The Weekly Sift

The press-politics system that produces this kind of news is so inward-looking that it threatens to sever the government from the people.

— Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails

In this week’s Sift:

• Why WikiLeaks Isn’t Ending the War. A theory from a three-year-old book explains why the WikiLeaks story is more like the Downing Street Memo than the Pentagon Papers.
• The End of (Military) History? Andrew Bacevich claims: “The Western way of war has run its course.” How close is he to being right?
• The Oil Spill. The worst didn’t happen: The well is capped and the surface slick has mostly dissipated. Now the media pendulum may swing too far in the other direction and tell us the spill was never a big deal.
• Race, Class, and Jim Webb. Senator Webb’s article “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” is not nearly as bad as its headline.
• Corporations 3, Humans 0. The impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision isn’t just theoretical any more. Corporate power may be reaching a tipping point.
• Short Notes The NH primary would be a granite stumbling block for a Palin candidacy. Reagan’s budget director won’t drink the tax-cut kool-aid. Glenn Beck’s golden fleece.

This week’s mystery was something that didn’t happen: Why didn’t WikiLeaks’ release of 91,000 U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan (75,000 available to the public so far) start a firestorm that forces a major change in the conduct of that war, or maybe even a withdrawal?

The leak hit public awareness a week ago Sunday, with simultaneous articles in the New York Times, the London newspaper The Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel, the three outlets WikiLeaks had given an advance look.

Wednesday, the House passed another Afghan war appropriation as if nothing had happened. By yesterday, Frank Rich was reassuring us that the Pentagon Papers hadn’t ended the Vietnam War singlehandedly either. He offered this weak consolation:

What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that.

By this morning, the WikiLeaks story had all but vanished. The front page of the Times’ web site still had a link to a Sunday news story about Defense Secretary Gates’ claim that the leak damaged national security, but nothing about undermining support for the war. Even the liberal blog TPM wasn’t talking about it.

So what’s up with that?

By fortuitous coincidence, my Journalism Reading Project had uncovered a book that explained it: When the Press Fails by Bennet, Lawrence, and Livingston. It came out in 2007 and examined coverage of the Bush administration, from the Iraq build-up to Abu Ghraib to Hurricane Katrina. The mystery the authors were trying to solve is why

a press system dedicated to telling “both sides of the story” so often reported only one.

In the pre-war debate about Iraq we often heard only the administration’s side, even when its message was false. Abu Ghraib started out to be a this-changes-everything story, but before long the administration got control of it — changing the media’s terminology from torture to abuse and focusing on “a few bad apples” of low rank rather than the guilt at the top.

How did that happen, given that journalists themselves are likely to be liberals? The authors did a lot of quantitative analysis about the trajectory of major stories, and came up with this theory [italics theirs]:

what carries a story is not necessarily its truth or importance, but whether it is driven by dominant officials within institutional decision-making arenas such as executive policy circles, or legislative or judicial processes.

In other words, the press isn’t covering the issue, it’s covering the government’s decision-making process about the issue. If something important is revealed, the mainstream press will cover it — once, for the sake of the public record. But to keep a story on the front pages, some important player in the government — somebody powerful enough to change things — has to pick up the ball and run with it. So if Congress holds hearings, or if the courts get involved, or if there is a rift between factions in the administration, the press will cover it.

But if no official does anything, the story dies. No matter how important it is.

Right now, no powerful force is bucking the administration’s Afghanistan policy. Republicans are generally pro-war and Democrats are mostly pro-Obama. There’s an anti-war faction among Congressional Democrats (102 House Dems voted against the most recent appropriation), but they don’t control anything big enough to make news. So far, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the leaks that someone could take to court and hope to win.

So there it stands: The information is in the public record for those who really want to know, but it won’t be news again until somebody with power uses it to take action. If they ever do.

The best parallel here isn’t the Pentagon Papers, it’s the Downing Street Memo. Leaked in 2005, it proved that the Bush administration was set from Day One on an Iraq invasion and manipulated the public to support one.

It was dynamite, and it got covered — sort of. But Republicans held firm and the Democrats in Congress weren’t ready to make a big push to end the war. So the memo became part of the public record, but never part of a why-the-war-must-end narrative that competed seriously with the administration’s narrative.

When the Press Fails uses the terminology of frames, and puts it this way:

a productive frame contest exists in the news only when information independent of an administration is put on a par with information obtained from that administration, and when the media present a coherent counterperspective, not just bits and pieces of alternative perspectives.

That’s exactly what the mainstream media doesn’t believe it should be doing: starting a “frame contest” with the administration. They’ll throw the facts out there, but not pull them together into an alternative point of view and push it. That would be a role for a propagandist, not an “objective” journalist.

Unfortunately, When the Press Fails lacks perspective on a Democratic administration. The main thing to observe about coverage of Obama is that the conservative flagships — Fox News and the Washington Times — don’t play by the mainstream media rules. They have no scruple about keeping a story going on their own (see the New Black Panther Party story) or presenting a counterframe that isn’t supported by any powerful institution.

