaking the law, for which s/he is assessed a penalty (collectable by the IRS on the income tax form). If the mandate were a tax, an uninsured person could obey the law by paying the tax (in the same amount on the same form).

The administration has argued that this makes no practical difference, so the courts should rule the ACA constitutional under the taxing power. But judges aren’t buying it. Who’d have suspected: You can’t tell a judge that it makes no difference whether a person obeys or breaks the law.

Or maybe it is a tax. The main reason not to rule on the ACA until 2014 is the Anti-Injunction Act, which says that a judge can’t issue an injunction to prevent a tax from going into effect. If a tax is invalid for some reason, the proper process is for the government to begin collecting the tax and for the courts to get involved only after people to sue to get their money back.

The point, I think, is to keep one or two renegade judges from screwing up the whole government by shutting off its revenue.

I know what you’re thinking: If the mandate is a penalty and not a tax, what does the Anti-Injunction Act have to do with it? Well, apparently there’s a penumbra of some sort, so that if a non-tax is sufficiently tax-like, the Act applies. (You can tell from the D.C. court ruling that Silberman and Kavanaugh had a long argument about this. I confess to skimming this part of their opinions.)

Action vs. inaction. Sooner or later, though, either now or after it takes effect in 2014, the Court is going to have to rule on whether the Commerce Clause authorizes the individual mandate.

Anyone who wants to invalidate the ACA has to deal with the long history of courts interpreting the Commerce Clause loosely and expansively. Under current precedents, Congress can regulate economic activity within a state if that activity is part of a larger interstate market, and it can even regulate non-economic activity (like limiting the quantity of wheat that a farmer can grow for his own use) if some larger scheme of economic regulation depends on it. Commerce-clause justifications have only been rejected when the obvious intention of the law was to regulate local, non-economic activity (like keeping guns away from schools) on the vague justification that the activity has some eventual impact on interstate commerce.

So the basic commerce-clause justification of the ACA goes like this: Healthcare is an interstate market, so Congress has a legitimate interest in regulating it. The scheme implemented in the ACA is a legitimate attempt to regulate that market. That scheme falls apart without the individual mandate, so the mandate is necessary and proper to carry out Congress’ commerce-regulating power.

The counter-argument is that none of the precedents cover the ACA’s individual mandate, because they all concern some kind of activity, while the mandate is regulating inactivity. Simply by existing, the ACA claims, you affect the interstate healthcare market. So upholding the ACA is breaking new ground and substantially expanding the power of the government. If the ACA is upheld, what couldn’t Congress force people to do?

Judge Silberman’s ruling. Silberman agrees with the counter-argument up to a point, but not all the way to its conclusion. The precedents don’t cover inactivity, but the whole activity/inactivity distinction is itself new. It’s not in the Constitution, and it’s not implied by the precedents. So it’s not exactly conservative to toss the law out on these novel grounds.

What’s more, he rejects the basic conservative frame that the mandate is an individual-liberty issue:

Appellants’ view that an individual cannot be subject to Commerce Clause regulation absent voluntary, affirmative acts that enter him or her into, or affect, the interstate market expresses a concern for individual liberty that seems more redolent of Due Process Clause arguments. But it has no foundation in the Commerce Clause.

… it is irrelevant that an indeterminate number of healthy, uninsured persons will never consume health care, and will therefore never affect the interstate market. Broad regulation is an inherent feature of Congress’s constitutional authority in this area; to regulate complex, nationwide economic problems is to necessarily deal in generalities. Congress reasonably determined that as a class, the uninsured create market failures; thus, the lack of harm attributable to any particular uninsured individual, like their lack of overt participation in a market, is of no consequence.

Silberman finds no obvious place to limit Congress’ Commerce Clause power here, but notes that Congress is subject to a “political check”. In other words: This is one of many areas where Congress has the constitutional power to do all kinds of crazy things, and it’s up to the voters to see that they don’t. If Congress only had the power to do wise things, we wouldn’t need to have elections.

What will the Supreme Court do? I think that Silberman and Kavanaugh have blazed the two possible paths that an honest conservative judge can follow: Unless you want to invent some new restriction that isn’t in either the Constitution or the case law, you have to find the ACA constitutional. Your only other option is to punt the ball to 2014 or 2015 by invoking the Anti-Injunction Act.

