Sunday, July 6. 2014
Short after spending so much time trying to follow what's happening
in Israel, but still have some scattered links this week:
Bob Dreyfuss: Is Obama on a Slippery Slope Toward Mission Creep in Iraq?
Of course, he is. The first step is all it really takes: by sending any
troops at all, Obama has chosen sides in Iraq's civil war and committed
America's prestige and power to defending Maliki (even at the same time
admitting that Maliki is the problem and should be replaced by someone
less abrasive). Henceforth, any time Iraq stumbles, the US will have to
pick up the slack, otherwise the prestige and power of the US will be
So in total the president sent troops to Iraq three times, on June 16,
June 27 and June 30. As Kirby put it: "And then so all that comes down
to the bottom there, a total of 770 authorized, 650 on the ground. And
that's where we are right now."
The first question involved the weaponry that the troops are bringing
with them, including helicopters, drones and so on. Kirby said that the
aircraft include "a mix of helicopters and UAVs [drones]," adding, "The
helicopters are attack helicopters, Apaches." And, he said, they'll be
flown by American crews, not Iraqis.
Paul Krugman: Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas: Been there, done that,
but gratifying to see that someone noticed:
Two years ago Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It
sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would
replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the
legislation -- in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year
any state has ever enacted -- in close consultation with the economist
Arthur Laffer. And Mr. Brownback predicted that the cuts would jump-start
an economic boom -- "Look out, Texas," he proclaimed.
But Kansas isn't booming -- in fact, its economy is lagging both
neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state's
budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody's downgrade
of its debt.
There's an important lesson here -- but it's not what you think.
Yes, the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don't have magical powers,
but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring
power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the
right people. [ . . . ]
And the Kansas debacle won't matter either. Oh, it will briefly give
states considering similar policies pause. But the effect won't last
long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn't about evidence; it's about
finding reasons to give powerful interests what they want.
The whole magic about "supply side" is that it is a trickle down
theory: first you give capitalists more money -- taking less in taxes
is about the laziest way possible to do this -- then you hope that
they will invest the money productively and that their increased
production will trickle down through the economy to at least marginally
lift everyone's standard of living. This never works very efficiently,
but it doesn't work at all if there is already an excess of capacity,
which is usually due to a shortfall of demand. In that case, additional
money forced into the supply side is redirected into asset bubbles.
If what you want is to see the economy functioning more efficiently,
the alternative is to prop up the demand side -- which, sure, can be
done by reducing taxes (especially the most regressive ones, like
sales and payroll), or lots of other ways.
Gideon Levy: Netanyahu's offspring: This does a nice job of summing
up much of what I wrote yesterday/earlier today on Israel:
The media in the Jewish state wallows in the murder of three yeshiva
students, while almost entirely ignoring the fates of several Palestinian
youths of the same age who have been killed by army fire over the last
few months, usually for no reason.
No one was punished for these acts -- in the Jewish state there is
one law for Jews and another for Arabs, whose lives are cheap. There
is no hint of abiding by international laws and conventions. In the
Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights
only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.
Phillip Longman: Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story
Exactly Backwards: Longman wrote the book on the VA health care system
(Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours), so
you'd think someone in the Obama administration would pay him some heed.
He's argued throughout the recent scandal that the problem isn't with the
delivery of care once veterans get in the door, but the bureaucratic
strictures on who's eligible when, and some macro-level alignment of
facilities with population -- the delays seem to be concentrated in Sun
Belt states like Arizona which have higher-than-average numbers of vets.
Longman starts by taking exception to a report by White House Deputy
Chief of Staff Rob Nabors describing the VA as beset with a "corrosive
culture" -- a phrase which became the takeaway headline despite the
lack of any evidence for it even in the report. (If you want to check
out what a "corrosive culture" is, look no further than Congress.)
It's not that Longman doesn't recognize any problems with the VA, but
most of what he sees were introduced by the Bush administration --
greater centralization, and more privatization (which the Bushies
like not to save money but to create patronage opportunities). He
concludes with a real sad thud:
Sadly, rather than reversing that trend, the Obama administation just
let the centralizing continue. As Ken Kizer, Undersecretary for Health
in the Clinton administration and the man most responsible for turning
the VA around in the 1990s observes in a recent piece in the New England
Journal of Medicine: "In recent years, there has been a shift to a more
top-down style of management whereby the central office has oversight
of nearly every aspect of care delivery. Indeed, over that period the
VA central office staff tasked to health care adminstrative duties has
grown from about 800 in the late 1990s to nearly 11,000 today."
