The Weekly Sift

If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

— GIIP Report: “Upper Big Branch“

In this week’s Sift:

• Jobs of the Future. Two consecutive jobless recoveries raise a question: Does the economy work differently now? And is concentration of wealth the culprit or technology?
• Why I Hate Vouchers. Private-sector competitors to public programs achieve their “efficiency” by skimming off the easy-to-serve. That begins a vicious cycle of erosion, which continues until the public program serves only a small group of very needy, very powerless people — who can then be ignored. If we had the stomach for it, we could achieve the same savings by ignoring the needy without going through the voucher charade.
• Short Notes. An independent report lays it on the line: Massey Energy’s calculated neglect killed 29 miners. What can we learn from the Rapture? Obama offers substance — and is mostly ignored. Now that we have a Democratic president and a Republican Senate minority, judicial filibusters are back. The Catholic Church’s Woodstock defense. I refuse to care about Arnold. The Onion outs the Facebook-CIA connection. It’s OK to be Takei. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If not “plastics”, then what should we tell this year’s graduates?

We’ve now had two jobless recoveries in a row. The 2001 recession technically ended in November, 2001 (see Wikipedia’s list of recessions), but the total number of American jobs didn’t return to its pre-recession level until October, 2003. And while the 2007-2009 recession ended in June, 2009, we’re still nearly 7 million jobs short of the March, 2007 peak.

So recessions end, but jobs return slowly. Worse, the new jobs aren’t as good as the old ones. Laid-off welders don’t get rehired at Chrysler, they become shelf-stockers at WalMart.

As different as they seem otherwise, both Bush and Obama followed the widely accepted get-the-jobs-back formula: run deficits and cut interest rates. Interest rates plunged near zero. Bush got his deficit mostly by cutting taxes; Obama mostly by increasing spending. Both fought wars. But neither got a clean bounce in jobs.

What’s up with that?

Some economists blame the workers: They don’t have the right training for the new jobs. (Structural unemployment, it’s called.) But if that were the whole explanation, some industry would be begging for workers, and some credential would be a magic ticket. What is it? If you were remaking The Graduate today, what word could plausibly replace “plastics“?

What if it’s not the workers? What if the economy has changed in some sinister way?

Wealth and demand. Regular Sift readers have been down this road before. In November, I explained the argument Robert Reich makes in Aftershock: Concentration of wealth is the underlying problem. A mass-production economy requires a massive number of people with disposable income. If wealth gets too concentrated, demand lags, and then no one wants to invest in new production — because who’s going to buy the new products? So instead of productive investment, capital gets sucked into speculative bubbles like the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000 or the housing bubble that popped in 2007-2008.

Reich’s theory solves the jobless-recovery mystery like this: Ordinary recessions start because investment and production get ahead of demand — builders overbuild, factories over-produce, stores over-order. Then everybody puts the brakes on at once, and times are tough. But after six months or so, the over-stocked inventories run out, new merchandise gets ordered, factories start up again, and workers get re-hired.

By contrast, the expansion phase of a bubble isn’t just over-optimistic, it’s delusional. (The high-flying start-ups of the dot-com bubble had no business models. No amount of economic growth would have made them profitable.) When the bubble pops, the fantasy is exposed and there’s no going back. So it takes longer for the unemployed to find jobs again, because so many of them will have to do something genuinely new.

Reich’s diagnosis and prescription focus on politics: Since Ronald Reagan, tax cuts and de-regulation have tilted the playing field to over-favor the rich, leading to an over-concentration of wealth and a bubble economy. Undo that, and you return to the broadly shared prosperity of 1950-1980.

But what if it’s not that simple? What if something other than politics has its thumb on the scale?

Technology and the neo-Luddites. Martin Ford’s recent book The Lights in the Tunnel argues that concentration of wealth is itself an effect of something else: technology.

His argument is a refinement of the one Luddites made 200 years ago and that was made most entertainingly in the 1951 Alec Guinness film The Man in the White Suit: Eventually, automation and technology will eliminate the need for workers.

200 years ago, it didn’t work out that way. Instead, demand expanded to match the increased productivity, which is how the average American or European now lives at a level of luxury that was unimaginable then.

Why won’t that keep happening? Most economists are confident it will, but Ford makes two counter-arguments: First, we are approaching a game-changing point where machines become autonomous. The wages of machine-operators won’t keep pace because there won’t be any machine-operators. Second, the acceleration of technology may reach a point where economic forces can’t keep up. In theory new markets would continue to be created, but those too would automate faster than human workers could be trained to fill the new jobs.

Low-demand dystopia. In either case, an unregulated market leads to a low-demand dystopia, where production depends entirely on capital, labor is irrelevant, and so only people with capital are economically viable. In short, income depends entirely on owning things, not doing things. So production shrinks to accommodate the needs of owners, and the unemployed masses subsist on welfare and charity.

If this seems incredible, Ford gives one very good historic example: the slave-holding South. Economically, slaves are capital, not labor. (The are bought and maintained like robots, not hired and incentivized like workers.) So the South was a society in which virtually all production came from capital. The result was a stagnant economy that worked well for the small owning class, but in which an ambitious young person without money had few opportunities. And the South only worked as well as it did because of exports — external demand. An entire world based on such a model would be a low-demand dystopia.

Marx addressed a similar dystopian vision by having the government own the means of production. In practice, that didn’t work out so well — whether government takes over business (communism) or business takes over government (fascism), the combination becomes totalitarian because it’s too powerful to control.