Now, the Roberts Court has shown itself to be political. Its maneuvering around Citizens United, where it made a ruling more sweeping than either side was asking for, is a case in point. In that vein, I find it disturbing that the Court has chosen to review not just the individual mandate of the ACA, but also its Medicaid expansion, which none of the appellate courts had a problem with. That hints at another activist ruling, where the Court answers a question no one is asking.

Still, Silberman’s reasoning will be hard to reverse, particularly since his opinion quotes both Roberts and Scalia. So I believe the Court will take either the Silberman or the Kavanaugh route.

But the choice between them will be based on politics, not law. The Court’s decision, which may not come out until June, will frame the healthcare issue for the fall election. (Kavanaugh already hints at this by suggesting that a future president could decide not to enforce the mandate if he believes it to be unconstitutional.)

The decision will be determined by the Republicans’ electoral prospects: Will it be better for them to have the issue hanging, or to know that the ACA will take effect unless a new Congress reverses it or a new president refuses to enforce it?

So I’m taking the moderately cynical view of the Roberts Court. I don’t think they’ll throw the ACA out just because they dislike it politically, but which of the valid legal options they’ll take will be determined by politics.

November 21, 2011 – 12:55 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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Paterno and the Bishops

I generally try to avoid topics that are already over-covered in the media, but I do want to say a couple things about the Penn State scandal.

First, if you’re not a college football fan, it’s hard to appreciate what a shock this all has been, and why it’s drawing so many comparisons to the Catholic clergy’s pedophilia scandal. Maybe the person in the best position to comment is sexual-abuse-prevention activist and College Football Hall of Fame quarterback Don MacPherson:

The program under Joe Paterno is considered one of the cleanest in college football, boasting high graduation rates and on-field performance. … Penn State stood above in the hypercompetitive and often unscrupulous world of college sports, and this served as a recruiting tool and an assurance to parents of promising high school football players. It’s also not hard to understand why parents of troubled young men would want their sons to have the influence of the environment that Penn State and [Paterno assistant coach and accused child rapist Jerry] Sandusky provided.

Many other college coaches … well, let’s not slander them by name, but I would just roll my eyes if I heard a similar story about them. Their whole careers display an it-doesn’t-matter-if-you-don’t-get-caught approach to life. If exposing some crime would threaten the image of their programs, of course they’d look the other way. But Joe Paterno? That’s disturbing on a deeper level.

Second, the comparison between the Catholic Church and the Penn State football program points up something else: American society has changed since the Catholic Church scandal broke. There was a certain amount of wagon-circling around Paterno and his program, but not really that much by comparison to the pedophile-priest scandal. (The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is still circling the wagons.)

Instead, a lot of people who clearly wanted to defend Paterno largely skipped past denial and went straight to how-could-this-have-happened shock and grief.

This ESPN clip comes from the day after the scandal broke. ESPN analyst and former Paterno linebacker Matt Millen (while he wants to give Paterno a chance to defend himself) is already wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of it — at one point going silent because he will start crying otherwise.

Millen’s reaction goes straight to the heart of why this story is upsetting: It overturns our comfortable notion that good people only do good things and bad people only do bad things. It’s obvious that for all these years, Paterno has been a moral voice in Millen’s head, calling him to live by a higher standard. And Jerry Sandusky … I’ll let Millen tell it:

Jerry Sandusky is your next door neighbor. He’s the guy you’ve known your whole life. He’s a helpful guy. He’s a light-hearted guy. He’s a smart guy. He’s a willing-to-help person. He’s everything you want. That’s the thing that just … could you see it coming? I mean … I’ve sat here. I’ve known the guy since 1976. I’ve been in meetings with him. He’s been in my home.

But all that doesn’t lead Millen to say “It can’t be true!” Instead he asks himself: “Could you see it coming?”

This mystery is part of what McPherson is confronting in his article The Myth of the Monster Pedophile: Sandusky wasn’t a child rapist pretending to be a nice guy, and he wasn’t a nice guy suddenly possessed by a child-raping demon. He was genuinely a nice guy in some settings and genuinely a child rapist in others. That’s what’s so disturbing.

November 21, 2011 – 12:34 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Seemingly Moral

No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on November 21st.

