The Weekly Sift

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.

— — Benjamin Barber, Consumed (2007)

all the Sift quotes of 2010 are collected here

This is the 49th and last Sift of 2010. Time to look back at where we’ve been.

In this year’s Sifts:

• The Theme of the Year: Concentration of Wealth. I never set out to explore a theme over the course of a year, but it happens on its own. This year, a number of Sfits ended up being about the concentration of wealth — that it’s happening, how it’s happening, and what problems it’s causing.
• Update on Last Year’s Theme: Corporatism. The battle between corporations and humans continued this year. The Citizens United decision helped make 2010 a good year to be a corporation.
• Secondary theme: Propaganda. By now I expect Sift readers to know that large swaths of the population believe things that are flat-out false. But why do they believe them? How do they believe them? I kept coming back to those questions all year long.
• The Sifted Books of 2010. There were a lot of them this year. All the links are collected here.
• Short Notes. The Sift’s biggest hit in 2010. My biggest mistake. And a couple of current notes: Obama moves towards embracing indefinite detention, a consequence of DADT repeal crosses my FaceBook news feed, and Barney Frank runs rings around a hostile reporter.

In 2010 there were two economies. If you were a Wall Street banker, happy days were here again. Even if you were just an investor, things were pretty good — the Dow is up nearly 1000 points this year, almost 10%. But if you were unemployed, it was a different story. Close to half of the unemployed — 6.3 million of them — have been out of work for more than 6 months.

That’s just the most recent step in a journey America has been on since late in the Carter administration: The rich have been getting richer, but everyone else has been working harder and producing more for little extra money — and sometimes less. The so-called “Bush boom” was the first time since the Depression that median household income dropped over a complete business cycle.

A lot of  people, including me, have talking about that for years. But in September a bunch of recent data got popularized in Timothy Noah’s series The Great Divergence on Slate and in the newly published Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.

The interesting point in this data is that the “vanishing middle class” phenomenon is only the part of the problem most of us are in a position to see. If you have the data, you realize that the super-rich are pulling away from everyone else, not just from the poor. If the world were a village of 1000 people, one guy would have made 1/8th of the money in 2008, nearly five times the share he got in 1973. (Increasingly that guy — or the super-rich class he represents — lives in a different world from the rest of us, as Robert Frank chronicled in Richistan.)

When you realize that hyper-concentration of wealth is the essence of the phenomenon, then most of the standard explanations fall away: It’s not global competition or education or immigration or automation, because none of that separates the top tenth of a percent from the top percent. Competition from illegal aliens isn’t preventing millionaires from keeping up with billionaires.

Hacker and Pierson lay the blame at the feet of the government: Republican and Democratic administrations alike have favored capital over labor, finance over industry, corporations over consumers, lenders over borrowers, fine-print-writers over the naive — in short, the very rich over everybody else.

Thomas Geoghagen’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be that way. Europe is subject to all the same economic winds we are, but countries like Germany and France and Sweden have built much more egalitarian societies, which Geoghagen argues are better places for ordinary people to live.

Typically, concentration-of-wealth is argued as a moral issue: Why should some people be allowed to waste the world’s resources on ridiculous luxury while others can’t get necessities? (This is the point of view of The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson. She tells the stories of middle-managers who — recognizing the injustice of it all — break or otherwise circumvent the rules to make life livable for the working poor. Conservatives are well defended against this moral argument, as I explain in How to Speak Conservative: Class Warfare.)

But Robert Reich’s Aftershock argues that concentrated wealth is bad in purely economic terms: In a healthy economy, mass production and mass consumption go together; money cycles naturally because people who make stuff can afford to buy stuff. (Similar ideas are in Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal.)

But when wealth gets too concentrated, money piles up in the accounts of people who don’t spend it. At first they might invest it in new production, which is good, but even that slows down once it becomes clear that demand isn’t keeping up. (Why expand a factory if you can’t sell what it’s making now?) Instead, the surplus of the rich gets drawn into speculative bubbles, as they look for investments that don’t depend on increased consumption. (I explain what’s wrong with the contrary view — that rich people create jobs — in Where Jobs Come From. These days, it’s customers who create jobs, not investors.)

That low-demand, underemployed, bubble-driven economy is typical of both the last decade and the 1920s, the previous time wealth was over-concentrated. The 20s ended in the Great Depression, and the “Bush boom” nearly had the same result. Unless we can start de-concentrating wealth — as happened accidentally due to World War II — Reich makes the case that future business cycles will be similar: speculative bubbles followed by collapse.

Finally, we get to the moral case libertarians make for capitalism and the so-called free market: that the market gives people what they deserve, and that changing the market result is some form of theft. The best refutation of this idea is the book Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, which I reviewed in April.

Alperovitz and Daly start with the question of why today’s economy is so much more productive than, say, America in 1800. It seems unlikely that the billionaires of today are hundreds of times harder working or smarter than the businessmen of 1800. The more sensible explanation is that society as a whole is benefitting from the accumulation of knowledge and social capital. The inventions of people alive today make a difference, but a much bigger difference is that we’ve gotten better at using things invented or discovered generations ago. (For example, we make really good wheels and fires these days.)

In short, our advantage in productivity is largely a collective inheritance from our ancestors, so diffuse that it’s not even attributable to individual bloodlines. What happens under capitalism, though, is that our collective inheritance benefits a relatively small number of people. What looks like individual earning is largely a usurpation of an inheritance that rightfully ought to belong to everybody. (We should all be getting our share of royalties on the Wheel. I made a similar argument last year in a talk called Who Owns the World?)

Another financial theme: I looked at a number of explanations of how the real-estate bubble grew and then popped, most notably The Big Short by Michael Lewis and ECONned by Yves Smith.

In April, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pulled a bunch of these themes together in a talk at the Kennedy School of Government.

Last December was the first time I noticed an annual theme in the Weekly Sift. Over the course of 2009, I had become more and more radicalized about the opposition between corporations and human beings.

2010 started with the Citizens United decision, which I characterized as Judicial Activism: The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights. That week I was also inspired to write The Book of Corporation, a re-telling of Genesis in which God creates the Eden Corporation, which in turn hires the Serpent as its CEO. Eventually the Babel Project succeeds and God is ousted by the Serpent.

In the Citizens United decision, the Court’s conservative majority anticipated that transparency would allow voters to evaluate the sources of campaign advertising, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Republicans managed to block the DISCLOSE Act in the Senate. Consequently, the fall elections saw a flood of anonymous money, nearly all of it spent on negative ads against Democrats. I covered this in Quotations of Chairman Anonymous.

The other big corporate/human conflict story of the year was the West Virginia mine disaster. Having reviewed Doubt is Their Product last year (followed by Merchants of Doubt this year), I saw the miners’ deaths differently than the mainstream media:

This is the current level of corporate ethics: If they can make money by killing their workers or customers, they will. It’s not just a few bad apples; it’s standard operating procedure. … Current law is more concerned with protecting the mine owners from frivolous claims than protecting the lives of miners.

That’s still true. A new mine safety bill was proposed after the miners’ deaths, but Republicans managed to defeat it.

Another place where corporate lobbying worked against the public interest this year was with regard to net neutrality:

The point here is to create many new choke-points where toll booths can be set up. That — and not innovation and competition — is how big corporations make big money.