Andrew Bacevich (bio) posted a challenging article this week, The End of (Military) History? announcing that “the Western way of war has run its course.”

Like the book he takes his title from (Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History), Bacevich is overstating things, but he does have a case: Recent wars demonstrate the huge gap between what most Americans think war is supposed to accomplish and what it can actually do for us.

For most of human history, war was good business if you were good at it. You could sack other capitals and bring their treasures back home. You could ransom prisoners, sell conquered subjects into slavery, impose taxes on foreign cities, and so on. The Caesars built Rome on the profits of war.

That model started sputtering in the American Civil War and failed completely in World War I, which bankrupted even the winners. Why? Industrialization and modern communications made it possible to turn an entire population into a war machine. That was so expensive and so mutually destructive that the economics no longer made sense: If you won, you could claim a larger piece of the pie, but the pie had shrunk so much and cost so much to win that it wasn’t worth it.

Plus, modern wealth isn’t sackable. You can carry gold and slaves back home with you, but not an electrical grid or an educated work force. By some measures, South Korea has the world’s best internet system. But if Kim Jong-il conquered the South, all he could do is destroy that system. He couldn’t sack it and bring it home.

But even if they didn’t profit, winners still got to impose their will. America no longer has slavery because the North won the Civil War. Germany is democratic and France is not fascist (rather than the reverse) because the Allies won World War II.

But even that justification has been failing in most wars since Vietnam. We (and the Israelis, who are Bacevich’s second example) keep winning on the battlefield, but failing to impose our will. (Afghanistan is Exhibit A.) Military history is almost certainly not over, but we need to take a hard look at what’s going on, and lower our unreasonable expectations.

Here’s what I think war can do today:

• Prevent somebody else from gaining an advantage by force. That’s the lesson of the First Gulf War: Saddam conquered Kuwait, we threw him out, and Kuwait more-or-less went back to normal.
• Destroy things that need destroying. Israel’s air raid on Saddam’s nuclear reactor, for example. If Saddam had really had WMDs in 2003, and if our goal in invading Iraq had been to destroy them and leave, it could have worked.
• Free prisoners or capture (or kill) people you want to bring to justice. We haven’t been able to pull off a capture of Bin Laden, for example, but at least that is within the realm of military possibility.
• Finally, If you’re willing to go that far, genocide and ethnic cleansing still work. You can kill everybody, or drive out an indigenous population and repopulate the land with your own people. (That’s how ethnically European people like me came to be Americans in the first place.)

I think that’s a complete list. If what you want to do isn’t on it, or if you can’t get what you want by threatening one of those things, then you can’t do it with military force.

Where we’ve gotten in trouble, I believe, is that certain ways of imposing your will depend on the ultimate threat of genocide, which we are not willing to do. It’s like in the movies, where everyone has to do what you say because you’ve got the gun. In practice, it doesn’t work that way unless people believe you’re willing to kill them — and not even then, if they’re willing to die.

I think a lot of Americans still have that movie-gun expectation: We’ve got tanks in the streets and bombers in the air, so everyone has to do what we say. When they don’t, we have no next step.

Assuming (as I do) that genocide and ethnic cleansing are going to stay off our list of options, war is not that useful to us any more, except to deter other nations from going to war. There are a few additional situations where a raid might accomplish something worthwhile, but that’s about it.

That capability cost us $782 billion in fiscal 2009.

This week’s other surprise was that the BP oil spill is dissipating faster than most people expected. (Some sources are saying faster than anybody expected, but back in May this guy was predicting exactly what’s happening now. I wasn’t convinced, but I linked you to him in June because he looked honest and plausible.)

Naturally, the media pendulum is swinging back too far in the other direction: The oil spill is no big deal, Nature takes care of these things on its own, environmentalists tried to scare everybody about nothing, and so on.

Let’s get our bearings. One of the worst possibilities isn’t happening: A big oil slick won’t cover the surface for years to come, cutting off oxygen and turning some large chunk of the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone before spilling out into the Atlantic. Religious people should thank God and everyone else should be feeling some unfocused gratitude. It could have been a lot worse.

But that doesn’t mean everything is fine now. The slick has broken up into smaller particles, many of which have sunk to lower levels. But the oil is not gone, and neither is the chemical dispersant BP used in unprecedented quantities. Grist’s Brad Johnson explains.

Stephen Colbert knows what has happened to the oil. Noting that since the BP well has been capped, spills have appeared in Michigan and Louisiana, Colbert concludes: “The oil has achieved whack-a-mole technology.”

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia walked into a mine field by writing a column in the Wall Street Journal about race. It came at either a good or a bad time, depending on your point of view. For months, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media had been banging the drum about racism against whites, trumping up a series of baseless stories that culminated in the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.

