Tag Archives: media

Democracy in Michigan: What Rachel Got Right and Wrong

April 9, 2012 – 11:53 am

Thursday, Rachel Maddow devoted 15 minutes to a very important story that no other national news source was covering, so I made it the Link of the Day on Saturday. Unfortunately, she only got it mostly right. So rather than just link you to her video, I need to write a whole article.

Briefly, democracy in Michigan is in trouble for two reasons, one that Rachel has been covering for about a year, and one she just noticed Thursday.

Local Dictators. The year-old problem is the Emergency Manager law. As the Nation summarizes it:

Signed into law in March 2011, it granted unprecedented new powers to the state’s emergency managers (EMs), including breaking union contracts, taking over pension systems, setting school curriculums and even dissolving or disincorporating municipalities. Under PA 4, EMs, who are appointed by the governor, can “exercise any power or authority of any officer, employee, department, board, commission or other similar entity of the local government whether elected or appointed.”

Basically, when a city or town gets into bad enough financial trouble, the state appoints a dictator who replaces the entire local government.

In addition to the taxation-without-representation aspect of the law (local people continue to pay local taxes, but have lost the ability to elect the officials who spend their money), there’s an unfortunate racial outcome: The communities most likely to suffer the dire economic conditions that trigger the law — Pontiac, Benton Harbor, Detroit — are those where white flight has left behind a black underclass.

I doubt this represents a conspiracy to disenfranchise blacks, but a similarly large group of disenfranchised whites could probably get more public sympathy. So, Rachel points out,

If you are an African-American living in Michigan, there is a 50-50 chance that this year, the state of Michigan has considered scrapping … your right to elect local officials to represent you.

(I haven’t figured out yet what “considered” means in this context. It may refer to concessions Detroit’s local government made to the state in order to avoid being replaced.)

Fake supermajorities. Here’s the newly-revealed part: The Michigan Constitution delays laws going into effect until 90 days after the legislative sessions ends — which could be a year or more after they pass. But there’s an “emergency” provision that allows a 2/3 super-majority to give a law “immediate effect”.

But then something funny happens. Since Republicans took control of the state legislature and the governorship at the beginning of 2011, 546 of 566 bills — including the Emergency Manager law — have been passed with immediate effect. The funny business isn’t just that there haven’t been 546 authentic emergencies, but that Republicans don’t have a 2/3 majority in the House.

How did they do that? Well, you see an example beginning around the 12:30 mark of Rachel’s segment: The Republicans pass a bill, the floor leader asks for immediate effect, the chair ignores Democrats calling for a roll call, asks all those in favor to rise, and within four seconds gavels that it has passed. The House journal records a 2/3 super-majority that probably never existed.

Wait a minute. Rachel is incensed, and so was I when I first watched. But then I had the same reaction as Kevin Drum:

When I first heard this, my BS meter tingled pretty hard. Maddow characterized her story as a scoop, but that made no sense. I mean, Michigan still has a Democratic Party. If this were a huge abuse of power, they’d be yelling about it, right? So what’s really going on?

OK, this is outrageous stuff, but it’s outrageous stuff that’s been happening since January, 2011 and the Michigan Democrats only sued at the end of March. (Monday they got an injunction, which the Republicans are appealing on the grounds that courts have no right to interfere in the workings of the legislature.) What’s up with that?

The Detroit News reports that the Democrats had similar percentages of immediate-effect bills when they were in power in 2009-2010, even though they also were short of a 2/3 majority. Democratic legislator Jeff Irwin was asked about this and responded:

Has this been done before? Yes. Violating the clear terms of the Constitution has become commonplace in the Michigan House of Representatives. The big difference now is that since the Senate follows the Constitution, there was always one chamber where immediate effect votes would be counted and extremely divisive bills would not earn immediate effect in the Senate.

But the Republicans really do have 2/3s of the Senate, so miscounting in the House makes a real difference now. Anyway, Irwin says:

I’m new to the Michigan House and I’ve always thought this practice of declaring votes successful without any actual voting is bogus.

What I think it means. Anybody who looks at the numbers and the video has to conclude that the Michigan House is violating the Constitution. That’s a bad practice no matter who is doing it, so it has to be stopped.

But it isn’t a sudden Republican coup. The House let itself get into the habit of miscounting supermajorities and so violating the Michigan Constitution — probably because the delayed effect the Constitution calls for was viewed by both parties as a procedural nuisance. So the House has been operating illegally for a while, even when Democrats controlled it.

Republicans should have protested this when Democrats did it, but it was easier just to block stuff in the Senate, or to wrangle extra concessions there in exchange for allowing bills to take effect immediately.

After the 2010 Republican sweep, though, they haven’t had to negotiate with anybody or concede anything. (The Emergency Manager law is evidence of that.) So Democrats have started refusing to cooperate in the illegal procedures, and the Republicans have been illegally running over their non-cooperation.

So anyway: It’s bad and it needs to stop, so Rachel was right to call attention to it. But she should have done a little more homework before she went public with it.

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Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (28)

Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes

March 26, 2012 – 1:00 pm

Buried deep in an insight-filled exchange between Grist‘s David Roberts and The Roost‘s Wen Stephenson about media coverage of climate change is this brilliant analogy:

It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit.

Both are long-term threats whose short-term symptoms don’t seem that serious. But they’re covered very differently.