Instead, Ford proposes a complex system in which taxes shift away from wages to focus on capital and production, funding a complicated set of incentives for citizens to live in society-enhancing ways — thus keeping income widely distributed and maintaining the mass market. I’m not sure this is any more workable than communism, but it does have the virtue that it can be implemented within our current economy, with the incentives supplementing wages rather than immediately replacing them.

Future jobs vs. futuristic jobs. Personally, I believe that Ford’s vision is worth keeping in mind as a thought experiment that shows what’s wrong with conservative economic policies. But I believe his dystopia is further off than he thinks, because economic forces have quite a bit of resiliency left if we stop sabotaging them by favoring capital over labor.

A short post by Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point: Most “jobs of the future” will not be futuristic. It has never been the case that new industries created the mass of new jobs needed. We’re fooled by looking at the huge factories of the 19th and 20th centuries. They employed a lot of people individually, but collectively they didn’t come close to absorbing the jobs lost when agriculture automated. (You can see the same phenomenon in China today. Even with a massive export market, Chinese factories are barely keeping up with the flow of peasants into the cities.)

Technology creates jobs through economic growth, not through new industries. For example, one of the growth professions of the 19th century was teaching. Teachers had been around forever, but until the 19th century only rich children had them. The growth industries of the late 20th century weren’t rocketry or nuclear power, but health care and food preparation — because prosperity let people live longer and eat out more.

Rich families today employ lots of trainers, coaches, therapists, decorators, and advice-givers of all sorts. If many more people suddenly became “rich” by today’s standards, the economy would need a lot more such advisors — and not a lot more nano-technologists.

I know it seems crazy to imagine an economy full of people advising each other — who will make stuff? But it was just as crazy in 1800 to imagine an economy where hardly anybody farmed.

In an LA Times story running down the Milwaukee teachers’ union, we get one small fact that sums up why I hate voucher programs.

Low-income parents can use vouchers to send their children to private and parochial schools, a decades-long experiment that [Governor Scott] Walker proposes expanding. That has left the [Milwaukee public school] district with a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities — 19%. In voucher schools, which can return students to the Milwaukee district if they don’t behave, the figure is 1% to 8.6%.

I’ll bet it now costs the Milwaukee public schools more to educate their “average” student than the private schools spend. And no doubt voucher supporters are wielding such statistics to prove that private schools are more “efficient”. But the underlying phenomenon isn’t government inefficiency. It’s that vouchers encourage the easy-to-teach students to leave while the hard-to-teach students stay.

That’s how vouchers work — not just in education, but in general. Government programs are based on the idea that we are a community, so we’re all in this together. Voucher programs are based on the idea that we are all individuals, so if you can get a better individual deal, you should go for it.

The result is always the same: Fortunate people who are easy to serve can take their vouchers into the private sector and get a better deal. The pool that is left behind in the public program is harder to serve, so average costs go up, making the private-sector voucher a good deal for even more people, in a vicious cycle.

The Walker education-voucher program is eroding Milwaukee’s public schools this way. The Ryan healthcare-voucher program will do the same to Medicare and Medicaid.

In the long run, there is only one way that vouchers will save taxpayers money: Eventually the public-program pool gets so small and so needy that it has no political power. Then we can lock them away in some cheap hellhole institution that doesn’t serve their needs at all, and what are they going to do about it? Cha-ching!

Of course, we could get the same savings without involving the private sector: Just let public programs throw hard-to-serve people out on the street to fend for themselves. But that would be horrible and heartless, wouldn’t it? The rest of us will sleep better if we achieve the same result by sleight-of-hand.

The same shell game is happening in states that privatize their prisons. Do private prisons save money? No. Even though (like private schools and private health insurance programs) they “steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates”, they cost more.

Back in the 90s, Newt Gingrich owned up to the erosion strategy, saying that he favored letting Medicare “wither on the vine” rather than attacking the popular program directly. Afterwards, pundits agreed that it was scare-mongering to quote Newt accurately on this subject.

Now he wants to declare another mulligan: He retracted his criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare-slashing voucher proposal after a firestorm of protest from the Right. So he says that it’s unfair if Democrats use the tape: “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”

Democrats, as we all know, get to retract any gaffe they make, and no one ever mentions it again. Just ask Howard Dean and John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

The Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel has issued its report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 miners a little over a year ago. Let’s skip to the conclusions on page 108:

Ultimately, the responsibility for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine lies with the management of Massey Energy.  … The April 5, 2010 explosion was … a completely predictable result for a company that ignored basic safety standards.

Massey didn’t ventilate the mine properly, let coal dust build up, and eventually the inevitable spark came that it all set off. Massey was warned, battled federal safety regulators tooth and nail, paid some wrist-slap fines, and did things its own way until 29 miners died. How could that happen? Easy.

Many politicians were afraid to challenge Massey’s supremacy because of the company’s superb ongoing public relations campaign and because CEO Don Blankenship was willing to spend vast amounts of money to influence elections. … If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

And that’s a lesson for all of us. Corporations are sociopaths. If they can make money by killing people, they will. And if elections depend on corporate money, governments will let them.

The failed Rapture prediction triggered two Interesting articles: When Prophecy Fails in Slate and Rapture-Ready: the Science of Self-Delusion in Mother Jones.

Summary: Rationalization has great power to resolve contradictions of all sorts, and religious people aren’t the only ones who use it.

While the media has been focused on the antics of Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, President Obama has given substantive and informative speeches on immigration reform and the Middle East and education.