Finally the Right had gone too far, and voices from the Left weren’t going to let them get away with it this time. Last week I pointed you to Rachel Maddow’s connect-the-dots reporting about Fox News attempt to stir fear that “black people are coming for you.” This week Joan Walsh picked up that message, naming it “the 50-state Southern Strategy” after Richard Nixon’s successful effort to turn white resentment into votes in the South.

So it was disheartening when, three days after the Sherrod resignation, Webb’s column appeared in the WSJ under the headline “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege”. I like Webb, so I offer this excuse for him: The term white privilege doesn’t appear in his article, and I know from experience that editors (not writers) compose headlines. So Webb’s headline may have surprised him as much as anybody.

The left side of the blogosphere struck back hard. David Sirota (who has been a Webb fan in the past) wrote a column inducting him (and NYT columnist Ross Douhat, who made a similar point)  into “The Cult of White Victimhood“. Author Tim Wise pulled Webb’s article apart line-by-line in an article that drew 435 comments — with few Webb defenders — at Daily Kos.

Webb, though, is arguing something a little more nuanced than “black people are coming for you”. A major theme of Webb’s political career is class. In his book A Time to Fight he says:

Contrary to the bellicosity of the right-wing talk-show mavens, it is not class warfare or envy to point out that economic inequalities persist in our society. In fact, the reverse is true: It is class warfare from the top down to pretend that such inequalities don’t matter.

In the context of his career and its message, I don’t think Webb is saying that white privilege is a myth. I think he’s pointing out that White America has class divisions. And whenever there is a price to pay for racial justice, upper-class whites make sure that lower-class whites pay it. (This is one theme of Anthony Lukas’ Pulizer-winning book Common Ground about the desegregation of Boston public schools. Upper-class whites sent their children to private schools or moved to upscale suburbs unaffected by desegregation, leaving lower-class whites and blacks to hash out the problems.)

When Yale decides to admit fewer whites, the George W. Bushes don’t lose their place. Douhat references a study of admissions at elite colleges:

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This is a double-win for the white upper class: Not only do they avoid losing any of their own privileges, they turn lower-class whites and blacks against each other.

Webb wants to focus affirmative action programs more narrowly on the descendants of the victims of slavery and Jim Crow, rather than on everyone who isn’t white. And he hints that upper-class blacks don’t need help either. Presumably this would lessen the impact of affirmative action on lower-class whites.

I haven’t thought enough about that proposal to comment on it. (I’d rather see a direct assault on upper-class white privilege, with less lower-class collateral damage, but that may be politically impossible.) But I do think that Webb and Douhat are expressing part of the racial conversation we need to be having. While rejecting the outright propaganda Fox has been giving us, I think race is an issue where we need a little less purity-of-message and more listening to all honest opinions.

In January, when the Supreme Court granted new first amendment rights to corporations, pro-human activists comforted themselves with two thoughts. The first said that corporations wouldn’t do much with their new rights, and the second said that it wouldn’t matter as long as we had good disclosure laws, so that people knew whose propaganda they were listening to.

Bad news on both counts: First, coal companies are going to use their newly granted rights to campaign for Kentucky Republicans in this year’s House and Senate races. Mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard says:

Between them, ICG and Massey have had 41 miners killed in just two disasters. It’s disturbing to see companies that don’t have strong safety records try to defeat politicians, like Ben Chandler, who have fought for stronger mine safety.

Second, a Republican filibuster in the Senate has blocked the DISCLOSE act, a bill to force corporations to identify themselves in political ads they buy.

Summing up: Through their Republican Party subsidiary, corporations already wield enough political power to insure that they can anonymously spend vast sums to acquire more political power. As Kent Brockman once famously announced, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.”

It’s always satisfying when the hard data backs up your intuition: If Sarah Palin runs for president, she’ll have a problem here in the New Hampshire primary. A new poll of NH Republicans says Palin runs fifth with 9% of the vote.

David Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s budget director and ought to know a thing or two about conservative economics. In yesterday’s NYT, he wrote a stunning indictment of current Republican economic proposals — particularly extending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy beyond their original expiration date:

Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

A graphic explanation of how Glenn Beck is helping a sponsor fleece his listeners. Short version: Get them worried that the currency is going to collapse, invent a conspiracy theory about how the government is going to confiscate gold bullion, and then personally vouch for a company that will sell them gold coins at a huge mark-up.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

—Sydney J. Harris

In this week’s Sift:

• My Journalism Reading Project: a work in progress. In a democracy, the People are supposed to be sovereign and the news media is supposed to be their intelligence agency. I’m trying to figure out why it’s not working that way.
• What’s Really Wrong With America: Too Many Free Books. When I think about government waste, I don’t usually think about libraries. But some people do. And other people wonder whether facts make any difference.
• Respectable, Sensible Bigotry. Accusations against Mel Gibson and the Tea Party are not just political correctness run wild.
• Disinformation Watch. It’s a shame that anybody has to waste time keeping track of the made-up stories in the news, but somebody does.
• Short Notes. The Times is still keeping an eye on Palestine. The Palins do soap opera way better than the Clintons. And Nate Silver graphs same-sex marriage.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the sovereign of your own little country. You’re queen or generalissimo or president-for-life or something. If you wanted to do your job well, how much would you want to know about your country?

