Talking About Killing

The execution of Troy Davis on Wednesday unleashed a wave of anti-death-penalty articles (I’ll link to the best ones I found as they become relevant), and a few defenses of capital punishment (or at least of the process that found Troy Davis guilty). Some even suggested that this case would be a turning point in Americans’ support for the death penalty.

I’ve got my doubts about that, because the two sides are still talking past each other — arguing with straw men rather than saying anything that might turn an opponent around. The real issues remain in a visceral realm where they can’t be discussed because they aren’t fully verbalized.

You can tell that people are talking past each other when they affirm the same principles, but imagine that the other side is denying those principles. A productive discussion can’t even get started until those agreements are recognized. Then the real disagreements stand out rather than remaining unspoken in the background.

Here are some principles held by death-penalty advocates and opponents alike:

  • Innocent life should be protected.
  • The state should affirm the value and dignity of life, not undermine it.
  • Actions should have consequences, and similar actions should have similar consequences.
  • Murder is a horrific crime in general, and many specific murders are acts of incredible inhumanity.
  • The people who loved the victim deserve our compassion.

On either side, if the bulk of your argument emphasizes one of these general claims, you’re probably just talking to yourself. No one disagrees with you. The disagreement is about where those principles lead.

Some of the surface-level disagreements concern questions that could be resolved by evidence, if anybody could gather and evaluate the evidence fairly. The biggest ones are to what extent the death penalty deters future murders, how many innocent people get convicted, and the roles that race and class play in determining who gets executed.

But the root disagreements, the ones that cause everyone to misrepresent evidence and project straw men onto each other, are very basic:

  • We disagree on the continuing worth of an ancient principle of justice: Suffering pays for suffering and blood pays for blood. 
  • We disagree on how to weigh the risk of punishing the innocent against the risk of insufficiently punishing the guilty.

Our arguments go round and round because these questions are not amenable to logic or evidence, no matter how much both sides wish they were.

Recognizing the agreements. A great deal of pro-death-penalty energy is devoted to horror stories about murders, as if death-penalty opponents believe that murderers are basically decent people who deserve our sympathy. (If somebody somewhere believes that, I haven’t met them.)

Similarly, death penalty advocates agree in principle that innocent people should not be convicted and that execution should not depend on the race or class of either the murderer or the victim. But they disagree about how perfectible the process is and how to balance those risks against the risk that the guilty will be insufficiently punished.

The real difficulties come with the principles that pull both ways. How should the state affirm the dignity and value of life? Those who believe blood-pays-for-blood think that not killing the murderer devalues the life of the victim. (And they project that devaluation onto DP-opponents).

But DP-opponents believe that life is affirmed at the extremes: Even the murderer should not be intentionally killed by the state; that’s how valuable life is.

Similarly, how should we protect the innocent? By deterring future murderers with the threat of death, DP-advocates say. By not executing any innocent people, DP-opponents counter.

A hidden agreement. One false assumption — that death is the worst punishment we can inflict — sneaks into the discussion and hides an area of agreement by producing a false either/or: We either should or shouldn’t inflict the worst possible punishment on murderers.

In fact, no current execution method approaches the worst possible. We could flay the murderer alive, for example, or let him be eaten slowly by rats.

Many of the same arguments would apply: The murder-victim’s family might take satisfaction in a more gruesome execution, and it might be a better deterrent than, say, lethal injection. But who advocates these more extreme punishments? Overwhelmingly, both sides agree that we should not inflict the worst punishment possible.

Evidence-based disagreements. Because we all want to be provably right, both sides exaggerate their evidence-based points. It would help if we could all admit two things:

  • Truly innocent people are a very small fraction of those executed. Even in the Davis case, we don’t know he was innocent; we’re just not sure he was guilty.
  • If the death penalty has a deterrent effect, it’s tiny. If deterrence worked, Texas wouldn’t lead the nation in executions year after year.

If you want to see a real deterrence effect, look at interceptions in football. It’s been 29 years since the same player led the NFL in interceptions two years in a row, and I don’t think three years in a row has ever been done. After you intercept a few passes, quarterbacks stop throwing in your direction. But Texans never stop committing murders.

Deep disagreement: weighing our mistakes. Every human process will make mistakes. (Andrew Cohen’s Atlantic article shows just how fallibly human our capital-punishment process is. Repeated attempts to fix it led Justice Harry Blackmun to write, “From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”) One of the most basic liberal/conservative differences is whether you want to err on the side of mercy or strictness. A liberal would rather feed ten moochers than turn away someone genuinely in need. A conservative would do the reverse.