Out of this, only one line drew national attention: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” The furor over this — MIke Huckabee said “The President of United States betrayed Israel” and many other Republicans expressed similar feelings — is a little mysterious. When has a U.S. president said anything significantly different?

In the spirit of Emma Goldman (“If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution”), here are the biting-but-entertaining political videos of the week: John LIthgow performs a Newt Gingrich press release, a hippyish chorus on a hillside reminds us that the issue with the Koch brothers is “the evil thing“, and George (Sulu) Takei offering his name to counter Tennessee’s new don’t-say-gay law. Also, WhoWhatWhy recalls the classic George Carlin “I’m a Modern Man” routine.

The Onion News Network reveals that Facebook is actually a very efficient CIA program.

BTW, the don’t-say-gay bill got watered down before it passed. Now it’s only prepared materials that can’t mention homosexuality; teachers can still answer questions about it. [Full — and proud — disclosure: My nephew Mike Stephens interned for State Senator Andy Berke, who is quoted criticizing the bill.]

Media Matters totals up the partisan split of Meet the Press guests, going back to the Clinton years. Conclusion: When Democrats control the White House, MTP splits its guests almost evenly between the two parties. Under Republican administrations, Republicans get a 60/40 advantage.

Ask yourself: Which failed presidential candidate have you seen more often on national networks: John Kerry or John McCain?

I just shook my head sadly during the John Edwards debacle, so I’m going to similarly restrain my reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We’ll have plenty of time to discuss their sex scandals if either of them runs for office again. And if they don’t, I don’t care.

On his NYT blog, college professor Stanley Fish comments on the deals Florida State has made with the Koch brothers and BB&T, which I wrote about last week.

Is the [Koch] foundation funding the study of free-market economics — a perfectly respectable academic subject — or is it mandating that free-market economics be promoted in the classroom? Is it a gift intended to stimulate research the conclusions of which can not be known in advance, or is it a gift intended to amplify a conclusion — free-market economics is good; regulation is bad — the philanthropists have already reached and want to broadcast using Florida State University as a megaphone?

… If, in the judgment of an instructor, “Atlas Shrugged” will contribute to a student’s understanding of a course’s subject, there is every reason to assign it. But if assigning “Atlas Shrugged” is the price for the receiving of monies and the university pays that price, it has indeed sold its soul.

It was fun to watch Jon Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly about the Fox-promoted, scary-black-guy controversy over the rapper Common (seen here with his monstrous friend Elmo). But I wonder if Stewart lost just by showing up, because his appearance helped Fox keep the story hot.

Remember 2005, when the Democratic minority had just enough Senate votes to filibuster judges nominated by a Republican president? The Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” — eliminating the filibuster — until a bipartisan “Gang of 14” rode to the rescue with a compromise under which only “extraordinary circumstances” would justify a judicial-nomination filibuster.

As a result, centrist Democrats did not support a filibuster of the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, who turned out to be the deciding vote in Citizens United. (Justice O’Connor, the Reagan-appointed judge Alito replaced, has said that she still supports the decision that CU overturned.)

Well, now the Republicans have a Senate minority and a Democratic president is nominating judges, so of course that agreement is toast. Dahlia Lithwick assembles all the that-was-then-this-is-now hypocrisy.

A church-funded study of sexual abuse by Catholic priests attributes the scandal to the social turmoil of the 60s and 70s. The NYT refers to this as the “blame Woodstock” theory.

I agree with Matt Yglesias: It’s fine if you want to make the case that a government program isn’t working or costs too much. But once you have an arbitrary spending cap, what ends up mattering is the political clout of the beneficiaries, not the effectiveness of the programs.

This is why I get a chill in my bones any time I hear discussion of “caps” on federal spending. … Capping things is code for “let’s keep all the spending that lobbyists love and make up the difference by slashing the incomes of poor people.”

Evidence: Even at a time when the deficit is supposedly Public Enemy #1 and Exxon’s profits are at an all-time high, the Senate can’t muster the votes to eliminate tax subsidies for the oil companies. Let’s take the money out of Medicaid instead, or cut more Pell grants.

Lawrence O’Donnell relates the history of “starve the beast”.

Several high school and college students are regular Sift readers. What advice would you give them about preparing for the future economy?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

No amount of balloting can obviate the need of creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters can say Yes, or No. … The Many can elect after the Few have nominated.

— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1920)

In this week’s Sift:

• Hit the Ceiling or Raise the Roof? It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen if Congress doesn’t raise the government’s debt ceiling, because then the administration will have a lot of choices to make. Unfortunately, all the options will be bad.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser. Democracy requires a lot of work. And when honest people won’t do it, it still has to get done.
• Short Notes. Answering birthers. ElBaradei imagines a Bush war-crimes trial. Senate recalls in Wisconsin. Peer-to-peer lending. Anxious teen girls. Roe v Wade in limbo. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If we don’t want to put the essential work of democracy in the hands of special interests, how do we want to get it done?

It’s been hard to get a clear story about what will happen if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Michelle Bachman says things will be just hunky-dory:

If we fail to pass increasing the debt ceiling, it isn’t that the federal government shuts down … It isn’t that revenues wouldn’t come into the government, they would. It’s just that we’d have to prioritize our spending. … It almost acts like a balanced budget amendment in a way because it says you can’t keep spending money you don’t have. That’s a good thing!

But back in January, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made the possibility sound apocalyptic:

The Treasury would be forced to default on legal obligations of the United States, causing catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

And Fed chief Ben Bernanke recently warned:

Beyond a certain point … the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt. And the implications of that on our financial system, our fiscal policy and our economy would be catastrophic.