Mainstream journalists routinely tell us that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit will lead to disaster. They don’t worry about sounding like activists or alarmists. When a newsmaker warns about the consequences of the deficit, journalists don’t hunt up some fringe economist to give an opposing view. Further, journalists will bring the deficit into a story even when the sources don’t. If a politician is proposing something related to taxing or spending, a common question is “What would that do to the deficit?”

None of that happens when mainstream journalists cover climate change. Roberts sums up:

the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.

Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy

When action on climate change is blocked, it’s typically reported as a defeat for “environmentalists” — a special interest group. But when action to cut the deficit fails, it’s a blow to our grandchildren.

Roberts’ analogy provides a very simple way to explain what we should be demanding from the media: Cover climate change the way you cover the deficit. It’s not impossible or impractical or a violation of journalistic ethics. They’re already doing it on a different issue.

Today’s wishful thinking: Maybe outright lying by politicians will become less acceptable. I’m not talking about the lies everybody tells about their inner process (like “I don’t pay attention to the polls”), I mean checkable black-is-white lies about history and the state of the world. Maybe the media will start calling attention to these lies and make them counterproductive.

This pollyanna-ish thought is motivated by NPR’s new journalistic ethics handbook, which emphasizes truth over balance.

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen sees this as a rejection of he-said/she-said coverage, where opposing true and false statements are presented without comment.

AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe thinks she has found an example of the new policy: On February 27, NPR ran a Mitt Romney quote and then corrected the part of it that was false. Maybe that practice will catch on with other journalists.

Correcting lies is a good first step. Ultimately, I’d like to hear journalists objectively report “That guy just lied to us” as Rachel Maddow does here:

The Romney Etch-a-Sketch gaffe just underlines what I wrote about him last week:

his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Lauren Zuniga’s poem for the Oklahoma legislators is painful to listen to, but that’s what’s so good about it.

Oklahoma is one of many states passing laws whose main purpose seems to be to humiliate and cause anguish to women who want an abortion. Zuniga strips away all the facades and reacts to the spiteful intention behind the law.

While we’re talking about transvaginal ultrasounds, have you ever wondered how doctors feel about the state using them as tools of humiliation against their patients? This one doesn’t like it, and even thinks some civil disobedience is in order:

When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Zuninga’s poem is an example of the Left getting more aggressive on social issues, a trend I hope catches on. For the longest time we’ve been passive. Unless “family values” types took crystal meth with gay prostitutes, we’ve mostly not challenged their claims to be well-intentioned moral people, motivated by conscience and authentic religious conviction.

It’s time for that to stop. That’s why Fred Clark’s recent article The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal is so important: He points out the suspicious timing of the evangelical revelation that a newly-fertilized ovum has a soul.

They haven’t always believed that. They started believing it after Roe v Wade, and it became undebatable in evangelical circles after abortion became the center of a right-wing political movement.

In other words, this isn’t a political view motivated by theological conviction. The theology was invented to support a political movement already in progress.

Two weeks ago (in the weekly challenge) I proposed that the Left go on offense on women’s issues by pushing the Equal Rights Amendment again. I wasn’t the only one to think of that.

The American public has basically the same view on abortions that it has on guns: There are too many of them, but if my family ever decides that we need one, I don’t want the government telling us we can’t have it.

So whether the public is pro or anti depends on how the question is phrased. This poll bears that out on abortion: In every religious group, large numbers of people who disapprove of abortion still want it to be available.

abortion poll

If you’re not watching Cara Santa Maria’s videos on Huffington Post, you’re not just missing good coverage of science and society, you’re missing a hot chick with glasses whose tag line is “Talk nerdy to me.” I mean, I like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but …

Here she tells us about a new state law to return Tennessee to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you’ve ever wondered about those “Proof Jesus Never Existed” ads that show up in the back of magazines or pop up on the internet, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler: He concludes Jesus existed.

I don’t expect President Obama to raise the Romney dog-on-the-roof issue explicitly. I just think we’ll see a lot of pictures like this:

If a prospective employer asks you to give them your Facebook password, what other morally dubious demands will they make?

And why would an employer trust applicants who are willing to violate FaceBook’s rules and compromise their friends’ privacy like that?

A week ago Friday, the Daily Show had one of its best episodes ever. The opening monologue was funny as usual, but the next two segments were John Oliver’s amazing take-down of our defunding of UNESCO. It culminates with Oliver in Africa (really — not via green-screen) explaining to cute African children why Israel-Palestine politics means they can’t have an education.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged | Comments (1)

Property vs. Freedom

January 23, 2012 – 1:47 pm

If you strip it down to its essence, the battle over SOPA/PIPA is Property vs. Freedom: the media companies want to defend their intellectual property, while Internet-users want to defend their freedom.

You won’t often hear it characterized that way in the corporate media, though, because Property and Freedom are supposed to be inseparable, like Love and Marriage. Sing it, Frank:

This I tell you, brother:
You can’t have one without the other.

Or, as Ron Paul more prosaically put it in 2004:

The rights of all private property owners … must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

Simply saying the phrase “Property vs. Freedom” marks you as some kind of extreme Leftist. All right-thinking people know that Property can’t possibly oppose Freedom.

Last summer I wrote Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say. Well, here’s another one: The relationship between Property and Freedom is highly contentious. (On second thought, the Love-and-Marriage parallel isn’t that bad.)

Get off my lawn. Why is that relationship so contentious? It’s simple: The essence of Property is the right to tell people to get off your lawn, and to sic the police on them if they don’t. If you can’t do that, it’s not really your lawn.