I finally summed up my picture of corporations a few weeks ago in Corporations are Sociopaths. I don’t intend that to be a rhetorical insult; I propose it as a diagnosis. Like sociopaths, corporations can be useful and entertaining if you meet them in circumstances where they can’t benefit by harming you. But if you look at the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy, they correspond to traits of corporate governance.

In a way, propaganda is always a theme of the Sift. Nearly every week I’m pointing out some widely publicized or widely believed “facts” that have no basis in reality: that the stimulus bill gave favorable treatment to districts represented by Democrats, for example, or that Obama quadrupled the deficit Bush left him. Occasionally I do a whole set of Disinformation Watch notes to list false things currently passing for truth.

But (having noticed how often new fake facts appear to replace the ones we manage to knock down) this year I tried to delve deeper into the mechanisms of the propaganda that surrounds us. Who believes it? Why? Who promotes it? How? And what are the false narratives that support and are supported by all these fake facts?

Part of the mechanism of propaganda is the cooperation of the media, or at least its submission. That was the theme of Tortured Coverage: A Harvard study documented how major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post stopped calling waterboarding torture when the Bush administration told them not to. The term became “contentious” rather than “objective” because the administration chose to contend against it.

Another level of mechanism is the network of right-wing think tanks and institutes that have been established by corporate and billionaire money. It is an entire system of apparent “experts” whose connections to their sponsors are rarely traced by the mainstream media, but whose opinions always fall in line with the interests of their sponsors. (This was the mechanism of Propaganda Lesson, in which the bogus scandal about stimulus funding was the result of “research” done by a “scholar” at the Manhattan Institute, funded predominantly by the billionaire Koch brothers.)

Similarly, large-scale corporate and billionaire money funded the Tea Party movement, but funded it through mechanisms that allowed the mainstream media to describe the movement as “grass roots”. In this way, disgruntled McCain voters who had never liked Obama were put forward as “independents” who had been “shocked” into opposition by the “radical” Obama administration. (What Money Buys)

The ultimate conservative infrastructure is the right-wing media, epitomized by Fox News, but embracing talk radio, newspapers like the Washington Times, and other outlets. This media empire has reached the point where Senate candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada could ignore the mainstream media entirely, refusing to answer any questions not posed by sympathetic voices. Fortunately, no major candidate who adopted such a strategy won a competitive race this year. But if Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012, we may see this strategy tested on a national scale. (The Private Campaign)

At the narrative level, I looked at the image of “government spending” which is always “out of control” and “wasteful”. This narrative is so well established by now that no facts are needed to support it. And so in the fall campaign right-wing candidates were able to run on a “cut spending” message without identifying any actual spending cuts other than the most trivial. They were pledged to cut “waste”, which the narrative tells us is everywhere. In an article titled simply Spending, I outlined how the supposedly “untouchable” parts of the budget were already enough to have caused a deficit in 2010.

In The Thing Behind the Thing I outlined three sets of largely unconscious assumptions underlying Tea Party rhetoric: that the authority of the Law comes in some way from God or Nature rather than from a social contract; that the punishment of transgressions is a good thing in and of itself, not requiring any justification in terms of its results; and that “the People” (as in “the People need to take this country back”) are straight white Christians.

Propaganda Lessons from the Religious Right was an attempt to get at some of the deep assumptions that make outlandish conspiracy theories believable to those on the religious Right: Belief in a Devil makes it unnecessary to provide a motive for the conspiracy, because it can literally be “demonized”. (How else to explain those terrorists who “hate progress and freedom and choice and culture and music and laughter”?) Also, a template like “reverse discrimination” can be promoted over decades, so that when an individual issue is identified as reverse discrimination, the pieces of the template snap into place without needing evidence to establish them. The lesson is that good framing doesn’t just happen because you coin a clever slogan. Templates of thought can take decades to build up.

Why Democrats Are Always on Defense makes a similar point in a different way. Here the phenomenon to be explained is: Democrats think they must “move to the Right” when they lose or fear losing, while Republicans never have to move to the Left, no matter how badly they get beaten. The piece is a re-introduction of George Lakoff’s notion of frames, and explains how a poll-driven approach to an issue can change the poll it is based on. (When liberals take what polls say is a “centrist” position, they can shift the public debate to the Right, moving the center away from the position they just took.)

Finally, last week I took a look at one of the deep conservative frames: class warfare. The phrase evokes an entire mythology on the Right, which liberals who argue against it are largely unaware of.

I went wild reviewing books this year: 16 of them in all. Some have already been mentioned in the previous sections: Aftershock by Robert Reich, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghagan, Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, ECONned by Yves Smith, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Richistan by Robert Frank, The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson, and Merchants of Doubt by David Michaels.

Other Sifted books of 2010 were:

Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich. Surprisingly, this is the only military or foreign-policy book that I reviewed in 2010. Bacevich is a retired colonel who has begun to doubt the necessity or wisdom of America policing the world. This book retells American military history since World War II in an attempt to explain how perpetual war became acceptable to the public, in spite of the fact that our wars seldom proceed as expected or achieve what was desired.

The Living Constitution by David Strauss. Strauss explains the common-law method of interpreting the Constitution, and presents it as a practical alternative to the better-known-but-impractical theory of originalism. At least we don’t have to try to imagine what the Founders would have thought about the Internet.

Democracy, Inc. by Sheldon Wolin. Wolin outlines what he calls “managed democracy”, in which the people don’t actually rule, but only ratify the decisions of their leaders.

The Long Descent by John Michael Greer. Greer discusses the end of civilization as we know it and stays calm about it. How exactly does the trip to Hell in a handbasket go? And what should you do when you get there?

Methland by Nick Reding. Reding interprets the crystal meth problem as a symptom of larger problems: the collapse of the social contract and the inability of government to do sensible things that would interfere with corporate profits. The result is a threat to the survival of small towns in America.

Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen. A NASA climate historian explains why global warming is even more serious than most people think.

The Sift article that made the biggest splash this year was My Reservations about the Market Economy. I used Open Table, a web site for making restaurant reservations, as an example of how the market economy rewards gatekeepers, not producers.

A regular Sift reader posted a link on Reddit, which for some reason took off. (Go thou and do likewise.) The Sift got 5000 hits that week (rather than a more normal 200-400).

My biggest mistake in 2010 was in refusing to believe for most of the year that the generic-ballot polls showing a Republican landslide in the House would predict the election. In the Senate, things turned out more-or-less as I expected: Republicans gained, but didn’t win the Senate, because the crazy candidates they nominated (Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell) couldn’t live up to the public’s image of a “generic Republican”.

Many House battles, on the other hand, never got beyond the generic race, and Democrats were unable to make hay out of the wild positions the Republicans were taking or had taken. But the main thing my crystal ball failed to pick up was that the Democrats would completely refuse to defend their actions. I expected a real debate about the health-care law, and pre-election votes that would tie the Republicans to unpopular pro-wealth positions. None of that happened.

In current news: According to Pro Publica, the Obama administration is drawing up an executive order that will formalize a process of indefinite detention for suspected terrorists.

I was against this when W wanted to do it, and I’m against it now. No matter how conscientious an executive-branch process you set up, everybody with any power in it takes orders from the President. You can’t deprive somebody of liberty forever one the say-so of one guy.

A lot of the claims people make about “the Constitution” are partisan. (Just about all the Tea Party folks, for example, started worrying about the Constitution on Inauguration Day, some time around noon.) But this is a real constitutional issue, and a good test of whether somebody really cares about the Constitution. You can’t seriously worry about whether the Constitution allows Congress to make you eat your vegetables and not worry about whether it allows the President to lock you up and throw away the key.