Silly question, right? You’d want to know everything you could. To the extent that your administration could afford them, you’d want to have agents of all sorts bringing you information: people who kept track of all your government’s projects and how they were progressing, who kept you up-to-date on the business climate, who monitored the health and safety of your citizens, and so on. You’d also want experts compiling statistics and noticing trends so that you could stay ahead of events. Outside your borders, you’d want agents keeping track of all the foreign countries that affected your homeland — trade partners, allies, threats, rivals.

And what would happen if you didn’t have that information? People who did would manipulate you into serving their interests rather than yours or your country’s. You’d sign things you didn’t understand. You’d empower underlings to go off and do God-knows-what. Even when you thought you were deciding things, you wouldn’t be; someone else would have laid it all out for you so that you really only had one choice.

Well, guess what? You are a sovereign. That’s what democracy is supposed to mean: the people are sovereign; they rule. You rule.

And there is an army of agents out there bringing you information. That’s what the news media is supposed to be: your intelligence agency. They’re supposed to be gathering the information you need to rule, figuring out what it all means, and presenting it to you in a way that you can absorb and use. And when they don’t, you and your country are at the mercy of whoever does have the information.

And so You the People, We the People, find ourselves going to war for reasons that turn out to be false, or being stampeded into covering the multi-billion-dollar losses of dishonest investment banks. When we try to do something in our own interests, like guaranteeing each other’s access to health care or heading off global warming, it’s incredibly difficult because of all the disinformation we have to wade through — death panels, Climategate, and much, much more.

So our intelligence agency has been letting us down. And things are getting worse: news agencies are closing bureaus and laying off reporters to save money. Can you picture any other sovereign allowing that? After 9-11, when it looked like the CIA and FBI had fallen down on the job, did the U.S. government respond by slashing their budgets and firing a bunch of agents? No, quite the opposite.

In many ways this is a big, complicated topic, but this much of it is simple: We the People haven’t been taking our sovereignty seriously. And we’ve tolerated both our government and the media corporations not taking it seriously either. We haven’t demanded the high-quality information that we need to do our jobs.

Scads of books have been written in the last few years about the sorry state and poor prospects of American journalism, and lately I’ve given myself the project of trying to read them. I’ll be telling you what I learn in dribs and drabs rather than saving it all for one big report.

Here’s one thing I’ve picked up already: Chapter 3 of McChesney and Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism contains some American history I had never run across before: Apparently the Founders really did take the sovereignty of the people seriously, and did consider the press to be the People’s intelligence agency.

That wasn’t just pious rhetoric. They spent serious money to subsidize that era’s equivalent of the Internet: the Post Office. Under the early presidents, America built the best postal service in the world, and had one of the highest literacy rates. That wasn’t just the result of our rugged individualism or our protestant desire to read the Bible for ourselves; it was social policy. Because, as Jefferson put it:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters to convey newspapers free of all charge for postage. They are not only the vehicles of knowledge and intelligence, but the sentinels of the liberties of our country.

And that brings us to the next story.

Like a lot of states, Illinois and its cities have budget problems. And Fox Chicago has spotted a fat pile of government waste: public libraries.

There are 799 public libraries in Illinois. And they’re busy. People borrow more than 88 million times a year.

But keeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.

That’s money that could go elsewhere – like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions.

But why spend more money on education when the schools could eliminate their own wasteful shelves of books? Bob Herbert quotes the AP:

As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.

And he comments:

What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.

Could anything be more unfaithful to the vision of the Founders or the sovereignty of the People? (See previous article.) All our discussions about the value of education for the individual miss the point. If we were a monarchy, we would spare no expense educating the Crown Prince, and consider ourselves fortunate if he showed any interest in our efforts.

In a democracy, the children collectively are the Crown Prince. We are educating the future sovereign — not for his or her benefit, but for ours. Far more than sending troops to distant corners of the world, educating American children to wield their future sovereignty wisely is the cost of freedom. We should pay it, even in hard times.

Now let’s talk about libraries. A lot of Americans don’t really need libraries any more. If we’re rich, we can buy all the books we want. If we’re middle-class, we can afford a broadband internet connection. Probably our homes have at least one quiet room where we or our children can think and study.

But if you’re poor, or just struggling, you may not have any of that. Lots of children are growing up in homes without books, without the internet, and without quiet places to do their homework. They may or may not use the library for those purposes — that’s up to them and their parents. But as long as the library is open, the door to our culture is not completely closed.

What’s that worth to you? What’s that worth to our country?

While we’re talking about education and democracy, it’s worth looking at an article in the Boston Globe from last week:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.