There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem like it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

— David Graeber
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

In this week’s sift:

  • Jobless Recoveries are Normal Now. One very instructive graph and the disturbing conclusion you can draw from it: The fundamental nature of recessions has changed, and most of the policies we fight over have nothing to do with it.
  • The Cain Scandal After a Week. Scandals just have entertainment value until they start driving your supporters away. So far that’s not happening.
  • The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes. Herman Cain’s China problem, a food-industry insider defects, a true blue supporter of the family is a deadbeat dad, the iPod of government, SB-5 is going down tomorrow, the importance of the smart grid, a couple particularly stunning scenes from nature, and more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Nonviolence and the Police, with 329 views.
  • This week’s challenge. Remember to vote in your local elections tomorrow. Also, Saturday was Bank Transfer Day, when people all over the country closed their accounts at too-big-to-fail banks and moved their money to community banks or credit unions. If you missed, it’s not too late. AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore gives a step-by-step.
November 7, 2011 – 2:29 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Jobless Recoveries are Normal Now

This might be the most important graph in American economics, but in the popular media hardly anybody talks about what it means.

It comes from the blog Calculated Risk (which has been updating it for a long while now), and is based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Each colored line represents a different recession in the American economy since World War II, starting with the 1948 recession (in blue). The longest and deepest (in red) is the current recession. The curves are scaled according to the percentage of jobs lost, to make the different recessions more comparable. (Otherwise the 1948 recession would look small just because the economy was smaller then.) The horizontal scale is months, and the recessions are lined up so that Month Zero is when employment bottomed out.

For the purposes of the graph, a recession starts when the number of jobs peaks, and it ends when employment returns to that previous high. That’s a little different than the definitions most economists use. Typically, economists say a recession is over when GDP starts rising again, which is why the Wikipedia says the current recession ended in June, 2009. But employment is what is known in the trade as a “lagging indicator”. In other words, even after the recession is technically over, you’ve still got a lot of jobless people wandering around.

At its simplest level, this jobs-based graph just verifies something you probably already feel in your bones: This recession is longer and deeper than anything we’ve seen since the Depression, and it’s not over yet.

But that’s not what I want to point out. Instead, I want you to notice this: The last three recessions have a different shape from the others. The earlier recessions are short and sharp. Jobs go away fast and come back fast. The job market hits a definite bottom, and 8-10 months later everything is back to normal.

But the recessions of 1990 and 2000 look like smaller versions of the recession we’re in. In each of them, the bottom is flat rather than sharp, and employment doesn’t come all the way back for a long time after that — two years for the 2000 recession and nearly-two-and-counting for the current one.

Therefore: The job market is changing in some long-term way that has little to do with our month-to-month political squabbles. The 1990 recession starts and ends under President Bush the First. The 2000 recession gets started under Clinton and its long, slow recovery happens under Bush II. The worst of the current recession is on Obama’s watch, but the shape and depth of the curve was already well established when he took office.

It’s hard to find a Republican/Democrat pattern here. About all you can say for or against Obama, for example, is that the deep recession curve that had already developed under Bush II has gone on to have the same shape you’d expect from the previous two recessions.

Other simple explanations similarly fall flat. For example, we had a modest budget surplus and no wars at the beginning of the 2000 recession, but a huge deficit and two wars going into the current recession. But the two curves have the same shape.

I’m going to go on to list some characteristics and possible explanations for the new-style recession, but I don’t claim to have answers for it. (There are things I’d like to see done, but ending this article with any policy proposals I can think of would do a disservice to the data. I’m pointing to something solidly real, and my “solutions” would be speculative.) Mainly, I want to offer two principles for critiquing anybody else’s proposals:

  • If you’re not talking in terms of decades, you’re not dealing with the real problem. Whatever the causes are, they’ve been brewing since at least the late 1980s.
  • You can’t fine-tune your way out. Any change in policy that is going to make a dent will have to be big and fundamental. If the pattern is unaffected by the differences between Clinton and Bush, or Bush and Obama, we’ve either got to think a lot bigger or accept these long slow recessions as fate.

The old recession pattern. OK, now let me try to express the change in words rather than curves. The old-style recessions fit the inventory-correction model of the business cycle in a manufacturing economy.

To say that in English: Good times cause everybody to get too optimistic at the same time. (GM builds too many cars, contractors put up too many new subdivisions, Sears stocks too much merchandise, and so on.) When this over-optimism starts to become apparent, everybody slams on the brakes at the same time.

So orders drop, factories get shut down, and workers get laid off. But it’s all temporary. After a few months, retailers manage to sell off their overstocked inventories and need to order new stuff again. Then the workers get called back, the factories re-open, and the recession is over.