So naturally Property increases Freedom for the owner. Once you have the right to sic the police on trespassers, your lawn becomes available for cookouts, gardening, minimally supervised children, and all sorts of other expressions of freedom.

But look at it from the other side. What if you’re constantly being forced off other people’s lawns and own no property you can retreat to? How free is that?

Free to be Jim Crow. Now read the Ron Paul quote in its full context. On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Wikipedia entry, text of bill), which banned racial discrimination in “any place of public accommodation” (like the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro) and in hiring, Paul portrayed the law in this light:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.

In other words, business owners lost some of their right to tell black people to get off their lawns. Definitely it was a diminishment of Property. But was Paul right that it was a net loss of Freedom, or did the freedom gained by blacks more than make up for the freedom lost by businesses?

Why is it your lawn anyway? Post-slavery America may look like an exceptional case, but actually it was just a particularly egregious example of a general rule: Never in the history of humankind has private property been fairly distributed. By the time American blacks stopped being property themselves, all the good stuff was already owned by whites.

Welcome to Freedom, suckers! Now get off my lawn.

One standard pro-property response to this point is that in a free economy property tends to move to the people who earn it through hard work and ingenuity, so mal-distributions even out over time. Maybe the newly-freed slaves did get a raw deal, but that was a long time ago. According to this point of view, by now their great-great-grandchildren must be pretty much where they deserve to be.

But far from an exception, the race problem is a convenient color-coding that makes the general historical pattern easier to see. Michael Hudson described that pattern like this:

The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage.

In other words, the typical trend is not for things to even out after a few generations, but for unfair distributions of property to get moreso. Sing it, Billie:

Them that’s got shall have.
Them that’s not shall lose.

The only exception I can think of is post-World-War-II America and Europe, where property tended for decades to become more evenly distributed. But far from the natural workings of a free economy, that outcome required inheritance taxes, progressive income taxes, public education, laws to break up monopolies and protect unions, a significant social safety net, and many other government interventions.

Freedom and public property. America’s two greatest symbols of freedom are the Cowboy and the Indian, both of whom own little, but live in a vast public common where they can hunt in the forests, drink in the streams, and swim in the lakes without worrying about ownership.

Contrast that freedom with economic blogger Noah Smith‘s account of downtown Tokyo.

there are relatively few free city parks. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). … outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money. Public buildings generally have no drinking fountains; you must buy or bring your own water. Free wireless? Good luck finding that!

Does all this private property make me feel free? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite – the lack of a “commons” makes me feel constrained.

To me the lesson is clear: For all but the fabulously wealthy, freedom is maximized by balancing public and private property. It’s nice to have your own lawn, but public property you can’t be chased off of — roads, parks, sidewalks — is even more important. It’s also nice to have public access to water and sanitation, and not to be at the proprietor’s mercy whenever you enter a store, restaurant, or theater.

Intellectual property. Applying that logic to intellectual property gets you to the kind of public/private balance we used to have: Copyrights and patents grant creators and inventors valuable temporary rights, while producing a rich public common allowing fair use of recent creations. And since everything eventually becomes public, a balanced copyright law increases the value of the public domain by encouraging the creation of works that otherwise might be impractical.

Protests of SOPA and PIPA make no sense until you understand that we have lost that balance.

Consider how the music-downloading problem arose: By controlling distribution, media corporations inserted themselves as toll-collectors between creators and users. You’d pay $20 for a CD you could easily copy for $1, knowing that precious little of the difference made it back to the artist. Napster-users had few moral scruples against “stealing” music because the system was already amoral. (Call it the Leverage Principle: “The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.”)

Also, endless copyrights have dammed the flow of material into the public domain. When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928, he was granted a 28-year copyright with the prospect of renewing for another 28 years. Evidently, the prospect of Mickey entering the public domain in 1984 didn’t deter Walt from creating him.

But every time that expiration date approaches, the Disney Corporation leans on Congress to extend the length of existing copyrights. Tom Bell illustrates how copyrights lengthen as Mickey ages.

Unless corporate money loses its primacy in our political system, nothing created after 1928 will ever enter the public domain. Unlike Mickey, the vast majority of that cultural treasure-trove will be orphan works that no one has the right to use. (For a book-length treatment of these issues, see The Public Domain, which the author has graciously put in the public domain.)

As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out, extending an existing copyright does nothing to promote creativity or otherwise advance the public interest:

No matter what the US Congress does with current law, George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.

In short, the Infosphere is slouching towards Tokyo. Gradually the public common is shrinking towards the day when almost everything of value will be corporately owned.

SOPA/PIPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the equivalent Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate are two more corporate attempts to buy laws that serve the private interest but not the public interest. (Interestingly, Politico covers the SOPA protests as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as if the public were not involved.)

These laws would make search engines, internet-service providers, and other middlemen responsible for blocking access to web sites that copyright-holders claim are pirating their works. Since they bear no comparable responsibility for defending fair use, their safest course will be to block any site Disney or Time-Warner complains about.

Consider the quotes and images in this article. Traditionally, they would be considered fair use. But what if somebody complains? Is WordPress really going to pay a lawyer to read this article and write an opinion? Or are they just going to shut the Weekly Sift down?

The protests worked, for now. Websites like Wikipedia went dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA/PIPA, and a massive public response forced many lawmakers to change their positions.