Let’s see if I can unravel this. Much as I usually hate the analogy between the federal budget and a family budget (for reasons Matt Yglesias explains), in this case it lends some insight. Suppose your family is spending more than it takes in, running up a little more debt every month. Then your credit maxes out. What happens?

Well, you very suddenly start living within your income — prioritizing your spending, as Bachmann says. But it’s hard to make more specific predictions until we know what those priorities will be. Maybe you’ll default on your mortgage, as Bernanke imagines, or maybe you’ll cut back somewhere else so that you don’t.

Whether “that’s a good thing” or not depends on what somewhere-elses are available. Maybe you’re outspending your income because you’re an alcoholic, and you’ll have to clean up your act now that the liquor store won’t take your plastic. Or maybe you’re running in the red because your daughter needs surgery and you have no medical insurance.

It makes a difference, doesn’t it?

Bachmann wants us to believe that the federal budget is full of money spent at the corner tavern, buying rounds for the house. If that were true, she’d be right. Shutting off the government’s credit would be good.

But she knows it’s not true. Whenever the Right has to produce an actual budget — or anything beyond a “cut spending” slogan — they don’t find significant amounts of waste to eliminate. Instead, they cut Medicaid, which is literally surgeries for uninsured little girls. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. The girls are poor, many are black or Hispanic, and putting them on TV depresses the ratings. So you probably won’t see them.)

The federal budget simply does not have the kind of huge waste the Tea Party imagines. When the government credit card maxes out, are we going to tell our soldiers in Afghanistan to shoot less? Ask seniors to eat cat food and stop taking pills until we get things sorted out? Close the courts? Stop inspecting food or nuclear power plants? Furlough FBI agents and hope Al Qaeda doesn’t notice? Open the federal prisons so the inmates can start supporting themselves? Close the CDC and hope no major plagues erupt before we get it open again? Take our chances on hurricanes and earthquakes without FEMA?

No? Well what, then?

I can’t pick any one of those things and say, “This will happen”, because we could imagine making that particular thing the first priority. (And if it does happen, we could blame President Obama for not making it the first priority — a position Senator Pat Toomey is already staking out.) Similarly, the maxed-out family could make the mortgage the top priority and hope that their daughter gets better on her own. If she dies or never walks again, you can blame them for that. Or if they pay for her treatment first and lose the house, you can blame them for that instead.

But even if we can’t say exactly what it will be, we can be sure that some desperately vital thing will go unfunded if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, because there just aren’t enough non-desperately-vital things to make up the difference.

Anybody who thinks differently, I believe, has an obligation to tell us specifically what those non-vital things are. They owe us a line-by-line spending plan, one that stays within the debt ceiling without killing anybody — or at the very least, estimates the body count.

Slate’s Annie Lowry imagines how a treasury default hits the trading markets, and believes (as I do) that Republicans in Congress will quickly get in line once the markets start crashing. A better question is whether anything resolves the situation before that, which I am coming to doubt.

Salon’s Andrew Leonard makes an obvious point that for some reason isn’t getting any attention: Suppose the government avoids defaulting on its bonds by making debt payments its first priority, and instead defaults on other legal obligations like Social Security. Are the markets going to be reassured by that? Or will investors look at the video of homeless old people and conclude that this country is hopelessly broken?

Do a small-business analogy this time: Suppose I’m a banker who has money in a restaurant. They’re up-to-date on the loan, but I hear they’ve stopped paying their other creditors. Shouldn’t I call that loan in as fast as I can?

Monday, Standard & Poor’s announced a “negative outlook” for the AAA rating on U.S. government debt, citing not the economy, but the political gridlock that might produce trillion-dollar deficits far into the future.

House Republican leader Eric Cantor jumped on this as a “wake-up call” to cut spending, a talking point widely repeated on the Right. But S&P’s warning is about the deficit, not just spending, and Cantor’s refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy is as much a part of the gridlock as Obama’s unwillingness to cut Medicaid. Each is looking out for his supporters — Obama for the poor, Cantor for the rich.

One measure of how far to the right the conversation has drifted is that the middle position is represented by David Stockman, who was Ronald Reagan’s controversial young budget director 30 years ago. Remarkably for a conservative, he quotes statistics about how wealth has concentrated since 1979, and then analyzes:

The culprit here was the combination of ultralow rates of interest at the Federal Reserve and ultralow rates of taxation on capital gains. The former destroyed the nation’s capital markets, fueling huge growth in household and business debt, serial asset bubbles and endless leveraged speculation in equities, commodities, currencies and other assets.

At the same time, the nearly untaxed windfall gains accrued to pure financial speculators, not the backyard inventors envisioned by the Republican-inspired capital-gains tax revolution of 1978. And they happened in an environment of essentially zero inflation, the opposite of the double-digit inflation that justified a lower tax rate on capital gains back then — but which is now simply an obsolete tax subsidy to the rich

Everybody, it seems, hates lobbyists. And every now and then a bipartisan consensus in Congress passes new rules that are supposed to toughen restrictions on lobbyists and clean up the process.

And yet lobbying is a perennial growth industry in Washington. What auto factories used to be to Detroit and steel mills to Pittsburgh, lobbying firms are to D.C. The local economy revolves around them. They may not employ many working-class Washingtonians directly, but how would the city’s bars and restaurants survive without them? Who would build office buildings in Tyson Corners or McMansions in McLean? And what would happen to the metro area’s landscapers and pool-cleaners?