This issue shows up all over: unemployment payments to people who might be able to find jobs, torturing those who are probably terrorists, the number of civilian deaths that are acceptable “collateral damage” in war, and so on. The proper balance is a deep intuition, not a conclusion based on logic or evidence.

This is why the Davis case will not turn be a turning point. It may be obvious to DP-opponents that a single execution of an innocent man invalidates the whole capital-punishment process. But DP-advocates can look squarely at that possibility and remain unconvinced.

Deep disagreement: Only blood pays for blood. Scales became a symbol of justice from crimes of property: If a measure of grain was taken from you, you got the same measure back; that was justice. Metaphorically, this got extended to crimes of violence — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Justice means balancing the scales.

This principle is so old that many people don’t realize it’s a metaphor. Killing the killer does not balance anything literal. Nonetheless, many Americans feel deep down that justice has been circumvented if a murderer lives. He got off cheap, or perhaps the victim’s life was valued cheaply. Any talk about “victim’s rights” (or the rights of the family, which stand proxy for the victim) or any comparison between the murderer and his victim (“how much compassion did he have for my daughter?”) is implicitly invoking the scales-of-justice metaphor.

This issue is complicated by the dogmatic needs of fundamentalist Christianity. If blood isn’t a necessary payment, then what was the crucifixion about? Deep down, fundamentalists know that if they give in on the death penalty, their whole religion is undermined.

Strategy. When a disagreement is not amenable to evidence or logic, evidence and logic become distractions. So there’s no point arguing about the statistics of deterrence or racial imbalance if the root disagreement is whether blood is necessary to pay for blood.

When you reach that point, a DP-opponent really has only two options. If you are comfortable with the religious or mythological language the other person thinks in, you can sometimes get your point across that way. (Example: Even though God told Cain “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground“, God did not answer that cry by killing Cain. Quite the opposite, God put a mark on Cain to prevent anyone else from killing him. It was the original example of executive clemency.)

But there is an alternative: Simply being in the presence of an alternate moral vision can change a person, particularly someone who has never taken seriously that another view is possible. To employ this strategy, you have to shed the projections DP-advocates throw at you, and refuse to be distracted by issues-of-fact that won’t change anybody’s mind. Eventually you need to make clear that you see what the other person sees, but you just don’t make the same judgment: Blood does not pay for blood. The scales of justice are a metaphor; we have a choice about whether to apply it.

Letting someone else see the example of your alternative moral vision may not be as satisfying as crushing them in an argument about facts or logic. But in the long run it may be more effective.

September 26, 2011 – 11:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight

The Hour of SunlightWhen extremists have been shouting — and sometimes shooting — at each other for generations, the center is a hard position to hold. Each side has its own version of history, which begins with its own people minding their own business and being horribly victimized by the other side. Each side has its own framing of law and justice and human rights, in which it has always been right and the other side has always been wrong. Even the horrible things that are undeniable — the killing of innocents, the torture of helpless prisoners — were only done to prevent (or in reprisal for) something worse perpetrated by the other side.

Sami al Jundi believes that people need to tell each other their personal stories, and that when they do, they will empathize with each other and start trying to find common solutions. That’s what he does in The Hour of Sunlight. Al Jundi is a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, and a secularized Muslim. His story is hard to pigeon-hole or stereotype, and that is the strength of his book. It made me wonder how many other stories of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians don’t fit into any of the standard molds.

Sami was a boy when Israel conquered East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. He grew up with family stories of leaving Deir Yassin in 1948 after a massacre that some Israeli writers say never happened. He grew up with a resentment against Israel and a desire to strike back. When he was a teen-ager, his two best friends went to Syria for a few days of training, and came back determined to make bombs. They blew themselves up. One died, while Sami and the other boy were badly injured. Sami got some experience of Israeli interrogation techniques and a ten-year prison sentence.

Prison, oddly enough, is where al Jundi gets his education in politics, in history, and eventually in non-violence. The political-prisoner community had a strong sense of identity, a strong education program, and the most idealistic democratic process al Jundi ever runs into. After a few years, though, an influx of new prisoners from Gaza produces a new regime and a paranoid search for collaborators. This is the first of many disillusionments about his own people that al Jundi suffers.

A greater disillusionment happens after he is free, and the Oslo agreement seems to promise peace. Al Jundi’s initial euphoria dissolves from both directions: The Israelis continue to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem neighborhoods, and the Palestinian Authority replaces the indigenous semi-democratic Palestinian underground leadership with the corrupt authoritarianism of the newly-returned PLO exiles.