But it’s naive to think that’s the end of the story. Corporate money is relentless. When public outrage dies down, we’ll soon see the basic ideas of SOPA/PIPA back in some other form.

In addition to protests, we need a fundamental rethinking of intellectual property. As long as we’re just talking about theft and how to prevent it, we’re missing the point. The right question is how we restore the public/private balance to intellectual property.

We need intellectual property lines that are widely seen as legitimate. When we have that, the problems of trespassing and theft will become much, much smaller and easier to police.

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Truth Vigilantes and other short notes

January 16, 2012 – 11:50 am

The most clueless post of the week came from the NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Brisbane was

looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

So if a “newsmaker” says the sky is green, should the Times let that stand? or explain to its readers that the sky is actually blue?

That post drew 327 comments and countless responses from bloggers and other pundits, almost unanimously (except for National Review) saying: If you have to ask that question, the Times is in worse trouble than we thought.

Brisbane wrote a follow-up claiming that we had all misunderstood the question, which prompted another avalanche of responses saying that we understood it perfectly.

Greg Sargent sums up current practice, which is to print a fact-check column once (maybe), but not reference it when a false claim gets repeated again and again. Result: “any Times customer reading [the false claims] comes away misled.”

Glenn Greenwald translates newsmaker to mean “those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems” and points out that critics of the newsmaking elite get a different treatment: “their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.”

Jay Rosen gives a long-term perspective:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years … the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.

Salon’s Marcus Cederstrom asks the question I’ve been wondering about for weeks: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

In all the uproar about American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, one point hasn’t gotten much attention: All the way back to George Washington, America has tried to maintain a code of honor for its troops. (We didn’t always succeed, but we always tried.) Why?

Here’s why: The American ideal is the citizen soldier who eventually rejoins civilized society. America’s fighting men and women are not supposed to be packs of jackals that we unleash on our enemies and then forget about. They are us, and when they’re done with the disagreeable job of war, we intend to welcome them home.

So when Dana Loesch says, “Come on, people, this is a war“, she may think she’s supporting our troops, but she isn’t. By implying that barbaric behavior is normal in our military, she’s undermining our soldiers’ eventual re-integration into civilian life.

If this is how Loesch pictures Marines, how will she feel when an ex-Marine moves in next door or wants to marry her little sister? Or has the distance between Marines and media stars grown so great that such possibilities are unthinkable now?

While I enjoy Jon Stewart’s pokes at our political system from the outside, nothing tops the way Stephen Colbert demonstrates its abusrdity from within.

When it became clear that unaccountable Super-PACs were going to dominate the 2012 election cycle, Colbert started one: Americans United for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. It’s a stunt, but it’s not just a stunt. He really raised money and put ads on TV in Iowa.

This week, Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of Super-PACs that are devoted to one candidate (but allegedly don’t co-ordinate with that candidate’s campaign) by transferring his Super-PAC to Jon Stewart and then announcing his own candidacy for president. Colbert and Stewart worked out their “non-cooperation” agreement on national TV.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And now, the Super-PAC has the absurd anti-Romney attack ad Mitt the Ripper on the air in South Carolina: If Romney really believes corporations are people, then he was a serial killer during his time at Bain Capital.

It was amazing to watch how quickly and effectively the Republican establishment moved to shut down criticism of Romney’s “vulture capitalism“. TPM’s 100-seconds series captured it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The point here seems to be that capitalism transcends good and evil. To make any moral comment on Romney’s business practices is beyond the pale, and puts you on the road to Soviet Communism. Such a nihilistic argument is pretty weird for a party that claims to be the natural home of American Christians.

Dahlia Lithwick: “If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.” We wouldn’t just see a loss of abortion rights, but “a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state.”

If you haven’t checked out Vi Hart’s YouTube channel, you’re missing the Internet’s best example of charming geekiness.

It’s always important on MLK Day, to remember just how radical King was. He didn’t promote a vague be-nice message, but took outside-the-current-mainstream stands on major issues.

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Under-reported Stories of 2011

January 2, 2012 – 12:49 pm

You didn’t need some blogger to tell you that Charlie Sheen flipped out in 2011, or that Kim Kardashian got married and divorced. It was everywhere. You couldn’t miss it. But one valuable service that the blogosphere and the alternative press provide at the end of every year is to raise the question: What important stuff didn’t you hear about?

It’s got a few flaws, but my favorite such list for 2011 is AlterNet‘s. These stories weren’t censored, exactly, they just went by so fast that you had to really be paying attention to catch them.

  1. 2011’s carbon emission increase was the largest ever.
  2. 50,000 Iraq War refugees have been forced into prostitution in Jordan or Syria. (Thanks for liberating us, America.) [Caveat: The links AlterNet gives are horrifying, but I can’t find the 50K statistic in either of them. This study looks authoritative and says 5,000, which is bad enough. Maybe somebody at AlterNet typed too many zeroes.]
  3. More activity-duty troops are killing themselves than are dying in combat.
  4. Drone strikes kill innocent civilians.
  5. Record numbers of US kids face hunger and homelessness. The homeless total is higher than after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2006. The 2010 raw numbers for hunger were a record, but the percentages were about the same as 2009.
  6. Prison hunger strikes protest long-term solitary confinement. If you aren’t crazy when you start your ten-year time-out, you will be when you finish.
  7. 5,000 kids are native-born American citizens, but they’re in long-term foster care because we deported their parents.
  8. The FBI is training its agents to suspect all Muslims. The religious bigotry here is bad enough by itself, but it also promotes the very terrorism the FBI is supposed to fight: “depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict.”