They studied popular political falsehoods (like “we found WMDs in Iraq”) and whether people who believe them change their opinion when given the facts. For the most part they don’t, and many people just dig in deeper, believing even more strongly after someone has tried to correct them.

I’ll quibble with the idea that this is a “recent” discovery. My journalism reading project includes Walter Lippmann’s 1921 classic Public Opinion:

The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them

When I think about how majority stereotypes of women, blacks, and gays/lesbians has changed since my childhood in the 1960s, though, I despair less about democracy than the Globe does. Stereotypes change, but only when people are confronted with new facts again and again, over a period of years.

Democracy works, but it works slowly, and only if lots of people are willing to insist on the truth day-in, day-out, while talking to their friends and co-workers over coffee.

Which brings us to the next story.

Ever notice how often somebody portrayed as an innocent victim of political correctness turns out later to have been a flaming bigot all along?

Frank Rich connects the Mel Gibson dots. Critics who found Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” anti-Semitic were themselves tarred as anti-Christian bigots — until Mel got drunk and started ranting to police about “the f**king Jews”. More recently, tapes of Mel’s verbally abusive remarks to his girl friend have come out, laced with the N-word and other slurs.

That poor guy, victimized by those over-sensitive Jews and their baseless charges.

This week, it’s the Tea Party. The NAACP passed a resolution asking the Tea Party to “repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches”.

So of course recent Tea Party Express VP Mark Williams was all over the airwaves telling us who the real racists are: the NAACP, making their hateful charges against the fine upstanding white people of the Tea Party. Centrists and even some liberal pundits were taking a head-shaking why-did-you-have-to-start-this attitude towards the NAACP.

Then Williams overplayed his hand: He posted a parody letter from the NAACP president to President Lincoln asking to have slavery back:

We had a great gig.  Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.  Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Yeah, that’s not racist. It’s — you know — funny. Right? And so was the suggestion that the NAACP finds tax cuts racist because …

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?

Hilarious. Where does that humorless NAACP get off implying folks like this are racists?

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates wrap up:

Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry

His point: We can’t let that grade-school “I’m not but you are” taunt intimidate us away from pointing out bigotry wherever it shows up.

Do illegal immigrants help or hurt the U.S. economy? Arguments both ways sound very convincing, but have a lot of holes. I haven’t yet found an analysis I can endorse wholeheartedly.

A report put out by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that illegal immigrants get a net government subsidy (benefits minus taxes) of $113 billion a year. But if you crunch some numbers in the report itself, you find that $38 billion of that goes to educating the American-citizen children of the immigrants. Thats us investing in our citizens’ future, not a “benefit” to illegal immigrants. I’ve got to wonder how many similar factors inflate the numbers.

A report by the Perryman Group estimated that making undocumented workers suddenly vanish (as in the movie A Day Without a Mexican) would lower GDP by $245 billion a year. However, its assumptions about the labor shortage in the native-born population are a lot less convincing now than they were when the report was published two years ago.

Since I can’t find or generate any trustworthy economic analysis, I’ll have to settle for a more anecdotal understanding.

One of the main characters in Nick Redding’s nonfiction book Methlandis Roland Jarvis, a native-born white American who starts out working in a meat-packing plant in Iowa, making $18 an hour with benefits. Over several years, the plant gets sold and resold, with each new owner slashing jobs and cutting wages (under the threat of closing the plant or moving it to Mexico), until workers make $6.50 an hour with no benefits. Jarvis tries to keep up his lifestyle by working extra hours (and smoking meth for extra energy), but eventually he gives that up to cook and deal meth full time.

A bunch of the people who take the low-wage no-benefit meat-packing jobs are illegal immigrants with some kind of phony paperwork. They do a hard, dirty and sometimes dangerous job that used to pay enough for an American worker to support a family and also pull his or her weight in the larger community through taxes. Now it doesn’t, so the plant workers (legal and illegal alike) are generating the kinds of costs the FAIR report tabulated: Their emergency-room visits and their kids’ education cost government more than their taxes cover. In essence, the workers are subsidized.

But who’s getting really getting that subsidy? Looking at the work and lifestyle of the immigrants, I don’t think it’s them. They earn what they get, and probably more.

Here’s what I see happening: The company pays its workers less than a living wage, and the government makes up the difference. To the extent that the meat-packing industry is competitive and efficient — not all industries are — the cost-reduction gets passed on to the consumer as lower meat prices. The rest is profit.

I think that’s typical. Whether we’re talking about cheap factory work, cheap child-care in our homes, cheap kitchen workers in our restaurants, cheap janitors in office buildings — the presence of illegal immigrants drives down costs. Some of that shows up in increased business profits and some in a lower cost-of-living for the rest of us. But it costs the government money.

It also costs unskilled American workers by driving down their wages — though it’s hard to tell how many of those jobs would just vanish overseas (maybe to be done by the same people who come here to do them now) if wages were higher.