His idealism leads him to work with Seeds of Peace, a group (founded and largely funded by American Jews) that brings Israeli and Palestinian youths together in workshops in Maine, where they learn nonviolence and listen to each other’s experiences. Al Jundi tries to keep the “seeds” (as the youths are called) integrated after they return to Israel/Palestine, and several invite each other to speak at their high schools.

This too falls apart from both sides. The Israeli government is upset that Jewish seeds are becoming conscientious objectors to military service, and Palestinians accuse al Jundi of being a “normalizer” — someone who wants to defang Palestinian resistance without overcoming Israeli oppression. Eventually, he is dismissed because Seeds of Peace can no longer countenance employing someone with his criminal record.

If Hour of Sunlight followed formula, this setback would be the prelude to an even bigger victory. But, at least so far, it hasn’t been. Al Jundi retains his faith in peace-making, in non-violence, and in democracy. But how he will manifest these ideas in the future remains unclear.

September 26, 2011 – 11:35 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (5)

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Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes

Whenever human rights advance, bigots feel victimized because they are no longer entitled to treat people badly. Case in point: This editorial is “concerned” about the rights of anti-gay military chaplains now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history.

Glenden Brown wrote a full takedown on One Utah, so I’ll just sum up: At the root of the chaplains’ complaint is a fundamental misunderstanding of their role. Their paychecks are not issued by God or by their denominations. They work for the U.S. military and their duty is to serve our troops. If you bear that mission in mind, all their issues evaporate.

Chaplains who aren’t right-wing Christians have always felt a tension between serving the soldiers and pushing their own beliefs or the dogma of their particular sect. (Examples: this Quaker chaplain and this Unitarian Universalist.) If right-wing Christian chaplains are feeling a tension now too, that isn’t discrimination.

This weekend I attended (via the Web) Lawrence Lessig’s Conference on the Constitutional Convention, which was interesting both for outside-the-box thinking about political change and because it raised the possibility of a left/right alliance for basic reforms. (Lessig’s co-host was Mark Meckler from Tea Party Patriots.) Details next week.

Surprise! Some of the things said by the Republican candidates in Thursday’s debate were not true.

In fact, the moment that “won the debate” for Herman Cain was also the most outrageous lie of the evening: He claimed that if ObamaCare had been in force in 2006, he would have died from colon cancer because “government bureaucrats” would have delayed his treatment.

Reality: Cain is a multi-millionaire businessman with private health insurance. He will continue to have the same insurance under the Affordable Care Act. And even if insurance-company (not government) bureaucrats get in his way, nothing in the ACA prevents Cain himself from paying for whatever treatment he wants.

Kate Conway elaborates:

It’s kind of twisted that Cain uses his against-the-odds recovery to condemn a policy that could help others less fortunate than him beat similar obstacles.

And Kevin Drum draws the conclusion:

[T]his is a real problem for liberals. Sure, we cherry-pick evidence, we spin world events, and we impose our worldview when we talk about policy. Everyone does that. But generally speaking, our opinion leaders don’t go on national TV, look straight into the camera, and just outright lie about stuff. Theirs do. … It’s awfully hard to fight stuff this brazen … especially when the mainstream press no longer seriously polices this stuff, and isn’t much believed even when it does.

I used to worry that the Republican primary campaign would dominate the airwaves the way Obama/Clinton did after McCain locked up the nomination in 2008. But so far that’s working in the Democrats’ favor. Each debate offers new evidence that the GOP has left mainstream America far behind: cheering for executions, calling to let the uninsured die, and (Thursday) booing an American soldier in Iraq because he has come out as gay now that the law allows him to do so.

William Kristol reported getting an email from “a bright young conservative” saying “We sound like crazy people.” Noticed that, did you?

Crazies can infiltrate any crowd, but here’s the real problem: At none of these moments did a candidate stand up to the mob and defend basic decency. How hard would it have been to tell the gay soldier: “Although we disagree on some issues, I honor your service to our country”?

Rick Santorum’s actual answer to the gay soldier was incoherent, and raised the “special rights” canard. David Tharp refutes:

[DADT repeal] doesn’t give gay and lesbian soldiers any “special privileges;” it only allows those soldiers to be honest about who they are. Straight soldiers are allowed to wear wedding rings, talk about their spouses and acknowledge their sexuality. Now, finally, gay and lesbian soldiers have the same rights.