Several other most-under-reported lists were less interesting (New Republic‘s, for example). But BlackAmericaWeb.com has a suggestion that could be on the list every year: any missing black woman. Derrica Wilson of the Black and Missing Foundation says, “It just seems like our lives are less valued.”

A couple of stories suggested by Current TV’s Josh Sternberg are worth a look:

Every year has dogs that didn’t bark — important things that should have happened, but didn’t. Usually those non-events pass without notice, so hats off to the NYT for highlighting this one: After investigating the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, Congress should have closed the loopholes that let Massey Energy risk its employees’ lives until 29 of them died. But it didn’t.

Religion never gets covered properly in the corporate media. When the media pays attention at all, it’s usually for some stupid reason like the trumped-up War on Christmas, or to cover some tiny sect of weirdos like the Westboro Baptists. But religion is pretty important in America and important developments must happen there from time to time. So who covers that stuff?

Check out Religion Dispatches. In particular, look at their Top 2011 Religion Stories That Weren’t: the Vatican’s clout in historically Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland is shrinking; a pioneering gay-friendly church is losing its identity now that mainstream denominations are open to gays; fewer Americans believe the US plays a special role in God’s plan; plus several other developments you won’t see on CNN.

But I especially want to call your attention to this neglected religion story: “Upside-Down Ideas About Religious Liberty” (which Kevin Drum also noticed).

In the past, the social service arms of religious bodies understood that if they wanted public money they would need to honor public law regarding the disposition of the money: i.e., provide the full range of mandated services on a universal basis. We used to say to objectors, “If you don’t like the mandate, don’t take the money.”

Apparently such a commonsensical response is now insufficiently deferential to religion. More and more people seem willing to say that if a Catholic health care provider doesn’t “believe” in providing reproductive health care to women, that private belief can trump public law.

A lot of attention has come to this issue lately because Catholic Charities is pulling out of Illinois rather than help gay couples adopt children. The bishops are getting away with painting this as a religious liberty issue when it really is nothing of the kind.

The principle here is pretty simple: If you take public money, you have to serve the public — the whole public, not just the portion of the public you happen to like. Nobody in Illinois state government is stopping Catholic Charities from arranging adoptions. They can even keep discriminating against gay couples, as long as they raise their own money. The only change is that Illinois tax dollars will no longer support a bigoted program. That’s right and just, and infringes no one’s religious liberty.

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Expand Your Vocabulary: News Desert

December 5, 2011 – 12:52 pm

A news desert is any segment of society so invisible to mainstream media that it’s hard for the desert-dwellers to keep track of what’s going on in their own community.

I picked up this term from Tom Stites of the Banyan Project. It apparently arose like this: Laura Washington described the media’s failure to cover poor urban communities as a communications desert, which the blog Chicago Is the World shortened to news desert.

Supposedly we’re awash in media these days, but if you think the downpour of attention is soaking everybody, you’re in for a metaphor shear. A community in a news desert is in danger of losing its identity, as people lack regular exposure to their common interests. It’s the difference between thinking to yourself that a particular corner seems dangerous, and reading an article about the fatal accidents that have happened there — knowing that everyone else has read it too.

Tom’s Banyan Project is a co-operative attempt to serve the news desert that was created in the 1980s when newspapers stopped covering the working class.  Its pilot site will be Haverhill, Mass., a town of 61,000 with no daily local newspaper and no community radio station larger than the 100-milliwatt WHAV.

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Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation

November 28, 2011 – 1:20 pm

One of those facts “everybody knows” is that journalists are liberal. It’s even true up to a point. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that very few journalists identify as conservatives. 53% call themselves moderates, so the typical journalistic duo is not exactly Marx and Engels.)

But in spite of Sarah Palin’s fantasies of persecution by the “lamestream media”, coverage often tilts in the opposite direction. When conservatives want something like ClimateGate or the ACORN pimp video to become a national story, it usually does, whether it deserves to or not. When public opinion differs radically from the facts — believing, say, that climate scientists are more-or-less evenly divided on global warming, that Saddam was involved in 9-11, or that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet — the error is usually in the direction pushed by conservatives.

It’s hard to see how that could happen unless actual coverage slanted to the right.

Just last week, I gave numerous examples of right-slanted coverage: Unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent Occupy protesters have been covered “even-handedly” (police and protesters “clashed” like mismatched colors) or passively (“mayhem broke out”).

So how does that work? How do left-leaning journalists regularly produce coverage that leans right? Recently, Grist’s David Roberts has written some excellent posts documenting how media bias works against environmentalists. But before we get into that, let’s back up a little: What does it even mean for coverage to slant one way or the other?

The Hallin Sphere Model. “Media bias” usually makes liberals think of the everyday trickery on Fox News. (Recently, Fox labelled  would-be Obama-assassin Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez “the Occupy shooter” even after police said he had no connection to the Occupy protests.)

I don’t want to minimize the impact of such in-your-face propaganda. (For example, repetition has inured us to hearing President Obama described as “socialist” or even a “Marxist”. It doesn’t raise the kind of ire conservatives felt when President Bush was called a “fascist”.) But the more serious damage is done subtly in mainstream outlets like CNN or the New York Times — news sources that allegedly form “the liberal media”.