Clueless? Yeah it would seem. Except over the weekend, the White
House announced that after deep and thoughtful deliberation, it had
come up with just the man to turn things around at the VA, and he
turned out to be a Republican soap and toothpaste salesman -- a man
with no experience whatsoever in running a health care or social
services organization but who happens to be a close financial backer
of Republican House Speaker John Boehner. No, that's not clueless--
it's a cynical sellout of veterans by an adminstration that, in the
wake of a monumental failure of the press to put this story in context,
just wants to move on at any cost.
Kenneth W Kizer/Ashish K Jha: Restoring Trust in VA Health Care.
Also, a few links for further study:
Alex Fletcher: Tony Blair's (Private) Interests in the Secret World of
Oil: Quotes from Ken Silverstein's new book, The Secret World of
Oil, on how Blair remade himself as a cash register, clinking and
clunking his way to millions of dollars year after year. The old joke
was to describe Blair as "Bush's poodle." Nowadays, evidently, anyone
with the money can take him out for a walk.
More links on Israel:
Sunday, June 29. 2014
Some scattered links this week:
Josh Barro: Yes, if You Cut Taxes, You Get Less Tax Revenue: On
Sam Brownback's tax cuts in Kansas:
Kansas has a problem. In April and May, the state planned to collect
$651 million from personal income tax. But instead, it received only
In 2012, Kansas lawmakers passed a large and rather unusual income
tax cut. It was expected to reduce state tax revenue by more than 10
percent, and Gov. Sam Brownback said it would create "tens of thousands
In part, the tax cut worked in the typical way, by cutting tax rates
and increasing the standard deduction. But Kansas also eliminated tax
on various kinds of income, including income described commonly -- and
sometimes misleadingly -- as "small-business income." Basically, if
your income results in the generation of a Form 1099-MISC instead of
a W-2, it's probably not taxable anymore in Kansas.
Barro goes through the details, showing how to move income around
to lower your tax rate, mentioning cases where reduced tax liability
in Kansas is offset elsewhere. But the bottom line is that the revenue
loss is much greater than advertised, and the jobs gain is hard to see
if not flat out negative. Susan Wagle, the Republican Senate leader,
has recently admitted that the purpose of the tax cuts was to "starve
the beast" [state government], and therefore claimed that they were
working, regardless of the disingenuous sales pitch. The latest GOP
plan for making up the shortfall is to borrow $600 million, so that
will also contribute to "starving the beast." Barro also doesn't go
into cases where local governments have raised property and/or sales
taxes to compensate for less state revenue. Nor that things like
state college tuition keeps rising much faster than inflation, so
students will bear extra burden.
John Eligon: Brownback Leads Kansas in Sharp Right Turn, which is
four months old and kind of a puff piece. Brownback ran for president
in 2008 and got something like 3% in neighboring Iowa's Republican
caucus, so he gave up his safe Senate seat to get some executive
experience as governor and prove to the nation how wonderful his
radical "red state model" would be, hoping that would put him back
into the presidential race. Needless to say, he's been a complete
Dominic Gates: 787 still having problems with unfinished work from SC:
You remember this story: Boeing's genius management decided they could
pinch pennies by moving 787 assembly from Washington to South Carolina --
at least they pocketed a big kickback for "creating" all those jobs
(i.e., the ones they destroyed in Washington). The new workers slowed
Boeing down and proved so inept that Boeing has had to ship their work
back to Washington to be repaired.
According to employees, when mechanics removed the cradles that held
the rear fuselage in place on Dreamliner No. 214 -- destined for Royal
Jordanian Airways -- nearly 100 improperly installed fasteners clattered
to the factory floor.
A subsequent inspection found the South Carolina team in Everett had
installed hundreds of temporary fasteners near the join between the two
aft fuselage sections without the collars needed to hold them in place.
"If they can't make sure this is done, what else are they forgetting?"
said a frustrated Everett employee.
He said that the error showed a lack of the most basic knowledge and
that this work should be routine at this stage in the jet program.