It’s a mystery. Why is it so hard to get a handle on lobbying? How can it be so unpopular and yet so hard to shut down?

This month I got around to reading a great book on lobbying from 2007: So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post. It doesn’t answer those questions directly, but provides a lot of useful insight.

What changed. Kaiser recognizes that American politics has never been clean. But his book’s main point is that both politics and government have changed for the worse since the 1970s, and the growth of lobbying is both a cause and a symptom.

In addition to lobbying, the key elements are:

• cost of campaigns. The first election I followed closely was 1968, when Hubert Humphrey spent something on the order of $7 million and Richard Nixon overwhelmed him with a then-unheard-of $20 million. For 2012, President Obama is planning to raise $1 billion. At all levels, costs have gone up accordingly. As a result, congresspeople spend about half their working days on the phone raising money.
• the “permanent campaign”. Old-time campaigns took up maybe half of the last year of a congressman’s term. Then the signs and slogans went into the closet for a while. But in the current era of 24/7 media and instant polling, the campaign never stops. And so politicians of both parties stay on message, parroting focus-group-tested talking points at all times.
• the end of the independent legislator. This is a perverse result of good intentions: doing away with the seniority system in Congress in the 1970s. Pre-reform, a long-serving representative or senator would become a powerful committee chair. Owing this position to no one but his constituents, he could take independent positions — as when Democratic Senator Fulbright turned against President Johnson’s Vietnam War. Today, all institutional power in Congress comes by way of the party leadership, which explains why we see so many party-line votes.
• avoiding Washington. Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 by running against Washington. Speaker Gingrich pressured all incoming Republican congresspeople not to move their families to D.C., and he shortened the congressional workweek to allow commuting back to the home districts. Democrats similarly kept their families home and commuted to avoid being labeled “creatures of Washington”. Symbolically, this has kept Congress in touch with the people, but it also has the perverse effect that members of Congress don’t know each other. They don’t socialize, their spouses and kids don’t hang out together, and they have no reason to trust each other.
• the “farm league for K Street“. In the old days, the point of running for Congress was to be in Congress. Defeated congressmen sometimes became lobbyists, but that was a pathetic story, not something to emulate. Today, Congress and congressional staffs are like college basketball teams — places to get your ticket punched so that you can turn pro and make real money later. In 2007, Senator Lott resigned with five years left in his term, because otherwise new restrictions would have delayed the start of his lobbying career. According to Kaiser: “In a matter of six weeks, Trent Lott abruptly wound up a thirty-five-year career in Congress, abandoned his constituents in Mississippi, and opened a business that Washington rivals estimated would soon be earning millions of dollars a year.” It’s hard to maintain your independence as a legislator when you’re already auditioning for your next job.

The Founders envisioned Congress as a deliberative body. Voters would send their representatives to the capital, where they would debate and compromise and try to arrive at a common purpose for the nation (much like the Constitutional Convention itself).

That simply can’t happen any more. There’s no time for it, and even if you change a congressperson’s mind, s/he may not have the independence to vote differently. Instead, we have what Eric Alterman calls “kabuki democracy” — a show of deliberation in which senators address the camera, not other senators.

Personalizing the problem. Kaiser has a good trick for knitting an unwieldy mass of information into a readable story: He follows the career of Gerry Cassidy, a lawyer who came to Washington in the late 1960s as a poorly-paid staffer to Senator McGovern, then started a lobbying firm whose early clients were universities, and over the decades has accumulated a fortune of $100 million.

Cassidy is a great choice, because he is not a pure villain. In many ways he resembles Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark — a young man of considerable gifts who simultaneously dreams of being important and of doing good, but who ends up just being important. Where exactly he goes wrong is hard to pinpoint. Cassidy seems to ride the wave of political change rather than steer it, but when you analyze the wave, it seems to be made of nothing more than people like Cassidy.

And that’s a phenomenon we all need to understand if we’re ever going to change things.

Privatizing democracy. Here’s what I conclude after reading Kaiser: Democracy is a much more expensive and effort-consuming process than most of us imagine. Because we aren’t willing to recognize or fund that work, it gets done privately. And the private funders take advantage of their role to steer our government for their own benefit.

Let me unpack that. Naively, democracy works through elected representatives doing the people’s will. But, as Lippmann pointed out in the opening quote, “the people’s will” doesn’t become actionable (and may not even exist) until after somebody does a lot of work. Who?

The people, for example, may broadly want access to health care. But how does that shared desire turn into a plan of action? And how does that plan then become an Affordable Care Act that a person can be for or against? (I didn’t work on it. Did you?) Once the ACA exists, who educates the public about what’s in it, so that they can approve or disapprove? Who measures the resulting public opinion and organizes it into pressure that a legislator can feel, or into support s/he can ride to re-election?

In simpler times, legislators did much of this work themselves. With the help of a small staff, they studied issues, intuited public opinion, wrote legislation, rounded up colleagues to support it, and wrote speeches and newsletters to promote or denounce the outcome.

There’s no time for that any more. The issues have gotten more complex and the science of manipulating public opinion more resource-consuming. Staffs have grown, but not nearly enough to keep pace. Legislators have their hands full reciting talking points on TV and raising money for the next election.

Who fills the vacuum? Not corporate-funded journalists, who have become another part of the problem. (But that’s a subject for another week.) So: lobbyists, privately funded think tanks, high-priced pollsters and political consultants. They write the legislation, convene the focus groups, and produce the talking points. They organize the demonstrations and make sure the TV cameras are pointed in the right direction. And ultimately, they fund and produce the election campaigns.