A useful way to think about news coverage in general comes from Daniel Hallin’s 1986 Vietnam book The Uncensored War. Hallin says that a factual claim can be reported in one of three ways: as the consensus of knowledgable people, as a controversy that reasonable people might disagree about, or as a deviant claim believed only by a lunatic fringe. Schematically, it looks like this:

A claim in the Sphere of Consensus can be reported as a simple fact, in the journalist’s own voice, without offering a contrary view. So a news story would say “Water runs downhill”, not “According to many scientists, water runs downhill” — balanced later by a quote from an anti-water-runs-downhill spokesman.

But claims in the Sphere of Controversy call for that kind of balance; the reporter should not take sides. So a news story should not say that Obamacare’s individual mandate either is or isn’t constitutional. The reporter should describe arguments made on each side and say that the Supreme Court will rule by June.

Finally, claims in the Sphere of Deviance can be rejected outright in the reporter’s own voice, or just ignored. So an American news story about Al Qaeda will probably not consider that the jihadists might be the good guys. Some people actually hold that view, but they are deviant; they can be ignored.

The boundaries. Politically, it’s very important what claims end up in what spheres.

For example, former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer is running for the Republican nomination for president. He’s the only candidate in either party making a serious attack on the dominance of money in politics. But only true political junkies know that, because Roemer’s whole campaign is happening in the Sphere of Deviance. He gets no mainstream coverage and doesn’t appear in televised debates. It’s self-justifying: He gets no coverage because “he can’t win”, and he certainly can’t win if he gets no coverage.

During the health care debate in Congress, no congressperson had to explain why his/her plan was better than a single-payer system, because single-payer was in the Sphere of Deviance.

On its merits, the claim that the planet is getting hotter should be in the Sphere of Consensus and the claim that it isn’t in the Sphere of Deviance. It’s a measurement, not an opinion. But somehow both usually wind up in the Sphere of Controversy.

In short, if you want to bias your coverage, outright lying and distortion is a ham-handed way to do it. It’s much cleaner and more effective to slot claims into the spheres that serve your interests.

Process. Who makes these decisions and how? Journalism professor Jay Rosen believes that it’s an unconscious group process among journalists. They just “know” what is news, what isn’t, and what kind of news it is. Sphere placement is

an intrinsic part of what [journalists] do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions … are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists that the school does not teach values.

No Curia or Politburo holds hearings or announces its rulings. The press makes these decisions collectively, as “an unthinking actor, which is not good”.

Manipulation. As advertisers have long known, people who make unconscious decisions are open to outside manipulation. Maybe “we cannot argue with those people”, but that doesn’t mean that they’re beyond influence by other means.

A year and a half ago I told you about a Kennedy School study documenting that the claim “waterboarding is torture” abruptly moved from the Sphere of Consensus to the Sphere of Controversy in 2004. In 2003, a reporter could have blithely written “Waterboarding is torture.” But a 2004 reporter could only say “Critics claim waterboarding is torture.”

How did that happen? I summarized several sources:

Waterboarding-as-torture didn’t become “contentious” because some new information threw previous judgments into doubt. It became contentious because an interested party — the U.S. government — started contending against it in defiance of all previous objective standards.

In short, journalists didn’t change their ideology or even rethink the specific issue of waterboarding. Instead, outside pressure manipulated their unconscious groupthink about what is controversial.

David Roberts vs. the mainstream press. In recent months, Grist’s David Roberts has been contrasting mainstream reporting of two environmental stories:

  • The Solyndra bankruptcy, which is being widely covered as a “scandal” in spite of the fact that nothing actually scandalous has yet been uncovered. Also, the loss to the public is purely financial and fairly small by U.S. government standards — a half billion dollars.
  • The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, which promotes the use of tar sands (the most carbon-intensive of fossil fuels) and endangers ground water sources in our agricultural heartland. Environmentalists have been using everything from blogs to civil disobedience to get this story out, but it hasn’t really taken off.

Roberts comments:

Solyndra and Keystone XL are real things in [a real world], not just dueling narratives. And by any conceivable metric — energy, money, pollution, corruption — Keystone XL is a much more significant phenomenon. Solyndra was a bum loan that will be forgotten within a year as the solar industry continues its explosive growth. Keystone XL is a huge, dirty, expensive pipeline that would run down the middle of the country; it’s being pushed through via a rigged process; and its consequences for our energy system and our climate will last for decades.

Zeroing in specifically on Politico’s handling of the stories, he observed:

Republican talking points are delivered as first-order news. Liberal talking points are wrapped in meta-news about liberals and their talking points.

A few weeks later Roberts isolated a classic example of this pattern from a New York Times story about the EPA’s thwarted attempt to implement higher smog standards:

Environmental and public health groups challenged the Bush standard in court, saying it would endanger human health and had been tainted by political interference. Smog levels have declined sharply over the last 40 years, but each incremental improvement comes at a significant cost to business and government.

So the NYT presents the claim that smog endangers human health as something environmental groups say (Sphere of Controversy), and the claim that decreasing smog involves significant costs as a simple fact (Sphere of Consensus).

But the merits of the two claims are exactly reversed: It’s a provable fact that smog endangers public health, while the net economic impact of higher smog standards is debatable. (Increased costs at the smokestack are balanced by fewer sick days and higher productivity, not to mention that everything in our cities corrodes more slowly.)

That’s media bias in action. But does it happen because Politico and NYT reporters are ideologically anti-green? I suspect not.

Money buys controversy. Like the waterboarding example, environmental issues become “contentious” not because new information throws them into doubt, but because powerful actors contend against them.