Paul Krugman: An Innovation Lesson From Germany: Less Disruption, More
Here's the key point on the remarkable German export story: German labor
is very expensive, even compared with the United States'
(see this chart from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics).
And this has been true for decades, yet Germany is a very successful
exporter all the same. Not by producing the latest tech product, but by
maintaining a reputation for producing high-quality goods, year after
If Germany seems remarkably competitive given its high costs, the
United States is the reverse; our productivity is high, but we seem to
be consistently bad at exporting -- and have remained so throughout my
professional life. I used to think it was our cultural insularity, our
difficulty in thinking about what other people might want. But is that
Actually, Boeing has long been the largest US exporter, usually by
a huge margin, so they clearly know how to build for world markets.
Also, their only serious competitor is Airbus, based in Germany and
France, where their wages are higher than Boeing's, so there's no
competitive reason why Boeing has to cut labor costs. Boeing does
so for purely ideological reasons, and not infrequently they hurt
themselves in the process.
Alicia Johnson: Supreme Court Throws Up More Abortion Barriers by Knocking
Down Buffer Zones: Anti-abortion "protesters" routinely harass
women as they attempt to enter Planned Parenthood and other clinics
where abortions are performed -- happens routinely here in Wichita,
and often elsewhere. Massachusetts passed a law promising a 35-foot
hassle-free buffer zone around clinic entrances, and the Supreme
Court unanimously threw it out claiming it violates the free speech
of the protesters. I tend to think of myself as more protective of
free speech than most Americans, but I find this ruling appalling.
It says in effect not only that one has the right to speak freely
but they also have the right to get in your face, to force you to
listen to their rants. Moreover, in this specific case the ruling
advances a specific political agenda for taking a basic right away --
something the Court should start to take an interest in protecting,
given how anti-abortion agitators have used harrassment, vandalism,
and murder to reduce availability of abortions. (Of course, murder
remains illegal, but in places like Massachusetts and Wichita it
has only occurred after an atmosphere of harrassment has developed,
and that's what this ruling permits.)
Of course, this ruling could be interpreted to allow all sorts
of more aggressive, in-your-face demonstrations for worthy causes.
Why shouldn't Occupy Wall Street protesters be able to hector
traders and bankers all the way to their business doors? Why
shouldn't Code Pink be allowed to say their piece when they
interrupt speeches and government hearings? Why don't we set up
gauntlets around Army recruiting offices similar to what the
anti-abortion protesters do? All of this would be consistent
with the Court's unanimous ruling, but in fact we do commonly
place limits on where free speech can take place -- e.g., many
demonstrations are penned up in so-called "free speech zones"
where they can't make their targets hear their message.
Gaius Publius: Obama Loosens Four-Decade Ban on Crude Oil Exports:
Every GOP platform I can remember has an N-point plan calling for
"energy independence" but it's only under Obama that the elusive goal
has been met. Still, the decision to allow crude oil exports after
banning them for 40 years shouldn't have been automatic. Absent the
export option, one of two things would have happened: companies would
slow production down to conserve oil for later demand, or they'd pump
it and cut the price until current demand caught up. Either would have
benefited consumers, which is to say most Americans, and the former
would be better for limiting carbon emissions. Allowing exports only
helps production companies.
Why worry about climate change when there's money? That's not oil in
those tankers and pipelines; that's cash. And it's Obama's job, and
every other president's so far, to not get between the owners of
carbon and their profit-making (sorry, job-creating).
Your takeaway? This is another example of Obama protecting the
profits of the carbon industry, while at the same time he laments
the damage it does.
Joseph E Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable: This sums up a
series of posts called
The Great Divide.
So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of
the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the
solidarity it had engendered. As America triumphed in the Cold War,
there didn't seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model.
Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that
our system could deliver for most of our citizens.
Ideology and interests combined nefariously. Some drew the wrong
lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung
from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate
interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those
regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment,
our safety, our health and the economy itself.
But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest
advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept
hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the bailouts
that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the
beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of "free" markets and deregulation.
The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality
translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields
increasing economic inequality. In fact, as he recognizes, Mr. Piketty's
argument rests on the ability of wealth-holders to keep their after-tax
rate of return high relative to economic growth. How do they do this?