Conservative commentators were ready to bury Rick Perry after three bad debates, and his nationwide standing against President Obama is slipping. There was some question whether rank-and-file Republicans agreed with their commentariat, but after Perry lost a Florida straw poll to Herman Cain and a Michigan poll to Romney, maybe they do.

I ran across a lot of amusing political images this week, like this Rick Perry poster (“because George W. Bush didn’t do enough damage”). Or this pie chart explaining the consequences of gay marriage. The most amusing same-sex marriage signs are collected here.

This looks cool as a poster: “I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one.” And I loved: “They only call it class warfare when we fight back.“

You should never read too much into the phase-one trials of any treatment, but this NYT story of a miraculous leukemia remission via an immune-system treatment is pretty amazing.

Pro Publica looked at the question of whether regulations kill jobs. Conclusion: Not really.

Add this to my continuing series on Libertarianism: SF author David Brin uses conservative/libertarian principles to argue against “the idolatry of property”.

For Brin, markets are a means, not an end. The Soviet failure taught him that an economy is too complicated for central control; markets allocate resources better through distributed processing. But when a handful of corporations come to dominate an economy and their CEOs all play golf together, you’re back to central control.

Jon Stewart covers the plight of “this nation’s most vulnerable wealthy”. If only a Subway mogul could find some inexpensive way to feed his family …

If you’re feeling excessively cheerful today and want fix that problem, look at Doom by TNR’s John Judis. The governments of the world are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, and the only policies that might turn things around are politically impossible.

Surely everybody on FaceBook has seen this by now, since it went viral sometime last week. But new Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has captured the liberal-populist message better than anybody so far.

September 26, 2011 – 11:17 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (9)

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Turn the Crank

No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on September 26.

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

— Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde Sismondi
New Principles of Political Economy (1819)

In this week’s sift:

  • Economics Works Backwards Now. It used to be about working to produce scarce goods. Now what’s scarce is work.
  • Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say. Remember how in high school you sometimes couldn’t say obvious things, because the other kids would ridicule you for it? Politics is like that.
  • Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes. Toucans can’t symbolize a Guatemalan educational non-profit, because they already symbolize Froot Loops. Also: I avoided 9-11 coverage, my reservations about Obama’s jobs strategy, some funny Rick Perry signs, a TED talk using iPods and magic, left-wing libertarianism, why the center keeps moving right, and a poster about common sense.
  • Last week’s most popular post. The whole site still lives in the shadow of Why I Am Not a Libertarian, now up to 18,000 views, and One Word Turns the Tea Party Around (8000). But though last week’s Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence (231) and Blowing Smoke About Clouds (165) posted much more modest numbers, both did well when reposted on Daily Kos.
  • This week’s challenge. The next significant campaign is the Ohio referendum called Issue 2, which will be voted on this November. Issue 2 is the old S.B. 5, Ohio’s union-busting bill, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Kasich, but is still in limbo now that enough signatures have been gathered to force a referendum. Find out how you can help at WeAreOhio.com.
September 12, 2011 – 12:43 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Economics Works Backwards Now

Do you ever think about how strange it is to worry about “creating jobs”? Wednesday, Douglas Rushkoff observed this:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Originally, economics was supposed to be about scarcity. People didn’t have enough food, clothing, housing, or tools. So you worked to make some, and then traded your surplus for somebody else’s surplus of the things you needed.

Today it’s all backwards. We produce plenty of goods, and if necessary we could dial the process up and produce more. What’s scarce now is work.

Try to imagine that on a personal level: It’s dinnertime. You’re hungry. There’s so much good food in the frig that you worry about it spoiling. But you haven’t justified your meal yet and you can’t think how you’re going to do it. So you have to sit there and be hungry until you can create a task for yourself.

Or on a family level: The kids each had jobs to do to help with dinner. But then we got a dishwasher, so now Jenny doesn’t get to eat dinner because we haven’t found a new job for her yet.

Crazy, isn’t it?

This week the big news was President Obama’s jobs speech, the Republican reaction, and the various economists who mostly told us that these were pretty good ideas.

But think about that speech’s focus. Not that we need to grow more food or make more cars or build more houses because those things are needed, but that we need to produce more of something so that people can be employed producing it. He tried to justify the needfulness of the jobs, but all the same it would miss the point if Obama could accomplish the same things by snapping his fingers instead of hiring people.

Rushkoff again:

it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

John Kenneth Galbraith was making similar observations half a century ago. In The Affluent Society he described the following paradox: We judge our nation’s economic success by how much it produces, and we justify production because it satisfies demand. But demand has to be created by advertising, because without constant hectoring people would not want all the things we produce.