It was one of those innocuous things that come across my FaceBook news feed all the time. One of my friends updated her status to say she’s in a relationship. One of my friends in the Navy.

Oh.

And speaking of the DADT repeal, Barney Frank totally eats the lunch of a reporter from the right-wing CNS network when he springs a gotcha question about gay and straight soldiers showering together.

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.

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Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (1898)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Deal. We now know what President Obama got by agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts. The agreement is defensible economically, but you have to wonder what’s going to happen politically a year from now. Also, how to answer the “it’s my money, not the government’s” line.
• Too Good, Too Easy, But … For years, educators have been working to close gender and racial performance gaps. A new technique seems to do just that … but it has nothing to do with the subject matter of the course. Why I’m not totally skeptical.
• Elizabeth Edwards. I can’t say I knew her, but I did meet her once. Her death gives me flashbacks to my wife’s cancer battle.
• Short Notes. Hottest year ever. Death panels in Arizona. Republicans rediscover earmarks. Suspicious behavior at WalMart. The difference between freedom and options. Living without Monsanto. The lack of Republican scientists. A smoking gun at Fox News. And more.

Last week I expressed my bewilderment that the administration was planning to give in to the Republican demand to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income rather than just the first $250,000 of income. Well, the full deal was announced this week, and much argument has ensued. Let’s see if we can sort this out.

As usual, the best spokesman for White House economic policy is Austin Goolsbee at the White House White Board. His basic message is that President Obama wanted another economic stimulus and the Republicans wanted another handout to the rich (whose stimulative effect is questionable). In the compromise, Obama got $238 billion of stimulus, while giving up $114 billion of handouts to the rich. (The rest of the $900 billion deal is the middle-class tax cuts that both sides claimed to support. Ezra Klein has a pie chart.)

The $114 billion for the rich means that they pay $91 billion less in income tax and $23 billion less in estate tax than if the Bush cuts had been allowed to expire.

The $238 billion of stimulus includes $104 billion of extended unemployment benefits, grants for renewable energy projects, and various tax credits targeted at low-and-middle-income people. This is good both in terms of compassion and economic stimulus (because poor people spend their tax credits while the rich may not).

Another $22 billion is for letting businesses write off their investments faster. This is good stimulus, because it might have a multiplier effect: The $22 billion in tax cuts might motivate a much larger amount of business investment. But I question listing it as “our” part of the deal rather than “theirs”. (Paul Krugman laments: “how, exactly, did we get to the point where Democrats must plead with Republicans to accept lower corporate taxes?”) This money will also go to the rich (though it will be in exchange for them stimulating the economy, rather than just a tribute to their wealth), so their take is really $136 billion. (114 + 22 = 136)

The remaining $112 billion on the stimulus side goes to the “payroll tax holiday”, which is the most controversial part of the package. This lowers the tax that wage-earners pay into the Social Security fund from 6.2% to 4.2% for the next year. It replaces that contribution with money from the general fund, so that the solvency of Social Security isn’t affected.

Whether this is a good idea or not depends on whether you look at it economically or politically. Economically, it is a very effective form of stimulus: Working people will see more money in their paychecks, which many of them will spend.

Politically, the question is what this is going to lead to. The plutocrat tax cut is for two years, the payroll holiday for one. So what happens a year from now? Greg Anrig of the Century Foundation worries:

Particularly if the economy remains weak, as seems likely, few politicians of either party will want to oppose an extension of the payroll tax holiday for another year. Because payroll taxes are taken straight out of paychecks, both a reduction in them and then a return to current levels would be highly noticeable to most workers.

Under that scenario, what would happen if the Republican candidate won the presidency? Given the conservative movement’s long-standing hostility toward Social Security, the likely next step would be to make the payroll tax cut permanent, while no longer replenishing the Social Security trust fund to make up for the lost revenue. That basic strategy of slashing the payroll taxes that support the program has been a central plank of right-wing think tanks for decades, but until this point it has never succeeded.

So the tax holiday could undermine the political case to preserve Social Security — especially if it gets extended beyond one year, as it probably will. The reason we all feel so strongly that we deserve our Social Security benefits is that we paid for them already. If instead the Social Security trust fund is being filled out of the general coffers, then Social Security becomes more of a welfare program for old people, and the case against cutting benefits loses a lot of its force.

Michelle Bachman has a knack for spelling out the ridiculous stuff that other Republicans merely imply:

I don’t think letting people keep their own money should be considered a deficit.

In other words, the laws of addition and subtraction should bend to conservative ideology. The deficit is expenses minus revenue, but cutting revenue shouldn’t increase it.

The standard Republican line about tax cuts ignores the deficit completely, but says that tax cuts don’t have to be balanced with specified spending cuts because it’s “letting people keep their own money”.

The proper response to the “it’s my money, not the government’s money” line is “it’s your government”. This isn’t the English king imposing taxation-without-representation on the 13 colonies. The government is Us — We the People. That’s what the Constitution is all about: establishing a structure by which we can make these kinds of collective decisions. Saying “it’s my money, not the government’s” is saying that the Constitution failed.

We the People spend our money in two ways: as individuals and collectively through public programs supported by taxes. Both are legitimate, but we can’t spend the same money twice. If our democratically elected government-of-the-People has already spent the money, then it isn’t “our money” any more to spend as individuals.

The most interesting response to the tax deal came from the market for U.S. government bonds, which plunged. The yield on 10-year bonds rose to 3.32% at Friday’s close, up from 3.02% a week earlier.

I don’t think markets are omniscient, but I do think they are honest. People might bluster in their public statements, but if an idea makes them move their money, they must really believe it.

If you don’t speak bond-market language, let me interpret: The U.S. government wants you to give them dollars today, with the idea that they’ll give those dollars back in ten years. How much extra you want in order to agree to that deal depends on two things: what you think dollars will be worth in ten years, and whether you think the government will be solvent in ten years.

If the interest rate goes up, that means investors are worried about those two factors. If it goes up quickly (and an increase of 1/3 of a percent in a week is quick in a market that is ordinarily very stable), that means that investors were not only worried, they were surprised. (If they’d been expecting to be this worried now, they’d have been only slightly less worried last week.)

So the bond market believes this deal is bad for the future value of the dollar and the future solvency of the federal government. And it didn’t expect a deal quite this bad.

Kevin Drum isn’t worried about what the payroll tax holiday does to Social Security.

This sounds way too good and too easy to be true, but I don’t see any holes in it. Discover reports on a simple classroom exercise that seems to undo the pernicious effect of stereotyping. It was originally developed to help black high school students, and has now been tested on female physics students. In short: groups that had a persistent test-score gap saw that gap substantially diminish when they did this exercise.

It’s not some intensive coaching thing and has nothing to do with the subject matter of the course: Take 15 minutes and write about values that are important to you and why they are important. A University of Colorado physics class had students do this twice near the beginning of the term, and then proceeded normally.

The point, as I understand it, is to change the mindset of the student in that class. Having recalled and validated your core values brings your whole being into the room, and banishes the I-don’t-belong-here mindset.

It sounds like another one of those new-agey things that never actually work when I try them, but here’s what makes me give it some credence. Decades ago, as a teacher and graduate student in one of the prime gender-gap subjects (mathematics), I got to observe some of the nuts-and-bolts of the problem-solving process. Solving a hard math problem is a little like investigating a crime: First, you figure out who did it, and then you assemble a case to convince a jury.