By designing the rules of the game to ensure this outcome; that is,
One minor quibble I have here is that I wouldn't say that "America
[or capitalism] triumphed in the Cold War." I'm reminded of a wrestling
match where one fighter dies of a heart attack and the other falls on
top of the corpse to claim the win. The Soviet Union's economic system
indeed performed poorly in the 1980s, but for Russia the real economic
disaster occurred in the 1990s when state resources were turned over
to a handful of oligarchs.
But the basic point is solid: growing inequality is the result of
policies that favor the rich and disadvantage virtually everyone else,
and can be reversed by other policies. The rich were able to obtain
those policies for a number of reasons, including that the US political
system has always been highly susceptible to corruption -- and was,
therefore, defenseless when business interests started their sustained
assault on the political system in the 1970s (cf. the Potter Stewart
letter, a conspicuous turning point).
Also, a few links for further study:
Juan Cole: Waiting for the Arab Summer: An excerpt from Cole's new
book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the
Middle East. He's looking for a return of the liberal democrats
that started the Arab Spring, that have largely been eclipsed of late,
but figures the demographics will still be there once the flames of
war have burned out.
Fred Guerin: The Compelling Conclusion About Capitalism That Piketty
Resists: Well it's that capitalism, in practice if not necessarily
in theory, sucks. Since Piketty takes pains to distance himself from
Marx (even while adopting his title), it's the first point on the mind
of every Marxist critic. This at least articulates the point at length,
and rather eloquently.
Elias Vlanton: The Unkindest Cut: Book review of Joshua Steckel/Beth
Zasloff: Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His
Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond Poverty. Vlanton, by
the way, is a very dear friend from my college days, and could well
write his own book on this subject.
Some Iraq links:
Juan Cole: Top 5 Reasons US Aid to "Moderate" Syrian Fighters Is
Roi Kais: US fears Israel would be dragged into war with ISIS:
Fears? Dragged? Didn't Israel already bomb ISIS positions in Syria
last week? Admittedly, if Israel enters an existing US war against
Arabs, that's going to reflect poorly on the US, but it's not as if
the US hasn't already tarred itself with its slavish support of
Israel's numerous violations of human rights and international law.
Given that alliance, it's all the more stupid for the US to get into
an anti-Arab (or specifically an anti-Sunni) war.
Yifa Yaakov: US: Jordan may ask Israel to go to war against ISIL:
Same credibility issues as the US asking for Israeli support, except
that the latter doesn't involve any domestic risk, it just adds
credibility to ISIS/ISIL in that it gives them another enemy pretty
much anyone likely to support them already detests. On the other
hand, if the Hashemites need Israeli support to survive a revolt
of their own people, they're pretty much doomed anyway. (Not that
they didn't get away with it once before, but that was a long time
ago and a complete surprise.)
There's lots more that could be said on the subject of Iraq, but
I'm not finding many links that make what I feel is the key point.
The only just endpoint for the now-linked civil wars in Syria and
Iraq is a diplomatic agreement where all sides agree to step down
and stop killing each other, and let their differences be sorted
out peacefully at the ballot box. It's widely assumed that Sunni
jihadists would never agree to this, but in fact Sunni Islamists
do exceptionally well in elections, and only resort to terrorism
when peaceful political routes are blocked. One certainly shouldn't
assume that they're the problem, especially when you have dictators
in Damascus (and Amman) and a narrowly sectarian government in Iraq
to deal with, not to mention regional interests of the Kurds. It
won't be easy to solve these issues, especially since a solution
will have to appear to be fair to (i.e., to give a fair chance to)
all groups. One might, for instance, consider redrawing some borders
(since, frankly, Sykes and Picot didn't do a very good job). Or one
might consider restructuring the countries among more federalist
lines, which would allow more local control at a finer level of
granularity. There's also the thorny question of oil revenues, which
should be pooled and distributed per capita (benefitting Syria, and
Jordan if they got involved, but inequity in Iraq is also a problem).
For that matter, it would be good to throw some Saudi and Kuwaiti
oil into the pool (the other Persian Gulf emirates too). But the
most important thing is to get the outsiders to stop interfering:
Iran, of course, but also the Saudis, Qataris, and whoever else
has been bankrolling all those jihadis. Also Russia and the US,
which means the US cutting some kind of side deal with Iran to
ensure that the Persian Gulf shipping lanes will remain open. (It
would also be good to solve the Israel-Palestine thing, but thus
far it looks like that's separable -- a good thing given that
Israel refuses to solve anything, and thinking about Israel costs
the US about 40 IQ points.)