Summing up: The subsidy FAIR noticed is just the visible piece of a larger social/economic policy decision to have a low-price low-wage economy. If we had an economy that respected hard work — one that paid workers a wage that allowed them to support both their families and the larger community — the subsidy would go away. But things would cost more.

In the absence of reliable numbers, I’ll just give my gut impression: I think middle and upper-class Americans do well out of illegal immigration, the working class not so well.

Most people don’t want health care reform repealed.

Illegal votes by felons did not give Al Franken his seat in the Senate.

The “scandal” about the Justice Department “protecting” the fringy New Black Panther Party is completely trumped up. Newsweek concludes:

it’s not about a real investigation; it’s about staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration.

New British and Dutch reports say the same thing as every other official investigation: The only scandal in Climategate was stealing the researchers’ emails. Unfortunately, they can’t get the front-page coverage that the bogus stories got.

And finally, I’m not sure how you debunk something this nutty: A Republican Congressional candidate in Missouri claims Obama and the Democrats are taking away “the freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.” Don’t look at me — I said at the time that deporting the Holy Spirit was a bad idea.

Follow-up to last week: The NYT has yet another Israel/Palestine article with no precipitating event. Like the Kristof column I quoted last week, these reporters see the blockade failing to undermine Hamas:

Today Hamas has no rival here. It runs the schools, hospitals, courts, security services and — through smuggler tunnels from Egypt — the economy.

The best soap operas always find some way to stay fresh. Unwed pregnancy, break-up, acrimony, drug charges, nude photos — and now the Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston wedding is back on.

Meanwhile, those family-values-destroying Clintons are having a wedding of their own: Former first-daughter Chelsea is getting married at age 30. There’s no baby. She’s just marrying a guy she’s known since her teens, after getting her bachelors from Stanford and a masters from Oxford. Dull, dull, dull.

An illuminating graph from Nate Silver:

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

In this week’s Sift:

• Minneapolis. This week’s Sift comes to you from the best thought-out downtown in America.
• Road Gadget: Three weeks with my iPad. I can’t give you a nice simple justification for buying one, but I like it.
• Short Notes. The wisest thing Robert Byrd ever said. A local Fox station has an open-mic incident after a Palin speech. Republicans vs. demography. McChrystal is almost famous. Fantasies of Hezbollah in Mexico. A simple depolarization scheme. Glenn Beck claims Thomas Jefferson. And if money is speech, then speech isn’t free.

Downtown (see map) is really two shopping districts overlaid. The heart of ground-level downtown is the Nicollet Mall, an 11-block long stretch of Nicollet Avenue that has wide sidewalks and two traffic lanes reserved for buses — many of which are free for rides up and down the Mall. It’s anchored at one end by the beautiful Hennipin County LIbrary and the light rail station (which will take you to the Mall of America, if you really think that’s necessary), and at the other by the Convention Center. In between are a very un-mall-like variety of retailers, from unique local shops and restaurants to big chain stores like Macy’s and Barnes & Noble.

I can’t say how packed downtown is on a normal weekend, because this was the Pride Festival. While walking from a conference event to my hotel Saturday evening, I suddenly found myself in the staging area for Dyke March. A peppy young woman explained that I didn’t have to be a dyke to march with them, but I had somewhere else to be.

In this week's Sift:

• Saving BP. In BP's hour of crisis, its highly placed defenders reveal that it is not just a corporation. It is England.
• College Conference Realignment. This only looks like a sports story. Really it's really a business story. And it is best explained by that great philosopher, Cyndi Lauper.
• Follow-up on the Gaza Blockade. My view gets some unexpected support from Senator Schumer.
• Short Notes. A cross-cultural look at the difference between liberal and conservative minds. Cheney's favorite memo is full of holes. Defenses of don't-ask-don't-tell get crazier and stupider. Off-set your infidelity. And more.

Immediately after the oil spill, the usual energy-industry-supported politicians spoke up on BP's behalf. Texas Governor Rick Perry, for example, used the phrase “act of God” and said that BP “historically had a very good safety record from my perspective.” After a reporter reminded Perry of the Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers — think about that: a foreign corporation's negligence killed Perry's constituents — he spun that positively as well, pointing out that BP would have been extra careful this time knowing that it had “a bullseye on its back” because of its past sins.

One in every six pounds that UK institutions earn in dividends is derived from BP: a reduction will have a direct, adverse effect, not just on fat cats, but on British pensioners. This is bad for all of us. We can understand American anger at this environmental and human catastrophe but the punitive approach to BP will help no one.

That concern is being echoed at higher levels. UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said:

It's in our joint interest to make sure that BP is able to go on functioning as an effective oil company

And Prime Minister David Cameron spoke with President Obama Saturday to “soothe transatlantic tensions” and stress “BP's economic importance to Britain, the U.S. and other countries.” 