In my experience, the mathematics gender gap was in figuring-out-who-did-it part. That kind of thinking is all speculative, and it collapses whenever the overall uncertainty overwhelms you. To succeed, you need to postulate something on intuition, and then have enough faith in your intuition to keep postulating on top of it until you have the outline of a solution.

My female students had a higher tendency to throw one speculative idea out there — maybe even a correct one — and then get stuck because they weren’t sure they were right. Often the only coaching they needed was, “OK, suppose that’s right. Then what?” Men were more likely to have the arrogance necessary to keep building their castle of speculation even though the foundations hadn’t been established yet.

So this quote in the Discover article made a lot of sense to me:

if someone can’t hammer in a tricky nail, it might not be because their arm isn’t strong enough. It might be that they constantly have to look over their shoulders while they work.

Why the writing exercise solves this problem so easily is still a little mysterious, but it doesn’t look as magical as it did at first glance.

You probably already know that Elizabeth Edwards died. In a Facebook post a few days before her death she wrote:

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious.

I met Elizabeth Edwards once, briefly, when one of my friends held a house party for her husband’s campaign. And I heard her speak several times, with and without John. She wasn’t the smile-and-wave type of political wife. She was passionately committed, knowledgeable, and she had to be careful not to outshine the candidate, who had a pretty good public persona of his own.

Back in March, 2007, when I first heard about her cancer, I recalled my wife’s experience with breast cancer and wrote a blog post advising John and Elizabeth to rethink this whole presidential-campaign thing, even though it was probably Elizabeth’s last chance to see John in the White House. That post is as much about cancer and marriage as it is about politics, and I think it holds up pretty well from the perspective of three-and-a-half years.

Given how John’s career flamed out, it can be embarrassing to remember that I supported him. But when I look back at what he was saying in 2007, it holds up pretty well too. Talking about the vested interests in the health care industry and the Powers That Be in general, he said:

If you give them a seat at the table, they’ll eat all the food. You have to beat them. … You can’t be nice to these people. We’ve been nice to them. That’s the problem. And they haven’t given up anything voluntarily.

Three years later, they still haven’t.

Watching Cate Edwards eulogize her mother, I thought: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I didn’t know that poise and presence were inheritable, but apparently they are.

In November, we continued marching on towards the hottest year on record. So much for that “global warming ended ten years ago” canard.

Sarah Palin told us there would be death panels, and sure enough there are. But it’s got nothing to do with ObamaCare and everything to do with spending cuts. Governor Brewer has cut the Medicaid funding for transplants in Arizona. One guy who needed a bone marrow transplant is dead already, and Randy Shepherd is waiting for a heart transplant.

It’s important to focus in on these personal stories, because conservative rhetoric wants you to think of “government” as some black hole that has nothing to do with people. So spending cuts only hurt “government” and “bureaucrats”.

But spending cuts do hurt real people, sometimes fatally.

Here’s another personal story that is not quite so horrible. It’s just an everyday account of what working people have to do to get by these days. Your household needs two incomes to keep the house, but it only has one. You have a job, and your spouse has a 2-year offer far away. So: My Husband is Leaving Me.

I’m separating this from my Elizabeth Edwards piece, because I don’t want it dirtied with partisan sniping. But John Edwards is a good example of how the standards are higher on the Left.

John cheated on his dying wife, and his career is over. Newt Gingrich did exactly the same thing, and he’s on the short list 2012 presidential candidates.

Remember those promises of action to improve mine safety after 29 West Virginia miners died in April? Umm, never mind.

According to NPR, the Upper Big Branch mine that collapsed had “more serious safety violations than any in the country. But lawmakers say loopholes in the system allowed the company to file lengthy appeals that delayed penalties.” And so miners died.

But changing the law is still “premature” according to Republicans. This is where we’ve gotten: Instituting a new regulation on a corporation requires a higher standard of proof than invading a country.

For some reason I haven’t quite fathomed, there are things you just can’t say in American politics. They’re not false or disloyal or immoral, but announcing them in public is heresy of the first order.

One of those taboo statements is: “An awful lot of the federal budget is money well spent.” That’s heresy, because everybody knows that all non-military government spending is waste.

Well, it’s fascinating (in an anthropological sort of way) to watch the new Republican majority in the House start coming to terms with this fact without admiting it. It’s showing up particularly in their discussion of earmarks, which (as we all know) are worst kind of waste, bridge-to-nowhere type waste.

Now that they have the power to end all that waste, they want to, really. But then they have to wonder about the worthwhile projects in their own districts that have been funded so far by earmarks. Politico reports:

many Republicans are now worried that the bridges in their districts won’t be fixed, the tariff relief to the local chemical company isn’t coming and the water systems might not be built without a little direction from Congress.  So some Republicans are discussing exemptions to the earmark ban

WalMart stores are showing this strange video from the Homeland Security Department. “Homeland security begins with hometown security,” says Janet Napolitano. So you should report to WalMart managers anything “suspicious” you see in the store or parking lot. Because, I guess, Al Qaeda must be just dying to hit some WalMart in the middle of Montana.

Here’s the suspicious behavior I see at WalMart: Americans working for low wages and no health care. They have jobs, but they’re on food stamps and Medicaid. The company is making billions, but intimidating its workers out of forming a union.

Report that to a manager.

Apparently the bizarre “War on Christmas” idea has reached the UK, and the BBC’s Marcus Brigstocke is having none of it.

Last week I made the case that corporations are sociopaths, and observed how hard it would be to follow Martha Stout’s advice on dealing with sociopaths — namely, don’t; get them out of your life as fast as you can.

Yes magazine’s April Dávila demonstrated that when she tried to live without Monsanto. Monsanto’s genetically modified corn, soybean, sugar beet, and cotton seeds are planted by countless farmers, and the resulting foods and fibers are very hard for a consumer to trace. Just about any processed food has high-fructose corn syrup in it, and probably there’s some Monsanto corn in there somewhere. Going organic helps avoid Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (given to dairy cattle), but legally “a Monsanto seed that is grown organically is still organic.”

The whole point of a market economy is that consumers are (as Milton Friedman’s book says) “free to choose”. But more and more the market resembles a computer game: We are not actually free, we are just given options within a scripted scenario. Deciding you don’t want to deal with Monsanto or don’t want to support genetically modified crops isn’t in the script.

By the way, here’s a cool thing about Yes magazine: People vs. corporations is a category on their web site.

Also from Yes: a call for a constitutional amendment to undo the Citizens United decision that allowed corporations to spend unprecedented amounts in the recent elections.

This is another example of the difference between real freedom and options-within-the-script. Polls show a significant plurality of people support such a constitutional amendment. Will that get it onto the public agenda? In the normal course of things, no. That option is not in the script. Getting an issue like this on the public agenda, so that candidates have to take positions on it and low-information voters realize they should have an opinion on it, will take some creativity — much more stuff like the Target Ain’t People protest and video.

I doubt you’re shocked to hear that Fox News slants its coverage. But now we have the internal emails to prove it.

The week’s strangest opinion piece: Slate’s Daniel Sarewitz laments the lack of Republican scientists (OK so far), and thinks that scientists need to do something about this. The fact that Republicans have consistently chosen ideology over truth has nothing to do with it.