So if that's the end point, what should the US be doing now?
Unless Baghdad is on the verge of getting overrun, I don't see any
value in backing Maliki -- least of all in giving him air support
that suggests he has a hope of regaining lost Sunni territory. Nor
does arming the so-called Syrian "moderate rebels" make any sense,
since that just prolongs the war there. US sanctions against Iran
and Russia are probably not helpful either, although surrendering
them would help as would settling side issues (like that mess in
Ukraine). The bigger problem is how to get some leverage on the
Saudis and Gulf Arabs, but those monarchs (and their families)
own a lot of assets in Europe and the US that could be frozen,
and for that matter those monarchies are overdue for democratic
revolutions (especially given US support, including air cover).
If this reads like fantasy, compare its likelihood to the chance
that anything good might come out of Obama's pledges of "advisers"
and drones for Maliki and $500M of small arms for those "moderates"
in Syria. (And try to recall the last time when any ad hoc group
with $500M of arms exercised any moderation at all.) The US has
repeatedly tried to pick sides in the Middle East, thinking its
"lesser evils" will always trump those "greater evils," and almost
invariably coming up wrong. We need to come to a comprehension
that the only US interest in the region is peace and stability,
and that peace and stability only comes through democracy and a
sense of social justice and equality. Also that one essential part
of the solution is that the US give up its military presence in the
region, which has thus far brought nothing but war and instability,
not least through our backing of a corrupt oligarchy.
Sunday, June 22. 2014
Let's start with Richard Crowson's cartoon of the week for a little
dose of Kansas politics:
Mike Pompeo is the current two-term Republican congressman from the
greater Wichita area. He is generally regarded as a Koch crony, although
he's extremely hawkish, a first-line defender of the NSA. Todd Tiahrt is
his eight-term predecessor, a Tom DeLay disciple, closer to the Christian
right, closer still to Boeing (Bush nicknamed him "Tanker Todd"), and he
feels entitled to reclaim his House seat, so they're fighting it out in
a big money primary. And being Republicans, that means they're trying to
out-asshole one another, something both have real talent for (although
I have to give Tiahrt the edge there, ground Pompeo will try to make up
with money). And, of course, the shifty-eyed guy on the right is Gov.
Sam Brownback, who's actually done the sort of damage that Pompeo and
Tiahrt only dream about.
Some scattered links this week (mostly on Iraq):
Paul Krugman: The Loneliness of the Non-Crazy Republican: Hank Paulson
wrote an opinion piece on the need to face up to climate change, "in the
same way we acted to contain the financial crisis." Paulson is a Republican,
in fact a very rich one, but Krugman points out:
But that's not the sad part about Paulson's piece; no, what's sad is that
he imagines that anyone in the party he still claims as his own is listening.
Earth to Paulson: the GOP you imagine, which respects science and is willing
to consider even market-friendly government interventions like carbon taxes,
no longer exists. The reins of power now rest firmly, irreversibly, in the
hands of men who believe that climate change is a hoax concocted by liberal
scientists to justify Big Government, who refuse to acknowledge that
government intervention to correct market failures can ever be justified.
Given the state of US politics today, climate action is entirely dependent
on Democrats. With a Democrat in the White House, we got some movement
through executive action; if Democrats eventually regain the House, there
could be more. If Paulson believes that he can support Republicans while
still pushing for climate action, he's just delusional.
Nor is climate change the only, or even an exceptional, topic where
Republicans have simply evacuated any sort of rational ground.
Elizabeth Samet: Can an American Soldier Ever Die in Vain?:
Samet teaches literature to officer cadets at West Point, which
leads to more than a little weirdness, as we become sentimental
about war instead of rigorously analytical about how to prevent
or end it.
Yet even after the revolutions in modern consciousness ostensibly
occasioned by conflict in the 20th century, a pernicious American
sentimentality about nation and war has triumphed, typified by
demonstrative expressions of, and appeals to, a kind of emotion
that short-circuits reason.