A few observations:

1. We're going to have to watch the Obama administration carefully, or this poor-poor-BP view will seep into its responses to the situation.
2. The conflict here isn't US vs. UK. Like Exxon-Mobil or Shell or Chevron, BP is sovereign unto itself. (PM Cameron should see what happens if he asks BP to do something unprofitable for the sake of the realm.) The fundamental conflict of our era is between corporations and humans. Voters in all countries need to look at their representatives and ask which side they're on.
3. Corporations always try to win sympathy by pretending to represent people: workers, customers, stockholders and so on. They don't. In a crisis, management always hides behind these human shields. But it will gladly sacrifice any of them when it becomes convenient.
4. If a BP bankruptcy threatens British pensioners, the British government would do better to aid those pensioners directly than to protect or prop up BP. That's the lesson of our Wall Street bail-outs: Remember how the hundreds of billions we gave the banks was supposed to re-start lending to small businesses? Imagine if the government had just lent a fraction of that money directly to small businesses.

Who says conservatives lack a sense of humor? Responding to a Twitter-post about the possibility of using illegal aliens to clean up the oil spill, Cato Institute scholar Michael Cannon tweeted that “they're very absorbent“.  Yes, dehumanizing large groups of people is incredibly funny. I wonder if Cannon has heard the one about the number of blacks it takes to shingle a roof.

Ken Ringle, writing for the Watchdog website of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, thinks the oil spill may not turn out as bad as most environmentalists think. He covered a 1979 spill near Trinidad for the Washington Post, and was amazed that the effects dissipated so quickly. Crude oil, he says, breaks down faster and is less toxic than refined products like diesel fuel. Some of the bi-products evaporate while others are eaten by bacteria in sea water. (We'll see if this applies to the oil/dispersant mixture we have now.)

Apparently BP's greatest clean-up efforts are aimed at preventing fact-balls from washing up on the beach.

Even though I'm a sports fan myself, I don't assume that Sift readers are. So I don't usually say much about sports, even when my alma mater goes to the Final Four two years running. But the apparent disintegration of the Big 12 conference seems bigger than your typical who-should-win-the-Heisman story, and you might want to pay attention even if you're not into college football.

In case you just said: “Colleges play football?” here's some background. Rather than hash out a brand-new schedule each year, colleges organize themselves into conferences: 8-to-16 teams that play each other. A conference is usually made up of schools that are in the same general region of the country, are roughly the same size, and have sports programs of reasonably equal strength. Most conferences include at least one titanic rivalry, like Ohio State and Michigan in the Big 10, or Oklahoma/Nebraska in the Big 12.

Fans get emotional about their conference identities and rivalries, but Cyndi Lauper was right, money does change everything.

So think like a business: College sports events draw a uniquely appealing audience for advertisers. Big schools like Texas or Florida have hundreds of thousands of alumni. So conferences like the Big 12 or SEC have millions of alumni, mostly with higher-than-average disposable incomes (being college graduates and all). And they don't all stay in Austin or Gainesville; you can find MSU Spartans or USC Trojans all over the country.

But college conferences aren't like the professional sports leagues: The Pac 10 may want to expand into the Denver market, but it can't just start up a new school in Boulder. It has to find an existing University of Colorado that it can lure away from its current conference, the Big 12.

That happened Thursday. 

One school switching conferences is not unusual, at least not in recent years. Penn State (formerly conferenceless) joined the Big 10 in 1990. (Giving it, oddly, 11 teams; find the hidden 11 in the Big 10 logo.) In 2005 the ACC poached Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East, which in turn swallowed Cincinnati, Louisville, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida.

If we don’t have the courage as a people to fight and share in the sacrifices when our nation is at war, if we’re unwilling to seriously think about the war and hold our leaders accountable for the way it is conducted, if we’re not even willing to pay for it, then we should at least have the courage to pull our valiant forces out of it.

A great parody of carbon offsets: The Cheat Neutral web site allows you to offset your infidelities.

I got sick of listening to other people's commencement speeches, so I wrote my own.

In this week’s Sift:

• Notes on the Oil Spill. First BP lied about how much oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. Now it’s lying about what’s making the clean-up workers sick.
• Notes on Race. You don’t actually have to hate anybody to be a racist. Just systematically short-changing them is enough.
• Other Short Notes. Safety problems in biotech. Closing in on DADT repeal. Palin has the First Amendment backward. Hotter than 98. Rand Paul vs. the 14th Amendment. The $100,000 infield. What if Juliet had a sassy gay friend? And more.

Little-noticed data posted on BP’s website and the Deepwater Horizon site show that 32 air samples taken near workers have indicated the presence of butoxyethanol, a component listed as present in an oil spill dispersant used by BP, known as Corexit. The Environmental Protection Agency considers it toxic.

BP is not supplying masks for its clean-up workers, in spite of Corexit’s manufacturer’s warning that people should “avoid breathing vapor”. According to CNN, Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimpers Association, charges that BP has been threatening workers who speak out about health concerns. “Some of our men asked, and they were told they’d be fired if they wore masks.” (Wild speculation on my part: Public relations? Was BP afraid that TV images of guys wearing masks would scare the public?)