After a certain point, Galbraith said, “Production only fills a void that it has itself created.”

So why are we doing all this? In theory, our society could work less, produce less, advertise less, and we’d have no more unmet desires than we have now. But then there wouldn’t be as many jobs.

If production is a paradox, productivity as an even bigger one. On the one hand, productivity is our best friend. The reason the standard of living today is so much higher than in the Middle Ages is that an hour of work now (with the assistance of machinery, electronics, fossil fuels, and a better-organized society) produces so much more than an hour of work did then. Beyond an occasional hobbyist project, why would you choose to work all week making something that you could buy for 20 minutes worth of your salary?

But productivity and new technology kills jobs. Rushkoff begins his essay talking about the Post Office, which faces massive layoffs because email and electronic bill payments don’t require human sorters and couriers.

Again, that’s not a new idea. The French economist Sismondi satirized the pure productivity-is-good view in 1819 in New Principles of Political Economy:

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

That fantasy gets closer and closer to reality. In his 1995 book The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin wrote:

The quickening pace of automation is fast moving the global economy to the day of the workerless factory.

Sismondi’s image of the king turning a crank captures the social problem of the workerless factory: The only reason to care whether it is in Topeka, Taipei, or Timbuktu is who owns it and who gets to tax it. Wherever it is, it will make goods, but it won’t provide jobs.

So even if “the output of England” stays the same, all the value of it now belongs to the crank-turning king (or maybe to the Workless Factory Corporation). No matter how plentiful those goods are, what can the people of England trade in order to get them?

In 1930, at the depths of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote the hopeful essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren“:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.

Imagine if humanity really did “solve its economic problem”. Suppose we got off the hamster wheel of ever-increasing desires, and kept improving our productivity until we could comfortably supply everything people really wanted.

Now imagine that we could do all that with only a few people working. The way we’re currently organized, that would be Hell. Whoever owned the machines and the natural resources would have the whip hand over the rest of us, who would scratch and claw to get the few remaining jobs.

So I want to suggest this: Yes, in the short-to-medium term we really do need to create jobs. But maybe our economic problems seem so intractable because we’re using economic tools to attack what is really a social problem. Currently (because in centuries past scarcity seemed eternal and the production system needed as many workers as possible) jobs organize our lives, give us our identities, and (most of all) allow us to prove that we deserve to eat.

But unless we either outlaw progress or keep inflating our desires until we consume the planet, eventually we’re going to have to rethink our lives, our identities, and the system that distributes goods. Otherwise we’re headed for Cornucopian Hell.

September 12, 2011 – 12:24 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say

Remember how things were in high school? If a truth was unpopular, you’d be ridiculed for saying it, no matter how obvious it was. Even people who knew you were right wouldn’t defend you, because then they’d be ridiculed too. They might even think they had to speak against you, just to be safe.

Politics is like that, but mostly just on one side. The rich and powerful can emphasize the effect when it works for them (by hiring professional ridiculers) or minimize it when it works against them (via spokesmen and front groups who absorb ridicule until things are safe for conservative politicians). If the PR professionals do their jobs well, the pro-wealth politicians don’t have to offer evidence or answer opposing arguments, they can just laugh and scoff — like the cool kids used to.

But a popular lie that damages the poor or even the middle class can go unchallenged for a long, long time. If we want to hear the corresponding truths, we’ll have to start saying them ourselves.

1. Most government money is well spent. The opposite idea — that government pours money down a rat hole — is broadcast every day. But strangely, anybody who sets out to find this wasteful spending and eliminate it ends up firing teachers, getting rid of food inspectors, letting bridges fall down, or cutting off somebody’s medical care.

I’m sure the people in the path of Texas’ wildfires appreciate the “waste” Gov. Perry managed to cut from the budgets of volunteer fire departments and the Texas Forest Service. When the antibiotic-resistant plague gets rolling, I’m sure we’ll be similarly grateful to House Republicans for the “waste” they’re finding at the CDC.

Speaking this truth in public takes courage, because the ridiculers can point to famous anecdotes of government waste — bridges to nowhere, $600 toilet seats — and nearly everyone knows some story of a mismanaged local project, an acquaintance who scammed disability, or a lazy civil servant who can’t be fired.

But the private sector has its own examples of spectacular waste. How many welfare cheats would it take to equal the $300-500 million CEO Dick Fuld “earned” by managing Lehman Brothers into extinction and touching off the 2008 financial collapse? I can find waste in my own apartment — things I didn’t need, never used, or paid too much for. A certain amount of waste is the natural friction you’ll find in any human activity.