In short, the work democracy requires — the enormous effort needed to turn vague popular desires into programs and laws that can pass through Congress — is being done by privately funded groups. Some of them, on some issues, promote the public interest. But most are working in the interest of their funders. Why wouldn’t they?

And that explains why we haven’t been able to get rid of them: They are corruptly doing work that ought to be done honestly, but which in any case needs to get done somehow. Until we figure out how to get that work done without them, they’ll always sneak back into the process.

If friends or relatives keep forwarding you stuff about where President Obama was born, send them here.

Mohamed ElBaradei, who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency during the run-up to the Iraq War (and who more recently played a role in the Egyptian uprising) just wrote a book. ElBaradei had to deal with countries like North Korea, but he saves some of his harshest words for the Bush administration:

“I was aghast at what I was witnessing,” ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls “aggression where there was no imminent threat,” a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, “should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a `war crime’ and determine who is accountable?”

Wisconsin update: Recall petitions have been filed on five Republican and three Democratic state senators. The signatures are being validated, but if they hold up, new elections will be held in these eight districts. Democrats need to pick up three seats to gain control.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains Prosper.com, where strangers lend each other money over the internet. My first reaction was “That’s crazy.” But maybe not.

Somebody close to you has been keeping a secret file of all the places you go together. It’s your iPhone.

At age 11, boys and girls are equally likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders. At age 15, girls are six times more likely. The different explanations of this phenomenon are a Rorschach test on attitudes about gender: Female hormones. Society’s impossible demands on adolescent girls. Or a lack of empathy for teen-age boys turns their anxiety disorders into anger-management problems.

Slate’s Dahlia LIthwick says that for practical purposes, Roe v Wade isn’t the law any more. State legislatures are boldly passing laws that violate it, and pro-choice organizations are afraid to take these cases to the Supreme Court.

Publicly funded campaigns are part of the solution for fixing Congress, but that’s not all the work that needs to get done. And public funding to do the rest of it — like organize and develop public opinion, or educate the public about proposed legislation — could rapidly turn into 1984’s Ministry of Truth. Brainstorm some alternatives. How does the work of democracy get done in a way that is independent of both the incumbent government and the special interests?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

In this week’s Sift:

• How Money Talks. Sure, we all know the rich get what they want from government. But how does that work exactly? Here’s what I learned from Lawrence Lessig at the National Conference on Media Reform.
• The Ryan Medical Plan. Paul Ryan’s Medicare and Medicaid reform plan doesn’t even ask how the old and poor will pay for medical care. It just limits how much help they’ll get from the government.
• Short Notes. This week’s notes slant towards comedy: Elon James White, Erin Gibson, Second City, Katie Goodman, Jon Stewart. Plus a few serious notes about debt ceilings, tax cuts, and growing up Objectivist. And how would 21st-century tech change the Exodus story?
• This Week’s Challenge. What perfectly fine policy alternatives never make it into the debate?

Americans are bipolar about the power of the rich. On the one hand, if you say, “The rich are really, really rich and their voices count for more than yours”, people will roll their eyes at you in a do-you-think-I’m-stupid sort of way. Of course politicians pay more attention to David Koch and George Soros than they do to you. Of course AT&T and Exxon are getting something for all the money their lobbyists spread around. Everybody knows that.

On the other hand, when somebody quantifies just how rich and how powerful the rich and powerful are, most of us are appalled. We knew, but we didn’t know. We thought it was bad, but not bad like that.

Two Harvard researchers recently measured this gap between the actual concentration of wealth and what most Americans think it is. And in 2004 (studying data mostly from the 1990s), Princeton Professor Martin Gilens wrote a paper correlating the preferences of Americans of differing incomes with actual policy changes. He concluded:

Most Americans think that public officials don’t care much about the preferences of “people like me.” Sadly, the results presented above suggest they may be right. Whether or not elected officials and other decision makers “care” about middle-class Americans, influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.

It’s not hard to think of examples: In poll after poll, Americans say the rich should pay higher taxes, and that creating jobs is a higher priority than reducing the deficit. And yet, the budget talks that just narrowly averted a government shutdown were entirely focused on cutting spending (including job-creating public works projects) while increasing taxes on the rich or ending tax breaks for corporations were off the table.

So let’s start there: Money talks. It talks a lot louder than most of us want to admit. And it gets results even when most of the rest of us disagree with it.

So how does that work?

NCMR. I spent Friday and Saturday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. In one way or another, just about every session was focused on the way that money talks and how its volume could be turned down (or the volume of ordinary people turned up).

The conference wasn’t designed to have a uniform message, but I kept hearing this theme: Neither blatant quid-pro-quo corruption nor overt censorship is the real problem. That kind of control is for amateurs. It happens, but if you stopped it you wouldn’t have solved anything important.

Instead, the real problem is in the way the system is structured. Again and again, on many levels, the interests of both decision-makers and opinion-makers are aligned with private interests rather than the public interest.