The last few recessions haven’t looked like that in several ways.

Bubbles. First, financial bubbles play a much bigger role in setting the recession off. The current recession starts with the housing bubble, the 2000 recession with the dot-com bubble, the 1990 recession with the savings-and-loan crisis.

Psychologically, it’s the same cause: Good times make people over-optimistic. But in the old model it was producers who became too optimistic about what they could sell, so they produced more than the market could consume.

In a bubble, on the other hand, it’s speculators who become too optimistic. So condos are built in Florida not because anybody expects people to live in them, but because speculators think they can flip them to other speculators for a quick profit. Or mortgages are written without any expectation that the payments will be made, because investment bankers have figured out a way to package those mortgages into CDOs that the ratings agencies will stamp AAA.

That’s a very different problem than GM building too many Corvettes or Sears stocking too many washing machines.

Bubble-popping recessions are harder to recover from because there is no “normal” to get back to. The NASDAQ stock index peaked over 5000 in March, 2000. That level was justified by visions of limitless future profits that turned out to be imaginary. So even 11 years later, the NASDAQ is still only about half what it was.

Inventory recessions are like taking a wrong turn. Bubble recessions are like dreaming something and then waking up. You can’t just go back.

Job destruction. Partly due to changes in the economy and partly due to changes in the social contract, businesses are now actively looking for ways to get rid of their workers. So the old model (where GM laid off some workers until things got better, then hired them back) looks quaint now.

These days when you lose a job, it’s gone. The company has probably closed the factory for good, merged with a competitor, or otherwise re-engineered its process to get along without you. When demand comes back, your former employer will open a new factory in Mexico or subcontract to a supplier in China or buy robots. At best, it might only threaten to do those things so that it can hire you back as a temporary contractor at half your old rate.

[BTW, this week I ran into a joke that is probably from the 50s or 60s. Union leader Walter Reuther and industrialist Henry Ford II are touring a new highly mechanized Ford plant. “Tell me, Walter,” Ford says, “How do you plan to get these machines to join your union?” Reuther replies: “The same way you’re going to get them to buy your cars.”]

Job recovery takes longer now because the economy has to create brand new jobs, not just re-start the old jobs. This means that the experience of being unemployed is completely different. The laid-off GM worker could collect unemployment, fix up the house, coach Little League, and be reasonably certain to go back to work in a few months.

Today the unemployed have to have a plan, and searching for a new job can be harder and more stressful than working. Worse, the new job often pays significantly less than the lost one.

Inequality. A long-term trend in back of the other trends is increasing inequality. As more and more money flows to the 1%, they don’t need more goods and services; they need more investment opportunities. That restless cash looking for a home pumps up the bubbles, funds the mergers, and buys the robots. But it doesn’t create new markets that need more workers.

What should we do? I’m not sure, but it needs to be much bigger and very, very different from anything currently on the table.

November 7, 2011 – 2:27 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Cain Scandal After a Week

When I was putting the Weekly Sift together last Monday morning, I had a decision to make. Politico had raised the Herman Cain sexual harassment charge the night before. Should I call your attention to it or not? I decided not to.

For most of the week, it was the top news story. And yet, when I did my headline-scan this morning, it was nowhere to be seen. The most recent opinion polls show Cain still at or near the top of the Republican field, as if nothing had happened. (Though one poll shows his favorability ratings among Republicans dropping from 66% to 57% — still higher than, say, Rick Perry, who had no scandals this week.) Cain’s Intrade shares bottomed out below 5o cents (indicating a 5% chance of him getting the nomination) on Saturday, and were rising sharply towards 65 cents this morning. Then another accuser announced a press conference and they dropped to 35 cents.

So the conventional wisdom doesn’t know what to think. If we’ve heard everything, Cain will weather the storm. If we haven’t, who knows?

Here’s the yardstick I’m using to decide what’s a big deal and what isn’t: Politically, a scandal is only important if it changes people’s minds. Which means: As satisfying as it might be for me to speculate about what Cain did or did not do and whether that does or does not dynamite all the moralistic foundations of his candidacy, my opinion makes no difference in this matter, because I was never going to vote for Herman Cain anyway.

Politically, this only matters if it changes the minds of Cain’s supporters and potential supporters. And so far, I don’t think it has.