Government is a human project, so it has waste in it and always will. Except for unnecessary wars, is it more wasteful than the private sector? Does its inevitable waste cancel out the vital services it performs? Could we get those services without waste? No.

2. Regulations save money and lives. Corporations can often make a short-term profit doing something that eventually costs the public far more than the corporation makes. (The guy at Hooker Chemical who suggested burying toxic waste at Love Canal saved the company a bundle. He probably got a raise.) Stopping those bad deals is what government regulation is all about.

We hear every day how much companies spend complying with regulations, as if that were the whole story. What we gain from that spending is far more valuable. In the 60s and 70s, the auto companies fought tooth and nail against making cars safer. A car with seat belts used to cost extra. Air bags weren’t even an option, much less standard equipment. Hard, unpadded, and sometimes even sharp steering wheels killed thousands.

Traffic deaths in the U.S. peaked in the late 70s, even though the number of people, cars, and miles driven keeps going up. That’s government regulation for you.

Or consider this: Taking the lead out of gasoline has made American children measurably smarter. What’s that worth to our future economy? What’s that worth personally, to them and to us?

3. The rich are job destroyers, not job creators. You can’t have a mass-production economy if the masses can’t afford the products they make. So when the rich get too rich, growth suffers.

The last time the rich captured this much of our nation’s income was 1929 — the last time the economy crashed this badly. It’s not a coincidence.

4. Rich heirs are parasites. In political rhetoric, rich people are all hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Because politicians need contributions from the rich, they can’t point out just how useless most second-and-third-generation millionaires and billionaires are.

We are encouraged to resent the unemployed worker who doesn’t try hard enough to find a new job, but not the heir who never works. We’re encouraged to resent the black or Hispanic who gets into Harvard through affirmative action, but not the “legacy” Ivy Leaguer whose test scores are even worse.

Our plunging inheritance tax has increased inequality in the worst possible way, and makes us more like the hereditary aristocracies of 18th-century Europe. In spite of the pop-culture vampire revival, we’re still missing the underlying social metaphor of the original Dracula: Those exotically beguiling aristocrats are sucking our blood.

5. The U.S. government can’t go bankrupt (unless it decides to). Even President Obama has been invoking the spectre of government bankruptcy, but it can’t happen in any literal sense.

Why? The overwhelming majority of federal government’s expenses are in dollars. Its debt is in dollars. So what are dollars? Whatever the Federal Reserve says they are.

The Fed creates dollars the way that Delta creates frequent flier miles: It enters them on a spreadsheet. The U.S. Treasury has an account at the Fed, which the Fed can replenish by creating dollars to buy government bonds. Or it could just let the Treasury’s balance go negative. No sparks would fly out of the Fed’s computers. Negative numbers work just fine.

The only way the U. S. government can go bankrupt is if it creates a crisis for itself, like the recent debt-ceiling debacle. As long as Congress is willing to authorize the government to pay its debts, the government can pay its debts.

Though it can’t go bankrupt, the government could pay a penalty for running a big deficit in two ways: The markets could drive up interest rates (which isn’t happening), or the Fed creating dollars could increase inflation (which isn’t happening, but should).

6. Some inflation right now would be a good thing. The official mandate of the Federal Reserve is to balance inflation against unemployment. It doesn’t. The Fed goes on red-alert at every hint of inflation, but the current unemployment is not inspiring similar alarm.

An easier money policy would lower unemployment at the “cost” of inflation — which would actually be a benefit. Anybody who lived through the 70s remembers the mindset inflation brings: You don’t sit on piles of cash. You buy or invest now, because stuff is only going to cost more later.

Corporations are sitting on a trillion dollars of cash. Rich people are probably sitting on even more. A little fear of inflation would get that money moving again.

7. Fill in your own unspoken truth. …

September 12, 2011 – 12:16 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (68)

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Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This sign is apparently genuine, from February, 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

(APPLAUSE)

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

In at least one case, maybe he should.

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

See Kevin Drum for elaboration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategies

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

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

In this week’s sift:

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

Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence

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

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

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

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

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

That’s bad — and not just for Monsanto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blowing Smoke About Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

The CERN press release quotes Kirkby:

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

The press briefing concludes:

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

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

Live Science also talked to Kirkby:

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

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

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

Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog responds:

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

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

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

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

Do you have to ask?

Fox Business Channel’s Tobin Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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