In some sense this is not new: Public relations is the science of manipulating the press, and it is at least a century old. But reporters have long known to take official PR releases with a grain of salt. So when American Tobacco insisted that Lucky Strikes didn’t cause cancer, that by itself didn’t make the claim controversial.

Tobacco-causes-cancer, though, was the end of one era and the beginning of another. As outlined in the books Doubt Is Their Product and Merchants of Doubt, the Tobacco Institute and the academic research it funded was the beginning of whole new layer of corporate PR infrastructure.

Today, when you read a “balanced” story about climate change, you are probably hearing the voice of Exxon-Mobil, disguised as an “independent” researcher for an “independent” institute at some university. The economics professor quoted in an article about the deficit might have been hired directly by the Koch brothers or the bank holding company BB&T. The article will not tell you this, and the reporter may not even know. (In an era of massive newsroom lay-offs, who has time to trace the funding of everyone he quotes?)

Simultaneously, corporations and the billionaires who own them have been creating a unified pro-capitalist information infrastructure — Chamber of Commerce, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc. — as envisioned by the famous Powell Memo of 1971. They have also achieved a vastly higher degree of message discipline within the Republican Party’s elected officials, and established an ideological media empire around Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.

The result is what conservative-in-exile David Frum calls “an alternate reality”.

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

And so blatant absurdities are now “controversial” simply because the conservative power structure chooses to assert them: Tax cuts raise revenue. Budget cuts that lay off teachers and cancel public works projects create jobs. White Christian Americans are the real victims of discrimination. Poor people and government regulators created the economic collapse. The Founders intended the Bill of Rights to apply to corporations.

Conversely, if the threat of unlimited corporate campaign spending and smearing by the conservative media empire can cow Democratic leaders into silence, the Sphere of Consensus can be expanded to include any number of shaky ideas, and their alternatives can be consigned to the Sphere of Deviance: Taxing the rich is politically impossible. Social Security is going bankrupt. The EPA costs jobs. Everyone (except the wealthy) needs to sacrifice. We can’t afford a social safety net any more (but we could afford a new war with Iran). And so on.

These ideas move from one sphere to another not because reporters have become more conservative, but because external power has changed their perceptions of which claims will be contested and which won’t.

What can liberals do to counter? Although we don’t dare abandon any battlefields completely, we can’t hope to beat the corporations financially and institutionally. And that’s why we have to be in the streets (and conversely why the Powers That Be smear and intimidate the people who are). When reporters are told that “everybody knows” one thing and “nobody really believes” something else, large numbers of ordinary people have to make it obvious that those claims are wrong.

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Building the Rioters of the Future

August 15, 2011 – 11:42 am

[8/15/2011] I’m assuming you already know that riots broke out in many English cities this week. If not, Wikipedia has a good summary of the basic facts.

But while it was easy to turn on your TV and see video of burning and looting, getting a half-way decent explanation of what it was all about was quite a bit harder.

Everyone agreed that the riots weren’t “political” like the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tunis or Cairo. No leaders presented lists of demands. Mobs didn’t shout slogans, political or otherwise.

The riots also didn’t seem to be racial, exactly. The unrest started in London’s diverse Tottenham neighborhood, but also jumped to mostly white neighborhoods like Croydon. The Irish Times reported:

Those who were taking part in the looting and fighting, or throwing fireworks at the police, were of many shades, ages and nationalities, but they all had something in common: they felt they had little to lose.

Eliminating politics and race left even less likely simple explanations: Prime Minister Cameron seemed to suggest that lots of people spontaneously turned criminal for no reason. Others blamed bad parenting, though it’s mysterious why that would suddenly become a problem last week rather than the week before. Maybe it was “mob mentality” or “mindless violence” — terms that sound more substantive than “I’ve got no clue”, but may not be. And there were the usual attempts to blame technology, which made no more sense than giving technology the credit in Cairo.

To me, the most disturbing aspects the coverage were the journalists who didn’t want an explanation. In this BBC interview, West Indian writer (and long-time Londoner) Darcus Howe tries to raise underlying issues:

What I was certain about, listening to my grandson and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and a careful hearing, they have been telling us — and we would not listen — about what has been happening in this country to them.

The interviewer then cuts him often, asking if he condones the violence. After a disgusted “Of course not”, Howe tries to talk about police behavior, and how often young blacks are stopped and searched for no reason. The interviewer interrupts to accuse Howe of having been a rioter himself in the past, which he indignantly denies. (“Show some respect for an old West Indian Negro,” he pleads.)

And then time is up. Riots: Are you for them or against them?

The most insightful thing I read about the riots was on the London blog Penny Red. (You may have seen it reposted on AlterNet, Common Dreams, or some other American web site.)

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

As in this week’s lead article, I find myself thinking that people are looking in the wrong direction. Asking why rioters take what they want, hurt people they don’t like, or burn down establishments they resent is like asking Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. (His iconic answer: “Because that’s where the money is.”)

It’s perfectly obvious why people would loot and burn. If you want to get simple, start with the question: Why don’t the rest of us riot every day?

The best answer, I think, is: Because we participate in systems that we believe work better for us and for our loved ones in the long run. We participate in the property system because we also want to own things. We participate in the money economy because we also want to have jobs and buy things. We participate in a system of mutual respect because we also want want to claim respect.