You don’t have to be a sports fan to be amazed by the video of the Metrodome’s inflatable roof collapsing under snow.

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.

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.

— Senator J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Sift Bookshelf: Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich. Why is it so hard to stop policing the world?
• Touch Somebody Else’s Junk. Last week produced a lot of venting about the TSA’s invasive scans and searches, but few good ideas. The worst idea of all is that we could avoid all this by profiling.
• Hope and Denial. A psychological study proves something we should have intuited: When the news sounds too grim, a lot of people just deny it.
• Short Notes. An extra helping of short notes this week. Don’t miss the video of the one-wing plane landing.

Every political discussion these days seems to center on the long-term budget deficit and what we can do to narrow it. We talk about raising the retirement age or privatizing Medicare and all sorts of other benefit-restricting changes. But one idea never seems to come up, or when it does come up it quickly gets dismissed: We could stop policing the world.

The cost of policing the world shows up in two ways: First, year-in year-out we spend more on defense than any conceivable coalition of enemies. (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates our military spending, including ongoing wars, at 46.5% of the world total.) That’s because we have to be prepared to intervene anywhere that evil might raise its head. We have to have military bases everywhere, and weapons and soldiers we could send to those bases at a moment’s notice.

Second, we are fighting more-or-less constant wars, with no end in sight. Our combat mission in Iraq is supposedly over, but we still lose a few soldiers every month, and the country still isn’t safe enough for its two million refuges to come home. If things deteriorate we might wind up sending troops back.

In Afghanistan our coalition regularly loses 50-75 soldiers a month. And no corner has been turned yet. The number of coalition deaths has gone up every year since 2003. Now we’re talking about 2014 as a date for ending the war, but even that seems optimistic.

Put together, the USA Today estimated in May that the two wars were costing $12.2 billion a month. In addition, we are regularly blowing things up in Pakistan, where we are allegedly not at war. Sometimes we also blow things up in Yemen. Some people want us to attack Iran. Near term, it’s more likely that we’ll be fighting in one of those countries than that we’ll get out of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Unlike entitlement programs, we have no way of predicting future military expenses. So we can talk rationally about when Medicare will go bankrupt, but not when our military commitments will become unsustainable.

Andrew Bachevich’s recent book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, examines how we got here and why it is so hard even to discuss backing away. It’s a history lesson that starts after World War II and goes to the present.

I found two things about this book striking: First, how consistent our military policy has been, no matter how our elections turn out. (I remember a joke from the 60s: “They told me that if I voted for Goldwater we’d soon have half a million troops in Vietnam. Well, I did, and we do.”) Administrations change, circumstances change, enemies change, but the need to police the world goes on.

Why? The answer is pretty simple: Corporations make money off of it and pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats make their careers. Seen any pacifist talk show hosts lately?

Second, permanent war is a post-911 thing. It’s easy to forget that. Every administration in my lifetime has fought somewhere, but the American people have never before accepted war as a way of life. We just had an election while two wars were ongoing, and frustration at the endlessness of them was not an issue. Hawks didn’t demand escalating to speed up victory; doves didn’t call for sudden withdrawal. It just wasn’t a big deal.

That’s new.

Bacevich calls for returning to a pre-1941 view of America’s role in the world. We should be an example of freedom and democracy, not the guarantor of it. He admiringly quotes John Quincy Adams from 1821:

[The United States] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

This week a great deal of ink was spilled in response to the new TSA full-body scanners and the opt-out pat-down that would be sexual assault if you hadn’t consented in order to get where you’re going. A lot of it was simple venting — like the guy who protested “Don’t touch my junk!” — and provided little insight to the issues involved. Let me see if I can assemble the worthwhile ideas.

First, this is all a response to the underwear bomber who failed to do anything more than burn his own genitalia last Christmas. But by smuggling PETN explosive onto a plane in his underwear, he did point out a hole in airline security: PETN is plastic rather than metallic, so the metal-detectors didn’t pick it up.

Ridiculous as that incident was, it pointed out a plausible avenue of attack if more competent suicide bombers could be found. (The problem with the whole suicide-bombing strategy is personnel. You’re always relying on somebody who’s never done this before.) To avert future PETN attacks, TSA decided it needed either a scanner that could find hidden bags of fluid, or it needed to check people for strange bulges in their underwear (as in the cucumber scene from This is Spinal Tap).

So the scans make sense from some narrow airline-security perspective: Somebody told TSA to defend against this threat, and the intrusive scans and searches are the most obvious way to fulfill that mission. It’s easy to imagine the outcry if a PETN explosion brought down a plane a year after it had been demonstrated that such an attack was possible.

Whether the scans make sense from a broader anti-terrorism perspective is more debatable. If you see an airliner bomb just as a way to kill 300 innocent people rather than an end in itself, you recognize that there are a lot of ways to kill innocent people in an open society like the United States. (You could blow yourself up in a mall food court on Black Friday, or even in the densely packed lines of people waiting to go through airport security.) There’s no point taking extreme measures to guard one door to mayhem if you leave the others wide open.

In short, from this point of view life in an open society is inherently risky. It’s not clear why airports should be a little chunk of police state in the middle of an otherwise free country.

There’s a legitimate debate to be had between those two views. But there’s a third POV out there that is just dangerous. Charles Krauthammer writes:

The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known.

It is undoubtedly silly to search 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds. But if word got out that we had a “narrow, concrete” profile of terrorists, Al Qaeda could start a worldwide search for out-of-profile sympathizers. Somewhere there is an 80-year-old with nothing to lose, or an 8-year-old that somebody thinks is expendable.

But an even more serious problem with the “universally known” profile is that it conveniently exempts people like me and Charles Krauthammer. (I can imagine Krauthammer’s reaction if he were pulled out of a line because someone thought Jews were suspect.) It’s way too easy to give away somebody else’s rights.

This is one of the many problems caused by the open-ended nature of the War on Terror. If a serial killer who looked like me had just escaped from a nearby prison, I could live with the indignity and inconvenience of constant suspicion for a week or two until they caught him. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re talking about permanently treating certain kinds of people differently. And once we’ve established that innocent people who fit a certain description permanently have fewer rights than the rest of us, where does that stop?

Where to draw the line between security and convenience is a question best decided by an informed public — a public that has to submit to the inconveniences it requires in the name of security. If I’m not willing to submit to a full-body scan or an invasive grope, what right do I have to demand it of someone else?

I wonder why Amtrak isn’t making hay out of this. They’ve poked at the inconvenience of plane travel in the past. Why not hit it harder now?

A new study by two Berkeley psychologists is apparently about people’s attitudes towards global warming, but I think it speaks to something much deeper that liberals need to bear in mind as they craft their messages. Feinberg and Willer are checking this hypothesis:

information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable. Individuals overcome this threat by denying or discounting the existence of global warming, ultimately resulting in decreased willingness to counteract climate change.

The researchers screened participants to identify people who have what they called “just world beliefs” — the idea that the world is fundamentally fair and predictable. Then they split the group in two and exposed each half to a different article about global warming. The two articles had the same first four paragraphs predicting the dire consequences to future (i.e. innocent) generations if we change nothing. But one group saw an article with an optimistic ending, emphasizing what we could do to avert these disasters, while the second saw a pessimistic ending, leaving little hope that change would be possible or effective.