I continue to be impressed by the foul-mouthed but right-to-the-point coverage from Daily Kos’ Fishgrease, who claims to have spent 30 years in oil and gas exploration and production. In this post, he explains why the Top Kill failure was obvious after 3 hours, even though BP took days to admit it.

Newsweek describes the BP/government efforts to limit press access to damaged sites.

This sums up the state of journalism: All the best interviews are done by comedians. I link to Jon Stewart all the time, but here Bill Mahr talks to Phillippe Cousteau (grandson of Jacques) after his dive into the oil slick. Cousteau comments on the environmental costs that are regularly passed on to the government and the general public:

Socialism … that word gets thrown around a lot. Well we as taxpayers in this country are subsidizing major businesses that are making billions and billions of dollars every quarter … They never really pay the full cost of their product. We end up paying for that. And that’s the problem.

Only a few meters down, the nutrient-rich water became murky, but it was possible to make out tiny wisps of phytoplankton, zooplankton and shrimp enveloped in dark oily droplets. These are essential food sources for fish like the herring I could see feeding with gaping mouths on the oil and dispersant. Dispersants break up the oil into smaller pieces that then sink in the water, forming poisonous droplets — which fish can easily mistake for food.

… The timing for exposure to these chemicals could not be worse. Herring and other small fish hatch in the spring, and the larvae are especially vulnerable. As they die, disaster looms for the larger predator fish, as well as dolphins and whales. … In a short time, the predator fish will either starve or sicken and die from eating highly contaminated forage fish.

It’s hard to assess the political impact the oil spill will have. On the one hand, it is a disaster on Obama’s watch and so far there has seemed to be little he could do about it. (Much of the political criticism has centered on imagery: He should look more involved. He should do more to show the people of the Gulf states how much he cares.) He looks weak and ineffective, which is never good for a president.

This week’s find is The Bobblespeak Translations, which claims to translate TV-talking-head-speak into real English — or at least humorous English. Its translation of Sunday’s Meet the Press has David Brooks saying:

This disaster proves that conservatives are right – there are limits to what government can do to fix the disasters caused by conservatives.

Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul has inspired some interesting discussion about race on the lefty blogs. Last week, if you remember, Paul touched off a firestorm by saying that he opposed the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that interfered with a private business’ right to deny service to anyone they didn’t want to serve. He denounced racial segregation and said he wouldn’t patronize a business that practiced it, but he didn’t think stopping private-market segregation was the government’s job.

So, what we’re seeing now isn’t a shift of influence in the GOP from the South to the West so much as Southification of the West. They’re not only becoming the hub of a new racial politics, but they’re growing more culturally conservative as well.

If you want to get publicity and make a name for yourself in a 3-way race, pander to bigots. That’s what Tim Cahill has decided to do in the Massachusetts governor’s race, where he’s running as an independent and is far behind incumbent Governor Deval Patrick and Republican challenger Charlie Baker.

When he heard that Gov. Patrick had met amicably with a Muslim group and endorsed cultural sensitivity training for police, Cahill released a statement talking about terrorism and “political correctness run amok”. The statement artfully invokes bigoted ideas without repeating them, juxtaposing phrases without actually connecting them.

I fully support equal protection under the law for every American, regardless of race or creed, but …

The overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans are peaceable people who love this land, but …

Does it matter what comes after but? I don’t think it does. If you need a but, you don’t “fully support” anything.

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King is also making the Hispanic/Muslim connection. Mexicans, Pakistanis — maybe there’s one big brown-people conspiracy or something.

The Israeli pirate attack seems to be getting remarkably little coverage so far. Ordinarily I’d leave this to next week because I don’t understand it yet. But I’m amazed this isn’t getting the 24/7 treatment.

January-April 2010 global average temperatures were the warmest on record.

Our Constitution protects individual freedoms and liberties. Nowhere does this document speak of protecting the majority over the minority. Anger about the economy, increased crime and security concerns are fueling this law, not constitutional principles.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

But that’s just the Constitution. Who cares about that?

And while we’re at it, who cares about facts? Paul said: “We’re the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen.” Deoliver47 points out that Paul is referring to the legal concept called jus soli, literally right of soil. Wikipedia lists 34 nations that practice jus soli. But other than the United States, they’re all barbarous places like Canada. I’m not surprised Rand Paul hasn’t heard of them.

Republicans want a special prosecutor to investigate a report that President Obama offered Joe Sestak a job in the administration if he wouldn’t run against Senator Arlen Specter. (Sestak did run and beat Specter in last week’s Democratic primary.) Even if everything claimed is true — and it seems not to be — it’s hard to see what the legal or moral issue is. Offering a congressman a job in exchange for voting a particular way could be bribery, depending on how explicit the quid-pro-quo is. But Sestak was making a decision about a career move, not a bill in Congress; if Obama offered him a different career move, what’s the problem?