Now imagine that you own essentially nothing, have no job prospects, and are treated with disrespect on a regular basis. What’s the system to you other than a policeman who is too busy to bother with you right now?

Riots may not be organized political actions that make clear demands. But nonetheless they have political causes. If we are leaving people out, leaving them without hope and without any clear way to channel their effort into bettering their lives, then we are building the rioters of the future. When the disorder begins, they will have no reason to restrain themselves.

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A Week of Down

August 8, 2011 – 11:59 am

It’s been an eventful week economically. The debt ceiling deal got passed and signed, but the stock market tanked and S&P downgraded U.S. government bonds anyway.

For the most part the media has covered this constellation of issues the way they cover anything: What-happened and what-it-means-for-citizens has gotten short shrift, in favor of assessing blame (always awarding it equally to both sides) and trying to predict how this tactical skirmish will affect future elections.

But we’re talking about trillions of dollars here, so it must have some effect on real people. Let’s start there.

What got cut first. “Only” $917 billion of spending cuts have been passed so far, including only $21-25 billion in the 2012 budget. (I’m seeing different numbers in different places; not sure why.) So worries about immediate contraction in the economy (at least from this deal) are overblown. The rest of the $900 billion is cut over the next decade.

Apparently, $350 billion comes from “security” — defense, homeland security, etc — and $567 billion (although this article in The Hill claims $756 billion) from domestic discretionary spending (i.e., not entitlements like Social Security and Medicare). That’s as specific as things have gotten so far. The Hill:

The law does not itemize the cuts, instead leaving those decisions to appropriators. But the size of reductions makes it inevitable they will impact a long list of discretionary programs, including those related to environmental protection, food safety, education and infrastructure.

<sarcasm> Food safety. Just the other day I was noticing that I hadn’t gotten food poisoning lately and thought, “That’s probably something we could cut back on.” <end sarcasm> The long-term unemployed are probably going to suffer too.

The next round of cuts. Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell each get to name three people to a “Super Committee” to recommend another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by November. Their recommendations will get an up-or-down vote in both houses of Congress, with no amendments.

The problem with agreements like this is that no Congress can force a future Congress to do anything. So the agreement contains automatic cuts that will happen if the $1.5 trillion deficit reduction doesn’t pass. The automatic cuts are supposed to be ugly to both sides, so that they’ll be motivated to negotiate a deal to avoid them.

Republicans are so set against any tax increases on the wealthy that they wouldn’t agree to them even in this automatic deficit-reduction package that isn’t supposed to happen. Their motivation is supposed to come from defense spending cuts.

The painful-automatic-reduction feature of the agreement sets up another hostage crisis in November, with the idea that both sides will have hostages, so no one will get shot. Somehow I don’t find this comforting. Jonathan Chait has compared such agreements to ransoming your child from kidnappers for “$100,000 and your other child”.

The precedent we’ve set. Keep in mind that the debt ceiling has never been used this way before. Most other countries don’t even have a debt ceiling, because it’s redundant: If Congress passes a budget with a deficit, it shouldn’t have to separately authorize borrowing to cover it. (That’s like going to a restaurant with nothing but your Visa card, eating, and then debating whether you’re going to take on this additional debt by signing the receipt.)

In the past, debt-ceiling increases have been opportunities for the out-of-power party to posture about the irresponsibility of the in-power party. But never has there been a negotiation in which the president made concessions to get the ceiling raised. That’s because the debt ceiling is a doomsday device. Nobody seriously believed that the country would be better off if our government couldn’t meet its commitments.  So there was nothing to negotiate about.

But now hostage-taking has become a respectable tactic. Don’t take my word for it, listen to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

McConnell says this “set a template for the future. … we’ll be doing it all over.”

I keep flashing back to the novel The First Man in Rome. As the story begins, the Roman Republic has few rules but a lot of traditions. In a gradual back-and-forth escalation of advantage-seeking, Marius (the main character) and his enemies violate the traditions — sometimes with justification, sometimes not. By the end, Marius is mounting his enemies’ heads on spikes in the Forum.

So yeah, there is nothing illegal about holding the American economy hostage until you get what you want. It’s just a violation of tradition, something we’ve never done before. But if you go far enough down that road, you wind up with heads on spikes.

The downgrade. Raising the debt ceiling and cutting future deficits was supposed to keep our credit rating up. It didn’t. On Friday S&P downgraded the U.S. government’s bonds from AAA to AA+, which is still pretty good. (Japan is at AA-, and they manage to sell 30-year bonds at less than a 2% interest rate.) The other major ratings service, Moody’s, is maintaining the AAA rating, at least for now.

As with the debt-ceiling crisis, lots of blame is going back and forth. Democrats and Republicans are blaming each other, the administration is criticizing S&P, and so on.

Here’s the thing to understand: What bothers S&P isn’t the sheer size of the federal debt. (Again, Japan is much worse fiscal shape, and they’re far from bankrupt.) It’s the dysfunctionality of our political system. If you look at the trends and do the math, our current level of taxation doesn’t cover the expenses of a world empire with an aging population and an inefficient health care system. None of that is unsolvable, but S&P says:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.

No one has a plan to disengage our military commitments, the Republicans have drawn a line in the sand against any increase in revenues, and our society is probably not willing to let large numbers of old people die in the streets. So how does that situation resolve? Inflation? Or maybe one of the future fiscal hostage crises goes bad and we actually default.

Given what we’ve just seen, it’s hard to make the case that loaning money to the U.S. government is risk-free.

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