Not that Cain’s audience doesn’t care about sexual misconduct. Quite the opposite, they’ll turn on him quickly if they start believing that he pressures women for extra-marital sex, especially if some of the women turn out to be white. (They’ll tell you that supporting Cain proves they’re not racist. But I don’t believe they’re that not-racist.)

But what would it take to convince them? They aren’t going to believe “the liberal media”. And even if one or more women come forward, Republican primary voters will say that they just wanted money, which they’re being paid (probably by all-around boogeyman George Soros) to come out of the woodwork.

As Dahlia Lithwick points out, Cain’s defenders have already gone far beyond just saying “we don’t know what happened” or “innocent until proven guilty” and are instead attacking the whole notion of sexual harassment. They know Cain is innocent because sexual harassment is a “scam” (Fred Thompson) and “a lawyer’s ramp, like racial discrimination” (John Derbyshire). The mere possibility of lawsuits “drains the humor and humanity from the workplace” (Kurt Schlichter), presumably because it’s so darn hard to make a female subordinate laugh without hinting that you want to have sex with her. Rand Paul agrees, saying he will no longer “tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly”. Lithwick concludes:

Nobody is suggesting these claims [against Cain] are necessarily true. But to claim that they must be false because all women lie and all harassers are just joking is a terrifying proposition.

Here’s the sad truth: If you care about sexual harassment and are willing to take a woman’s testimony against a powerful man seriously, you’re probably already a Democrat. So your opinion on the Cain scandal doesn’t count.

[I anticipate a sneering comment from some conservative about Bill Clinton and Paula Jones. You need context to understand Democrats’ dismissal of Jones: Jones’ story was marketed by the same people who claimed the Clintons had murdered Vince Foster. She was the Nth attempt to drum up a scandal against Clinton, after the first N-1 had been bogus.]

So there are only a few ways Cain’s harassment scandal becomes important: if there’s an embarrassing photo, if so many women come forward that the Wilt Chamberlain racial stereotype starts to apply, if people other than the victims (especially powerful men) come forward with supporting testimony, or if the pressure throws Cain so far off his truthy style that he looks guilty to his supporters.

So far all the furor is coming from people who never liked Cain anyway. Unless that changes, the scandal just has entertainment value. Politically, it doesn’t matter.

November 7, 2011 – 2:13 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes

Here’s the decline of journalism in one exchange: PBS’ Judy Woodruff is interviewing Herman Cain when he says the Chinese have:

indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

If you’re feeling generous, you can believe what Cain claimed later, that he meant that China was trying to develop a nuclear capability to rival ours. But the other possible interpretation was that Cain either didn’t know or got confused about the fact that China has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s — an appalling bit of ignorance in a presidential candidate.

Either way, it should be obvious to a trained reporter that some people were going to interpret Cain’s statement as ignorant (as they did). So whether an interviewer feels like nailing Cain or protecting him, his statement cries out for a follow-up question: “What do you mean by ‘develop nuclear capability’?”

But no. Follow-up questions are so 20th century. The 21st century interviewer just lets public figures blather and moves on, so Woodruff’s next question is about Cain’s position in the polls.

If you care about food-quality issues, you should be reading Bruce Bradley’s blog. Bradley is a self-described “food industry insider” (Pillsbury, General Mills, Nabisco) who now is trying to tell the rest of us what the food industry is doing.

He has a down-to-earth manner that comes through nicely in this demonstration of what’s wrong with processed tomatoes. Basically, after you process all the flavor out of a tomato, you have to add a bunch of garbage to make it taste like something.

You know those climate-change “alarmists”, the ones who exaggerate everything and make off-the-wall predictions? Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Well, CO2 emissions in 2010 turned out to be higher than the worst-case scenario in IPCC’s 2007 report.

Joe Walsh was the only Illinois congressman to get the Family Research Council’s “True Blue” rating for his “unwavering support of the family”. The irony: He doesn’t support his own family. He’s more than $100,000 behind on his child support payments.

Two women’s stunning encounter with starlings

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is only sort of joking when he asks: What if Government Were More Like an iPod? His specific suggestions for reform are mostly unworkable, some of them intentionally ridiculous. But I think he’s got the framing right:

I like to think of the government as a big, complicated machine. We citizens are the users. What we’ve always lacked is a well-designed user interface.

The vote to watch in tomorrow night’s election returns is the Issue 2 referendum in Ohio. Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature passed SB-5, a union-busting bill similar to the one that started the demonstrations in Wisconsin last spring. Issue 2 puts SB-5 up to popular vote. Polls show a significant majority for repeal.