These were the kinds of issues people talked about:

• net neutrality. Only government regulation can keep the small number of companies who own the delivery infrastructure of the Internet (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.) from either favoring their preferred content or extorting tariffs on web sites to get their message delivered. This was once a bipartisan issue, but after $100 million of industry spending on PR and lobbying, Republicans have defected and it has become a liberal issue.
• media concentration. How do you expose the undo influence of big corporations when you work for a big corporation and depend on its approval to keep your microphone turned on?
• source capture. Reporters need access to sources in positions of power. If they offend those sources, their access dries up.
• regulatory capture. Several times I heard this fact referenced: Michael Powell, the FCC head under President Bush, just took a high-paying job as the top lobbyist for the cable industry. (Lawrence Lessig quoted $2.3 million as a salary estimate, but I haven’t been able to verify that.) You don’t need to assume any back-room deals to learn this lesson: If you’re nice to the people you regulate, you’ve got a bright future after you leave government.
• non-advocacy. The traditional journalistic value of objectivity — going where the facts lead rather than pushing the story where you want it to go — has gotten distorted into a practice of only reporting the points-of-view that are already influential. Corporations have the wherewithal to put their ideas on the public agenda that the mainstream media reports. But how do the views of ordinary people break into that league?
• astro-turf. If you’ve got money, you can form “grass-root” organizations, create events for them, and get them on the news. Compare the relatively equal coverage of a Tea Party rally of a few hundred at the Capitol and a pro-union rally of 100,000 in Madison. A few hundred union supporters might not even make the local news, not to mention Politico or CNN.
• campaign finance. Every year it costs more to run for office. President Obama is planning to raise an unprecedented $1 billion for 2012. He can’t possibly raise that as 50 million contributions of $20 each. But he’ll need every penny when the Chamber of Commerce and their allies start spending against him. Corporations and billionaires have become the only conceivable source for the quantities of money needed to seek major offices.

Lawrence Lessig. The talk that pulled it all together was by one of my long-time heroes, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. The 25-minute presentation is already online. It focuses on clever graphics rather than Lessig as a talking head, so it works as well online as it did live at the conference. I recommend watching it.

Lessig’s career as an activist started with his opposition to the 1998 law granting a 20-year extension of existing copyrights. The motivation for that law was simple: Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain, soon to be followed by Superman and Batman.

Obviously, this mattered to Disney and Time-Warner. Just as obviously, extending the copyrights did nothing at all for the public. Copyrights are temporary government-granted monopolies that are supposed to encourage the production of creative works. But as Lessig puts it “Incentives are prospective. No matter what the U. S. Congress does, they cannot get George Gershwin to create anything more.” Extending copyright also has increased the number of orphan works that are unavailable because they are neither in commercial distribution nor in the public domain.

In spite of the extension’s net negative impact on the public good, Congress passed it unanimously.

Lessig connected this experience to what we’ve seen recently in Wall Street reform. After putting hundreds of billions into bailouts, the tax-payers have gotten no reform that will prevent similar disasters from happening again. The too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and still only minimally regulated.

Ditto global warming. Big democratic majorities and a president supposedly committed to action produced nothing in the face of huge corporate spending. Ditto health-care reform, which had to placate insurance and drug-company interests, but not the large majorities of the public that favored a public option.

Every single issue you and I care about — and not just you and I, people on the right too — every single issue we care about is blocked by the same fundamental rot. … We won’t get anything real from our government until we change this.

The fundamental problem, as Lessig describes it, is that Congress was designed to be dependent on the People, but instead it has become dependent on the Funders. But “the Funders are not the People.” (It needs to be said.) Rather than quid-pro-quo corruption, members of Congress

develop a sixth sense as they increasingly begin to recognize how every single thing they do might or might not affect their ability to raise money, and they adjust themselves to make sure they don’t reduce their ability to raise money.

This explains the kind of agenda-manipulation we see every day. Politicians don’t often change their positions in exchange for campaign contributions. It’s more subtle than that. They adjust the agenda so that questions that pit them against their potential funders never come up. Or, if they must come up, they appear as parts of large, seemingly inevitable compromises. So, for example, no one had to take a position on single-payer health care. There was no show-down vote on preserving the Bush tax cuts.

Similar processes are at work inside the corporate media. Overt censorship — drop that story or be fired — is very rare. But reporters know what will raise flak and what won’t. They know what their editors will and won’t support, what will and won’t keep their sources happy, what paragraphs are likely to get cut and what stories are likely to make page 1. Like leaping dolphins, they very quickly get trained to produce what the system rewards rather than burn their energy working against it.

Peter, Paul, and Mary had it nailed in 1967:

But if I really say it,
the radio won’t play it
unless I lay it between the lines

Root-striking. Lessig is pushing a campaign called Root Strikers. The initial purpose is simply to educate people to connect the dots, reframing every issue in terms of how it is changed by the influence of money on Congress. The ultimate plan, I’m told, involves a constitutional convention.

I have no idea whether this will turn into something or not. I’ll let you know.

At the conference I kept running into issues that used to be bipartisan, but have become partisan: net neutrality, global warming, campaign finance reform. In all of them, Republican support has vanished as industry deployed its resources.

Friday, after massive lobbying and other political expenses by telephone companies like AT&T, the House voted to invalidate the FCC’s already-watered-down protection of net neutrality on party lines: Republicans 234-2 against neutrality rules and Democrats 177-6 supporting them.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz (also at NCMR) has a current Vanity Fair article about the concentration of wealth and power.

It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put out his long-term budget plan Tuesday, spelling out some of the ideas he’s been suggesting in other forms for the last couple years. There’s been a lot of extreme rhetoric for and against it, and particularly about what it does to Medicare and Medicaid. It’s an extreme proposal, and at some point extreme rhetoric will be the appropriate response. But first let’s try to understand the Ryan Plan calmly.

An analogy helps: Suppose I have a niece. (I don’t.) Let’s call her Jenny, and let’s assume she has a serious health problem that her unemployed parents can’t possibly pay for. Not wanting to see her die, I’ve been footing the bills for Jenny’s treatment. I’m starting to go deeply into debt, and yet her treatments just get more and more expensive every year. Clearly, I’m headed towards bankruptcy.