As you might expect, the people who saw the optimistic message came away with a more optimistic attitude towards combatting global warming than the people who saw the pessimistic message. But here’s what’s interesting: The optimistic-message group had its belief in global warming itself increase after reading the article, while the pessimistic-message group grew more skeptical about global warming.

In other words, confronted with a message that undermined their belief in the world’s underlying justice (that innocent future generations will suffer and there’s nothing to be done about it), participants discounted the whole issue. It’s just not happening.

The liberal message in general says that the economic system and global power structure is unjust and needs to change. But if we stop there, or worse, if we imply that the Powers That Be are too powerful to challenge, a lot of people will simply decide to believe another set of facts. They won’t believe that Americans are dying for lack of health insurance, or that people desperately looking for jobs aren’t finding them, or that innocent people got sucked into Guantanamo and now can’t get out.

That’s why Obama had to run on themes of hope and “Yes we can.” Because if nothing can be done, then why disturb yourself by learning about the world’s injustices?

An amazing one-minute video of a stunt pilot whose maneuver turned into a bigger stunt than he planned.

Cognitive dissonance watch: If you’re worried that you’re going to leave your grandchildren a trashed planet, you’re an alarmist. If you’re worried that you’re going to leave them a pile of federal debt, you’re a serious person. Grist’s David Roberts explains the actual difference:

deficit concern is being driven by the wealthy, to secure their privileges. Climate change will affect everyone, but its worst effects will fall on the marginalized, poor, and dispossessed, and as a result, it’s being ignored and minimalized.

Like so many pieces of right-wing mythology, the account Limbaugh, Beck, et al give of Thanksgiving is not true.

For years one common complaint about the Left was that we made everything political. You couldn’t tell a joke or use common English without somebody dragging politics into it. Well, Dancing With the Stars was political this year, and we had nothing to do with it.

An Italian lingerie company has started its own version of Cash for Clunkers.

Now that the Republicans have successfully blocked a cap-and-trade law, the battle shifts to the EPA and the extent to which it can act without further authorization from Congress. Which means: You can expect an across-the-board attack on the EPA as an evil corrupt Marxist agency.

Grist examines one opening salvo, and finds that the Wall Street Journal is lying through its teeth.

I seem to be on a Grist binge. Well, this is Grist’s response to the James Fallows piece on clean coal that I linked to a couple weeks ago. The Grist-gist is that the content of Fallows’ article is as well-thought-out as Fallows’ stuff usually is. But the existence of Fallows’ article gives aid and comfort to the wrong people:

If “clean coal” development isn’t happening in the U.S., it’s not because DFHs are against it, it’s because nothing is happening in the U.S. A piece focused on that corrupt, criminal inaction might rattle a few cages. A piece reassuring Big Coal and its many backers that they’ll always be in the driver’s seat won’t.

[DFH is a standard pejorative or ironic acronym for left-wing environmentalists.]

A 1999 study showed that medical mistakes in the US caused about 100K deaths and a million injuries a year. A new study of hospitals in North Carolina shows that nothing has changed:

About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable. Most of the problems were temporary and treatable, but some were serious, and a few — 2.4 percent — caused or contributed to a patient’s death, the study found.

The findings were a disappointment but not a surprise, Dr. Landrigan said. Many of the problems were caused by the hospitals’ failure to use measures that had been proved to avert mistakes and to prevent infections from devices like urinary catheters, ventilators and lines inserted into veins and arteries.

This is part of our overall “amenable mortality” problem — the number of Americans who die because we take bad care of each other. The French do much better. (Actually just about everybody does much better, but the French are particularly good.) We could imitate them, but that would be socialism and we are a freedom-loving capitalist country. “Give me liberty or give me death” — you didn’t realize how literal that was, did you?

The New Yorker’s George Packer reads President Bush’s memoir so that I don’t have to. “Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages,” he reports, “are not self-serving.”

For Bush, making decisions is an identity question: Who am I? The answer turns Presidential decisions into foregone conclusions: I am someone who believes in the dignity of life, I am the protector of the American people, I am a loyal boss, I am a good man who cares about other people, I am the calcium in the backbone. This sense of conviction made Bush a better candidate than the two Democrats he was fortunate to have as opponents in his Presidential campaigns. But real decisions, which demand the weighing of compelling contrary arguments and often present a choice between bad options, were psychologically intolerable to the Decider. They confused the identity question.

This isn’t just Bush, it’s a whole segment of the electorate. An awful lot of the populist criticism of Obama is phrased in terms of what he is rather than anything he has done or is trying to do. (Here’s a clip of Rachel Maddow talking to Joe Miller supporters on the street in Alaska. The conversation turns to Attorney General Eric Holder, who they know is “anti-gun”. But they have no idea what anti-gun thing he is supposed to have done.) Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a foreigner, a Muslim. He’s anti-American. What he does is almost an afterthought compared to what they think he is.

You don’t usually think of concrete as a high-tech material, but that could change. Cracks in concrete actually start at the molecular level. (The article says subatomic, but I doubt that.) Adding carbon nanotubes to the usual mixture fills invisible holes to make highways that could last 100 years instead of 20.

Another concrete innovation is a bacteria that colonizes tiny cracks and produces a glue that hardens. Presto! Self-healing buildings.

The world uses so much concrete that any improvement in it is a big deal. One source in the second article says that concrete production accounts for 5% of global carbon emissions.

Seneca Doane has the right phrases for talking about the Bush tax cuts: Democrats want to extend the cuts for the first $250,000 of a family’s income. Republicans want extra tax cuts for people who make more than that.

Extra — that’s the key word.

A jury of his peers found Tom DeLay guilty of money laundering. Predictably, DeLay used the familiar conservative line about “criminalization of politics” to describe the verdict.

“Criminalization of politics” goes back to the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, and it means that liberals prosecute conservatives for doing things that are “just politics”. In truth, though, no American has ever been convicted of being a conservative. Every person convicted in such cases — like Scooter Libby in 2007 — is convicted of violating an actual law. The indictment cites a law, the prosecution assembles evidence that the law was broken, and the jury unanimously declares itself convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

What “criminalization of politics” ought to mean, what it could more accurately refer to, is that politicians often pursue politics through criminal means like money laundering or obstructing justice. Occasionally they get caught, as DeLay was.

Just in time for Christmas shoppers, the NYT announces its 100 notable books of 2010.

In addition to those, let me plug a little-noted novel of 2008: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. I’ve had a hard time figuring out who to recommend it to, because (as one reviewer says) it “cuts across genre and expectation lines in the best possible way.” Ostensibly a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, it combines some authentically good SF ideas about matter and identity with social insight, an outrageous sense of humor, and a very non-SF writing style. (Think Neal Stephenson).

The pioneers of science fiction (Wells, Verne, Asimov, Heinlein, et al) had fascinating ideas, but generally pedestrian writing styles. Harkaway also has fascinating ideas, but (like Stephenson) he clearly relishes words and all the wonderful ways they can be put together into sentences and paragraphs and scenes.

Times are hard — unless you’re a corporation. Corporate profits set a record last quarter. I’m sure they’ll be using that money to create jobs any day now. (That was sarcasm.) Think how many jobs they’d create if Obama weren’t so anti-business, or if the corporate income tax were lower.

One of the most publicized of the global-warming deniers is Lord Christopher Monckton, who isn’t any kind of scientist, but is a viscount — which must mean something, I guess. In this audio-and-slide presentation, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota goes through Monckton’s presentation slide-by-slide and debunks his claims.