It’s been 20 years since Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive. At the time, not many people thought he’d be around to celebrate the anniversary.

Who’s to blame for the filibuster making the Senate unmanageable? A simple chart explains: When Democrats are in the minority, they filibuster about as much as the previous Republican minority. When Republicans are in the minority, they take filibustering to whole new level.

What do past elections predict about 2012? Nate Silver is the ideal person to answer that question: Obama is vulnerable, but any perception of an improving economy could save him. Or the Republicans could save him by nominating anybody other than Romney.

And by the way, Obama still has a huge advantage among younger voters. The whole election will come down to how many of them vote.

An electrical engineer explains the importance of the smart grid, an electrical system that can interact with your appliances rather than just fulfill their demands for power. Short version: What power companies do is match supply to demand. The power source that’s easiest to adjust to changing demand is natural gas as opposed to oil, coal, nuclear, or any of the green sources. And more and more, natural gas means fracking. But a smart grid could adjust demand quickly, making gas a less vital part of the system.

As wind becomes a more important electricity source, power surges become a problem to manage. Another way to add flexibility to the power system is to let utilities store excess power in your water heater or some other heat sink.

If you set up your tripod and get an entire thunderstorm on one photo, it looks like this:

November 7, 2011 – 2:02 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

The System’s Game

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you: pull your beard, flick your face to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.

— John Lennon
[it took me forever to source this;
for the longest time I thought it must be misattributed]

In this week’s sift:

  • Nonviolence and the Police. If the recent police attacks on Occupy protesters either enrage or discourage you, take some time to remember how nonviolence works, and the important roles the police play in that strategy.
  • It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy. Vast inequality? Paper profits and no jobs? It’s all part of a revolution in corporate behavior that started in the 70s. And one of the major revolutionaries was Mitt Romney.
  • Three-eyed Fish and other short notes. Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant. My Halloween column. Occupy Mordor’s statement. Perry’s flat tax. Some very pretty pictures of the northern lights. Bad Lip Reading does Herman Cain. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. For the third week in a row, Turn the Shame Around, with 352 views (7400 total). The most-viewed new post was Eliminate the Work Penalty (183). (Whenever I report such a low number, somebody reminds me that the blog page views don’t count the readers who get the Sift via email or RSS feeds. That’s around 300 people total, as best I can figure.)
  • This week’s challenge. Lots of state and local elections are happening a week from tomorrow. These elections are won on turnout, so make sure to turn out. The headline vote is in Ohio, where a No on Issue 2 will repeal the anti-union bill passed by the legislature. They could still use your help.
October 31, 2011 – 12:26 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Nonviolence and the Police

I assume that by now you’ve heard about this week’s police attacks on the Occupy protests — most outrageously in Oakland, but also in Denver and Atlanta. (If not, chase the links and watch some of the video. Descriptions don’t capture it.) These attacks resemble what had happened previously in New York and Boston.

This is a good time to review how nonviolent protest works, because a violent response challenges a nonviolent movement in two ways: First, violence makes protesters angry and tempts them to respond in kind, which hardly ever turns out well. You can’t win physically against the police, and unless it is clear that the violence comes entirely from their side, you won’t win in the media either. “They started it” wasn’t a convincing argument when you were ten, and it still isn’t.

Second, watching your nonviolent allies lose the battle — as they always do when the police are determined and ruthless enough — is discouraging. You might wonder: How can we ever win when they can be violent and we can’t?

And yet, nonviolent movements do cause major change (the Civil Rights movement), have defeated empires (the British in India), and can even overthrow dictators willing to torture and kill (most recently in the Arab Spring). How does that work?

In stages:

  1. Bring a problem to public attention and make its victims visible.
  2. Demonstrate the injustice of the system’s response.
  3. Make explicit the implicit violence that maintains the unjust system.
  4. Turn the servants of the unjust system, including (eventually) the police.

If you make it to stage 4, where the police simply refuse to follow orders, the government either gives in or falls. Governments know this, which is why they frequently give in sooner.

Now let’s go through the stages more slowly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already succeeded at Stage 1. FDL finds the value of the protest in

its shoving the Overton Window away from the far right end of the spectrum, far enough away to make talk of meaningful solutions possible, which is the first step towards making them politically viable. Putting a surtax on the rich and/or letting the Bush tax cuts finally expire was considered politically verboten as recently as a month ago. Then Occupy Wall Street got started, and suddenly surtaxes on millionaires start becoming very much discussed indeed.