I go to financial counselor Paul Ryan, who comes up with this plan: We figure out how much I can afford to spend on Jenny without going bankrupt, and we budget that I’m going to send her parents that much money each year, so that they can use it to pay for her treatments. Problem solved; I’m not going bankrupt any more.

I’m sure you see the difficulty: My potential bankruptcy is only one effect of the underlying problem, which we haven’t solved at all. Jenny is still sick, the doctors still aren’t going to treat her for free, and the cost of her treatment is still going up at the same rate. All I’ve done is detach my finances from that problem.

Now let’s come out of the analogy and look at the country’s health care system. The underlying problem is not fundamentally about government programs or taxes. It’s about the cost of medical care. For a long time, the cost of medical care has been going up faster than anything else — faster than inflation, faster than GDP, faster than government revenue.

By now, medical care is a huge expense for our economy. But the real problem is in the future: What if costs keep rising at this rate? Exponential growth will work its evil magic, and no matter how important you think medical care is, and no matter whether you imagine care being paid for by individuals, by private insurance, or by the government, at some point the money runs out. People will die even though we know how to save them, or they’ll limp through life with disabilities that we know how to fix.

Up until now, government programs have been shielding individuals from the worst effects of that trend. We have Medicare for the old and Medicaid for the poor. When those programs are properly funded and working well, no one has to die just for lack of money. But as we look forward and imagine a continuing exponential growth in medical costs, at some point it overwhelms any tax rate and government bankruptcy looms.

So budget chair Ryan gives the government the same advice that financial counselor Ryan gives me in the analogy: Detach your finances from the increasing costs. Rather than pay for treatment, provide a fixed amount of money as a voucher to help people pay for private health insurance. Let that amount go up at a rate you find sustainable.

If you think the government deficit is the only problem here, then this is a great solution. But if you think the problem is that people are sick and we don’t know how to pay for their treatment, that problem is untouched. The weight of it has just been shifted from the government to the individual.

The conservative response to this criticism is that medical inflation will abate when government money is no longer fueling it. Or, saying the same thing another way, when people become desperate enough for cheap medical care, the market will provide it.

This strikes me as magical thinking: I want it to be true, therefore it is true. If you poke the idea even slightly, it has no depth. Market incentives for cheap medical care already exist. (Insurance companies could make lots of money if they could provide quality care more cheaply. Employers could cut costs by forcing their employees into those insurance programs.) So far, those incentives haven’t produced results, and no one has put forward any economic model that shows how the lower costs would come about.

And if they don’t come about, people are going to die for lack of money. Parts of the Affordable Care Act begin to deal with that problem, but even these minimal efforts to reduce medical inflation are what raised the rhetoric about rationing and death panels. Ryan supports defunding them.

On privatizing Medicare and Medicaid,  Matt Yglesias asks the right question: “Why would introducing a new layer of rent-seeking special interests reduce health care spending?”

Because it has economies of scale, is non-profit, and doesn’t need to advertise or pay million-dollar executive salaries, Medicare has low overhead and spends a higher proportion of its money on care than any private insurance plan. Replacing it dollar-for-dollar with a voucher would mean significant cuts in care.

The most fun presentations at NCMR conference by comedians. I’ve linked to Elon James White’s This Week in Blackness series several times over the last couple years. But Erin Gibson and her Current TV series Infomania were new to me. Ditto Matthew Filipowicz, who has a great motive for starting his new talk show: “I know a lot of people who are smarter than I am, and I wanted to have a reason to talk to them.”

While we’re doing progressive comedy, sing along with Katie Goodman in “I Didn’t F*ck It Up“.

Glenn Beck is crawling back under the talk-radio rock that he wriggled out from. So I need to start drawing down my supply of Beck-skewering bookmarks: Mother Jones diagrams Glenn’s brain. And Katie Goodman sings “Glenn Beck is Batshit Crazy“. Jon Stewart also sees the end coming for his Beck impersonations. And Digby can’t resist dancing on Beck’s grave.

Republicans plan to seek new spending cuts next month when the national debt ceiling needs to be raised. But Matt Yglesias points out something significant: Threatening not to raise the debt ceiling (and send the U.S. government into default) is pure hostage-taking, not an alternate policy view.

If there’s some large block of members of congress who genuinely believe that failing to raise the debt ceiling is superior to raising the debt ceiling, then obviously it would make sense to negotiate with those people. But I don’t believe that there are any such people.

The effort to defund Planned Parenthood produced a lot of great responses: Erin Gibson’s and Second City Network’s were my favorites.

An Atlanta business owner repeats something New Hampshire businesspeople have told one of my friends:

Tax Cuts do not create jobs. Tax cuts adds profits into business owners pockets. If I get another 10% Tax cut, as the republicans are planning to push, lets say it moves and wins. If my current staff is can handle the volume, there is no incentive for me to hire new employees. That is the way it works.

As a former teen Objectivist myself, I understand that Randist philosophy is more than just an excuse to be a jerk. But if by coincidence you happen to be a jerk, it’s awfully convenient. Alyssa Bereznak illustrates in How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood.

In honor of Passover (coming up later this month), consider how Exodus would play out in the age of social media.

As you listen to TV talking heads debate politics this week, remember to take a step back occasionally and ask yourself: What completely different solution would work well for ordinary people, but is off the table because everybody knows it’s politically impractical? I’ll start the bidding with single-payer health care. Any others?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.