The typical sequence is: Monckton makes a claim and mentions some scientific paper as evidence. Abraham explains that Monckton is either misinterpreting or just making something up. Abraham writes to the authors of the Monckton-quoted paper, who agree with Abraham. It happens over and over and over.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth … to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of the currently produced wealth. … In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. — Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve 1934-1948

In this week’s Sift:

• The Deficit Shell Game. For years we’ve been borrowing money to give tax cuts to the rich. Now the chairs of the  Deficit Reduction Panel are delivering the bill to the middle class.
• The Sift Bookshelf: Aftershock by Robert Reich. A skewed distribution of wealth isn’t just unfair, it’s bad for the economy.
• Political Notes. I don’t have a Big Theory about the meaning of the midterm elections. But I do know a few lesser things.
• Short Notes. Maddow interviews Stewart. Don’t get leukemia in Texas. Scientists discover new reptiles in restaurants. The Chinese are serious about clean coal. Why Glenn Beck is not (quite) an anti-Semite. What comic books can tell us about religion. And more.

Suppose a major political party went to voters with this message: “We’re going shrink every program that the middle class and the poor depend on: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and so on. And with the money saved from those cuts, we’ll give big tax cuts to the rich.”

It would never fly. Rich people would support it, of course, and the party might get as much as 30-40% of the vote if they successfully demonized their opponents. But the bald message that the rich should have more and everyone else less has never been popular.

But here’s a funny thing: If you split the proposal by putting the word deficit in the middle, and if you’re careful not to discuss the two halves of your program in the same conversation, people go for it.

In Step 1, you promote tax cuts that throw a few pennies to everyone, but are focused on the rich. At this point in the process you argue that taxes are bad, because the people who earn money should get to keep it. You paint the Government as a huge black hole that eats up money without anything ever coming out. If pressed, you pledge to cut “spending” — that amorphous mass of “waste” that could go away without hurting anybody.

Then, after you get your tax cuts passed, you come back a few months later with Step 2: “Oh my God! There’s a deficit!” Because of course no one could have predicted that cutting taxes would lead to less revenue and more borrowing.

Suddenly the deficit — which you carefully kept out of the conversation when you were talking about tax cuts — is the Worst Problem Ever. And now that we’re distributing pain instead of bushels of money, everybody is in this together. Suddenly there is no “waste” to cut effortlessly. We all have to “tighten our belts”. The government has “made promises it can’t keep” (at least not at this tax level), so programs will have to be cut across the board — especially the entitlements that go mostly to the middle class.

The latest version of this shell game — the proposal from the “bipartisan” chairs of the Deficit Reduction Panel — is the most blatant I’ve ever seen. If you look at their slide show, you’ll find proposals to cut everything under the Sun — including rich people’s taxes. The slides say that “It is cruelly wrong to make promises we can’t keep” and “A sensible, real plan requires shared sacrifice – and Washington should lead the way and tighten its belt.”

Washington here is a euphemism for people who were counting on government programs — old people, sick people, veterans, the unemployed, and so on. They — and not the rich — need to tighten their belts. While the middle class has to figure out how to retire later, co-pay more of their Medicare expenses, and do without a bunch of other benefits, the tax rate paid by the richest Americans falls from 35% (currently) or 39.6% (if the Bush tax cuts aren’t extended) to 23%. And the corporate tax rate falls from 35% to 26%. Paul Krugman sums up:

this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

Amusingly, on the same day I started writing this article, La Feminista made the same point, even using the same term “shell game” to describe it.

A more intellectual critique of the government-has-to-tighten-its-belt approach is Daniel Greenwood’s Prosperity Comes From Justice, Not Austerity in Dissent.

The books I’ve reviewed lately all share a theme: the distribution of wealth. Winner-Take-All Politics described just how skewed the distribution has gotten, and how government policies have helped the ultra-rich pull away from everyone else. Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be that way by using the example of Europe: A 21st-century economy can provide a decent life for everyone. Health care can be a right. Workers can have a say in how their workplaces are organized. Consumption can focus more on public goods like parks and less on private goods like estates. It works.

Now Robert Reich has come out with Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. Reich is coming at the same message from the opposite direction: The winner-take-all economy doesn’t work, even on its own terms. He makes this point by comparing three eras in American history:

• 1975-to-now, when wealth has been concentrating;
• a similar period in the 1920s, leading up to the Great Depression;
• what he calls the Great Prosperity, the 1948-1975 period when wealth was spreading out

The singular virtue of the Great Prosperity was that supply and demand matched, and each pushed the other higher. In a healthy industrial economy, mass production and mass consumption go together. The people who make things earn enough money to buy the things they make. Carpenters can afford houses. Auto workers can afford new cars.

But when the distribution of income gets too skewed towards the rich, you get the bubble economy of the 20s and the last two decades. The financial economy separates from the real economy and goes through a series of speculative booms and busts.

The best account of the boom-bust cycles of the 20s is Fred Lewis Allen’s classic Only Yesterday, which looks back on the 20s from the sadder-but-wiser perspective of the Depression.

After the Florida hurricane, real-estate speculation lost most of its interest for the ordinary man and woman. Few of them were much concerned, except as householders or as spectators, with the building of suburban developments or of forty-story experiments in modernist architecture. Yet the national speculative fever which had turned their eyes and their cash to the Florida Gold Coast in 1925 was not chilled; it was merely checked. Florida house-lots were a bad bet? Very well, then, said a public still enthralled by the radiant possibilities of Coolidge Prosperity: what else was there to bet on?

That’s not just a coincidence; Bubbles are a predictable feature of an economy skewed towards the rich. Reich does an excellent job of explaining why.

Stop me if you’ve heard this. I’ve used this example before to explain the illusion of saving money, and how that makes the financial economy different from the real economy. If it’s obvious to you, skip to the next section.

Before money came into the picture, “saving” meant putting aside real goods. You spent the harvest season stockpiling and canning and preserving so that you could eat through the winter.

Compare that to what might happen today: All summer a college student makes pizzas and saves money. All winter he spends his saved-up money buying pizzas. On the surface this pattern resembles the canning-and-preserving practice, but all those summer pizzas got eaten or thrown away during the summer. No pizzas were put aside, only money.

That’s typical. When you save money, your “savings” is an illusion of the financial economy; the real economy isn’t saving anything. What makes this trick work is the banking system: It circulates your saved money by loaning it to people who will spend it, either to consume something they hope to pay for later, or to invest in something they hope will be productive someday.

Excess saving leads to depression. But everything falls apart if everyone tries to save money at the same time. Because then the only way to work things out is to stop production. (No matter how many people want to make pizzas, if no one is willing to buy them, even on credit, the pizza shop closes.) This can turn into a vicious cycle: Falling production means falling profits and people getting laid off. That scares the people who still have jobs, who save more; and it intimidates the people who might invest in new production, because they don’t see who they’re going to sell their new products to.

Concentrated wealth and bubbles. Now think about what happens when too much of an economy’s income goes to the ultra-rich. The kind of money the ultra-rich make isn’t consumable. (In 2009, the top seven hedge fund managers each made over $1 billion. You just can’t spend that kind of money.) So it gets saved.

If production isn’t going to drop, that saving has to get borrowed and spent by someone else. But who? There’s a limit to how much debt the middle class can carry, so ultimately the savings of the ultra-rich has to be borrowed by other ultra-rich people. We’ve already seen that they can’t consume their income, so they will have to invest it. But in what? If they invest it in increasing production — new factories, new shops, new services — that just kicks the can down the road. Who do they imagine is going to buy their increased production when it comes on line?