Also, people are finally starting to pay attention to the fact that many of the financial manipulations leading up to the crash were illegal, and that the bankers/criminals are either getting away with it or paying wrist-slap fines far smaller than their ill-gotten gains.

Sometimes stage 1 is all that’s necessary to create change, but usually you need to keep going.

It’s working on stage 2, occasionally popping up to 3. The main response the authorities are making to the protests is to identify broken regulations — there’s no camping in this park — and then say “We can’t tolerate breaking the law.”

The movement hasn’t succeeded yet in making the public see the hypocrisy in this. What the system actually can’t tolerate are little people breaking little laws. When Goldman Sachs commits fraud, or Bank of America illegally repossesses people’s homes, no one is arrested and no heads get broken. But put up a tent someplace you shouldn’t and all hell breaks loose.

The next job is to get people all over America asking, “What’s up with that?”

Here’s the comparable phase in the Civil Rights movement: when ordinary white people started seeing the Whites Only signs differently. At some point, they realized that there were no separate-but-equal facilities for blacks, and that blacks’ absence did not mean that they were happier with their own kind. Instead, whites began to see Whites Only not as an organizing label (like Men and Women signs on restrooms), but as a threat to have blacks carted away by force. Ordinary white people began to see the violence implicit in their apparently peaceful segregated lunch counters.

In order to win this phase, OWS has to stay as peaceful and orderly as possible, while continuing to keep up the pressure. The disproportion between their civil disobedience and the response it draws — and the contrast with the easy law-breaking of the financial elite — is what makes the case.

One NYC protestor had it exactly right (at the 5:30 mark)

Each new depiction of the abuses of the police on the First Amendment, the more people will show up here in New York City, and the more waves of occupation will spread across this country. And you should be proud of that, police, because you are participating in our media publicity campaign. Thank you for attending.

The challenge will be to keep Wall Street in the picture, and not let the financiers disappear behind the police.

Stage 4. Sometimes you establish the injustice of the system and the violence that maintains it, and it’s still not enough. The moral pretentions of the powerful have been exposed, but they’re basically saying, “Yeah, we’re bad guys. So what? We’re still bigger than you.”

That’s when an invisible moral force begins to work in your favor. You see, most people don’t grow up wanting to be evil. Maybe a few become bankers so that they can foreclose on widows and orphans, Snidely Whiplash style, but probably not many. Maybe a few become police so that they can get away with pepper-spraying defenseless young women in the face, but probably not many.

A lot of police joined the force because they wanted to be good guys, not bad guys. Many of them still want to be good guys. That’s why they can be turned.

Turning the police takes incredible courage and persistence on the part of the protesters. Basically, you have to let them beat you up until they can’t make themselves do it any more. One event that spins out of control is usually not enough. Police have to go to bed knowing that tomorrow they will get up and beat innocent people, like they did today.

At some point they’ll just stop. The order will come down and they’ll say no. It sounds incredible, but it happens.

Usually it doesn’t come to that, because the authorities will do anything to avoid it. (In Cairo, the army forced Mubarak to resign rather than see their ranks dissolve. At Tiananmen Square, the government brought in troops from the provinces, because they were afraid local soldiers wouldn’t obey.) But whether things actually go that far or not, the ultimate threat of a nonviolent movement is to turn the police. No government can survive that.

Protesters need to understand this threat from the beginning, and treat the police accordingly: Shame them but don’t insult them, and above all don’t threaten them. They are your ultimate weapon.

This video from Occupy Boston, of protesters chanting “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” is exactly right. Those are the questions we want cops asking each other in the privacy of their squad cars, and asking themselves late at night when they can’t sleep. We want them discussing that topic in their union meetings, and mulling it over when the 1%’s refusal to pay taxes leads to layoffs of good cops.

Who are the 99%, officer? You are. So what are you doing on that side of the barricade?

October 31, 2011 – 12:23 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy

One of the major debates of the 2010 election was about whose bad economy this was: Did the mess belong to Barack Obama now, or was he still just mopping up after the disaster that was George W. Bush? Despite the merits of their case, the Democrats lost that argument, and most of Congress along with it.

As we move towards 2012, the cover article in the current New York Magazine (doesn’t young Mitt look like Mad Men‘s Don Draper?) raises an intriguing third explanation: Maybe it’s been Mitt Romney’s economy all along.