Consequently, the money has to go into bubbles: Speculators borrow to bid up the prices of non-productive assets. That’s not some strange accident; it’s what has to happen when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack.

So in the 20s you had a series of land bubbles — Florida, the suburbs — followed by the stock market bubble that popped in 1929. (Stock market bubbles look like productive investments, but they’re really not. Only money invested in new stock goes into the real economy in the form of new factories, shops, and services. Otherwise you’re just bidding up the price of existing assets and not increasing production.) Or, more recently, you get bubbles in internet stocks or houses or gold or oil.

The basic bargain. World War II was the biggest unintentional redistribution of wealth in American history. That’s what ended the Depression. By taxing and borrowing, the government collected massive amounts of money from the rich and paid it out to soldiers and factory workers and farmers and miners.

After the war, veterans benefits together with the legal and social mechanisms established during the New Deal kept the money from flowing back to the rich: not just high taxes on high incomes (tax rates topped out over 90% and stayed that way until the 60s), but educational benefits, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and laws that made it easy to form unions.

The result was what Reich calls the Basic Bargain: If you participate in mass production, you should make enough money to participate in mass consumption. That bargain was the basis for the most widely-shared prosperity in American history.

Since Ronald Reagan we’ve been undoing that bargain, with the result that wages have stagnated even while productivity grows. The pie is bigger, but workers get an ever-smaller slice. At first, middle class households kept spending by sending more women into the workforce. Then they kept spending by borrowing against the bubble-inflated value of their homes. In 2008 their credit ran out and the game stopped: Middle class demand can’t drive the growth of the economy any more.

Restoring the basic bargain. Reich closes with a number of proposals, some of which (like a carbon tax) are more generically liberal than related to the case he has been making.  But his largest proposals are a reverse income tax (sharply higher rates for the rich combined with wage subsidies for the working poor), extending Medicare to everybody, and increasing spending on public goods like parks, libraries, and public transportation.

Unions are a key part of the case Reich is making, but he says little about changing the labor laws. I think labor-law reform is an important part of solving the income-concentration problem.

Think about what a “good job” is. In the collective discussion about the working class, we’ve tended to use the terms good job and manufacturing job interchangeably, as if there were something magical about factories that can’t be duplicated in service industries.

But the magic of the factory jobs of the 50s, 60s, and 70s was this: They were in unionized industries where wage increases could be absorbed by the owner or passed on to the customer. Many service jobs could fit this description, if its workers were organized.

For example, consider baristas at Starbucks. Payscale.com estimates that they average $8.63 an hour. (A Starbucks store manager gets only $13.) But the price of a cinnamon dolce latte has nothing to do with the cost of making it, and there’s no reason that an organized workforce couldn’t force a better deal out of the company. (Some workers are trying.) A cashier at Whole Foods — another place where prices have little to do with cost — starts around $8 an hour and averages about $10.

No law of economics says that retail and other service jobs can’t be good jobs. Workers just need to organize across entire industries, so that non-union stores can’t gain an advantage over union stores. (That’s hard, but government help would make it easier, if government got back to representing people instead of money.) Prices at Wal-Mart would go up, but we might have a stable middle class again, and a growing economy.

For the last two weeks the airwaves have been full of speculation about what the mid-term elections meant and what will happen now that the Republicans control the House. I don’t have a Big Theory that explains it all and tells us what to do next, but I do know a few things:

The voters rejected a straw man. I’m reminded of 2002 and 2004, when voters were still blaming Saddam for 9-11. Voters this year believed all kinds of false things: that Obama had raised taxes when he had in fact cut them; that health care reform raises the deficit when it actually lowers it; that government is growing like a tumor, when both federal spending and the number of government employees dropped in fiscal 2010. And let’s not even get into the numbers of voters who believe that Obama is Marxist Kenyan Muslim imposter.

It’s hard to know what to do with that. People who argue that Obama should “move to the center” seem to imagine that more conservative policies won’t or can’t be painted as the beginning of the Communist revolution. But you would have thought that about using Mitt Romney’s health-care ideas, too. Whatever you do, people can lie about it if they want to.

It’s not 1995. The Gingrich Revolt of 1994 foundered when the Republican Congress shut down the government in 1995. People don’t like the idea that their Social Security checks will be late, and they mostly blamed the Republicans.

But Fox News didn’t launch until 1996. Today a powerful conservative media machine will justify whatever the Republicans do. If they shut down the government (in February, when Congress will need to raise the ceiling on the national debt), no one knows who the public will blame.

If there is a government shut-down, watch the stock market. The Republicans will not bat an eye if grandmothers are begging on the streets, but if the stock market plunges they’ll have to do something.

Or maybe it is 1995. I expect a series of pointless investigations as the Republicans search for some excuse to impeach Obama. If they follow the Clinton-era pattern, they’ll raise a lot of Fantasy-gate issues hoping to stop Obama’s re-election, then move towards impeachment if that doesn’t work.

The Republicans ran on nothing, and have no agenda now. The closest thing they had to a policy proposal was “cut spending”. They never specified what spending, and there aren’t several thousand bridges-to-nowhere they can cancel. Any major spending cut means changing policies that the American people support, like raising the retirement age.

You can’t compromise with “there’s no problem”. Democrats want to do something about people without health insurance and Republicans don’t. Democrats want to do something about global warming and Republicans don’t. Where can they compromise?

Thursday night my two favorite TV hosts were on the same screen: Rachel Maddow interviewed Jon Stewart.

Stephen Colbert interviews the head of the last American manufacturer of marbles, and finds out that Obamacare is actually good for small business.

If you’re a biologist hoping to catalog a previously unknown species of lizard, where should you look? Try a menu.

American Prospect’s Gabriel Arana explains why the bullying gay teens face is different:

It’s not just the schoolyard jerk who picks on you. It’s the pastor who rails against the “gay agenda” on Sunday, the parent who stands up at a city council meeting and says he moved to your city because it’s “the kind of place that would never accept the GLBT community with open arms,” and politicians like New York’s would-be governor Carl Paladino, who on the campaign trail said things like “there is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” Even once you get past high school, you still can’t get married or serve in the military, and in most states, your employer can fire you just for being gay. This is the kind of “bullying” gay kids face, and it’s the kind no one’s standing up to.

I had two preconceptions when I started reading this article: James Fallows is a serious guy, and clean coal is not a serious idea. Something had to give.

The gist: The Chinese have done the math, and no credible quantity of alternative energy will allow their billion-plus people to join the 21st century. Oil is eventually going to run out, so either they’re going to figure out how to burn coal cleanly, or they’re going to wreck the planet. That vision gives their research an urgency that American research lacks.

Glenn Beck isn’t an anti-Semite. He just uses anti-Semitic stereotypes to demonize Jews he doesn’t like. See the difference?

The Daily Show explains why Missouri’s new ban on “puppy mills” (huge warehouses raising dogs for sale) is a step on the road to Communism. (Includes a guest appearance by the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan.)

The next time someone tells you that our health-care system is the best in the world, have them read “Too bad we can’t afford to treat your leukemia” by an anonymous Texas doctor.

If a generation of kids expected something different from superheroes twenty years ago, maybe they’ll expect something different from religion now that they’re adults. At least that’s what I claim in the current issue of UU World.

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