That claim seems like a stretch the first time you hear it, but it makes sense. Our 1% economy didn’t just come from government, it’s also the result of a revolution in the way corporations behave. And one of the most decorated veterans of that revolution is Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with efficiency. Whether or not you think a corporation is “efficient” depends on what you think corporations are supposed to do. Romney’s revolutionary cadre of young management consultants believed that the sole purpose of a corporation was to make money for its owners — a view that is orthodox in American business today, but wasn’t in the 1970s. (It still isn’t in many other capitalist countries, like Germany.)

Whenever you change the definition of efficiency, you’re going to look around and discover lots of inefficiency, because nobody has even been trying to be efficient by your new definition. That’s what Romney saw when he came on the scene in 1975. Corporations were inefficient in all sorts of ways: Too many were unfocused conglomerates, assembled more to gratify egos than to make money. They tried to do too many things and failed to make the most productive use of their resources.

But above all, they had too many employees and paid them too much. Efficiency demanded that this be fixed, and vast profits awaited whoever would fix it.

As the Economist points out, Romney can’t claim all the credit for this transformation — otherwise he’d be Buffett/Gates rich — but nonetheless he is typical of the class of people who can. Romney worked for the consulting group Bain & Company and in 1983 led their spin-off Bain Capital.

Every business story begins with a proposition, and the one that launched Bain Capital was the notion that the partners might do better if they stopped simply advising companies and starting buying and running the firms themselves.

One obstacle to efficiency at the taken-over companies was the loyalty that some managers felt towards their workers and middle managers, but Romney had a solution for that.

In 1986, Bain Capital bought a struggling division of Firestone that made truck wheels and rims and renamed it ­Accuride. Bain took a group of managers whose previous average income had been below $100,000 and gave them performance incentives. This type and degree of management compensation was also unusual, but here it led to startling results: ­According to an account written by a Bain & Company fellow, the managers quickly helped to reorganize two plants, consolidating operations—which meant, inevitably, the shedding of unproductive labor—and when the company grew in efficiency, these managers made $18 million in shared earnings. The equation was simple: The men who increased the worth of the corporation deserved a bigger and bigger percentage of its spoils. In less than two years, when Bain Capital sold the company, it had turned an initial $5 million investment into a $121 million return.

The poster child here is the paper company AmPad. Romney bought it, took it private, re-organized, and then took it public again.

By 2001, five years after the company had been taken public, it had filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets. But Bain Capital made more than $100 million from AmPad for itself and its investors.

In just about every way, Romney and Bain Capital were among the trailblazers of the new economy: They destroyed both blue and white-collar jobs, cut pay at the bottom and raised it at the top, and made money even on companies that failed.

How much further ahead of his time could Romney have been?

In 2002, he became governor of Massachusetts, where he turned his attention to health care. In a rational world, RomneyCare would be his political claim to fame. Working with a Democratic legislature, Romney crafted a program that has resulted in only 4.6% of residents under 65 lacking health insurance (compared to 26.5% in Texas). But RomneyCare was the model for ObamaCare, so now Republicans hate it and Romney can’t take credit for it.

But the choice of health care as Romney’s original issue gives a lot of insight:

But what separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve.

The picture that emerges is a little different from the one his Republican rivals paint: It isn’t that Romney changes his principles when the wind changes. It’s that principles are not fundamental to his thinking. He exhibits

the clinical separation of decision-making from ideology, the detachment of those decisions from moral consequence, a persistent blind spot for people as people.

That makes him an odd choice for a Republican Party that is more ideological and moralistic than it has ever been. And yet (though he is persistently mired in second place in the polls — seemingly behind a different leader each month), the InTrade predictive market is giving him a 70% chance to win the nomination, compared to 5.4% for current poll leader Herman Cain.

The Republican electorate longs for an authentic conservative (Bachmann) who has both charisma (Cain) and gravitas (Gingrich). But given that there isn’t one, they may have to settle for an efficient problem-solver who will say whatever they want to hear.

Next summer and fall, there will be a battle of narratives about the economy. Both parties will say that the economy is bad, but they will disagree about why. Is it bad because it is the Obama economy, hobbled by deficits, taxes, and regulations? Or is it bad because it is the Romney economy — the economy of paper profits and no jobs, the economy of the 1%?

October 31, 2011 – 12:14 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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