It is a language of the heart that works to insulate us from the
decisions we have made and paradoxically distances us from those
whose military service we seek to recognize. We see it in the empty
profusion of yellow ribbons and lapel-pin flags. We hear it in the
organized celebrations of American heroes and patriotic values:
celebrity public service announcements, beer commercials about
military homecomings, the more jingoistic variants of country music,
and the National Football League's "Salute to Service" campaign.
All these observances noisily claim to honor and celebrate, in the
words of the NFL, "the service and sacrifice of our nation's troops."
We have become exhibitionists of sentiment: The more public and
theatrical our emotional displays, the better we seem to feel.
Indeed, what's the point of war if it doesn't give you that warm
and fuzzy sense of unity that is so foreign to everyday existence
in America today? Consider this passage:
Everyone rose in unison, and some members of Congress wept as Obama
extolled the sergeant's sacrifice. In this, antagonistic leaders
could evince a solidarity they had not shown since they united in
sending Remsburg to war in the first place. Submerged in the
celebration of a "new generation of heroes" were all those nagging
questions about the use of force that ought to have dominated debate
in the first place. Lawmakers seemed to be seeking absolution for
their earlier uncritical enthusiasm by joining together in a tearful
expression of feeling.
This sort of sentimental ity is one way Americans avoid the actual
experience of war. While plenty of individuals experience tragic loss,
the nation as a whole goes from one fake triumph to another, refusing
to admit that so many individuals died for nothing -- "in vain," as
the unspeakable phrase goes. Last week Obama was explaining the need
to send more military forces into Iraq so as to prevent those who had
died in the 2003-11 war from having "died in vain." The fact is that
all those American soldiers -- more than 3000 of them -- died for no
good reason and to no good effect, "for a mistake" as John Kerry once
(but no more) had the guts to say.
Stephen M Walt: Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry:
Walt identifies four factors why people (in high places in government
and the media) still take neoconservatives seriously, despite their
perfect track record for being disastrously wrong: Shamelessness (their
utter disregard for the truth); Financial Support (noting that even
Elliott Abrams can "land a well-funded senior fellowship at CFR");
Receptive and Sympathetic Media (including New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post); and Liberal
Allies (including Samantha Power and Susan Rice still working for
The neocons' staying power also reminds us that the United States can
get away with irresponsible public discourse because it is very, very
secure. Iraq was a disaster, and it helped pave the way to defeat in
Afghanistan, but at the end of the day the United States will come home
and probably be just fine. True, thousands of our fellow citizens would
be alive and well today had we never listened to the neoconservatives'
fantasies, and Americans would be more popular abroad and more prosperous
at home if their prescriptions from 1993 forward had been ritually ignored.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive too, and the Middle East
would probably be in somewhat better condition (it could hardly be worse).
I'd say that the problem is more deeply ideological. The American
political class suffers from a tightly bound set of delusions that
derive from the notions that America has a unique role in the world,
that it has that role because of its unique commitment to freedom
and justice, that dominant military power enhances that commitment,
and that the result of American hegemony is benevolent for everyone
in the world (except evil people who hate our freedom). The depth
and resilience of belief in these tenets is really pretty amazing.
It derives, I think, from the Cold War interpretation of the US in
WWII, although that story was laid on top of a much older and deeper
doctrine of American exceptionalism. It works because it is deeply
flattering, and it continues to work because our political leaders
(both in office and in the media, including followers of both parties
as well as avowed centrists) keep repeating and reinforcing it --
a fairly trivial but nonetheless annoying example is how Obama ends
every speech with "God bless America."
Yet it wouldn't be hard to rephrase those planks in ways that make
their absurdity obvious. Clearly, there are people who chafe at American
power but are not evil, and all too often American power diminishes
freedom. Clearly, military power does not ensure virtue, and in fact
we readily recognize that power can be and often is abused. And on
some level we must realize that Americans are not all that different
from people elsewhere. In fact, it's worth noting that one of the
old tenets of American exceptionalism was that we were a relatively
classless society (at least as compared to Europe), something clung
to more in theory than in fact then, but grossly overturned now --
whatever moral claims the US had as one of the world's more equitable
societies has been squandered away, yet many cling to the belief and
are repeatedly surprised when the world disagrees.
It's worth noting that this cluster of ideological beliefs is more
often than not untested. Although some people, mostly on the liberal
interventionist side of the spectrum, instinctively see each and every
problem in the world as ripe for American fixing, the powers that be
have less appetite for trouble, so most conflicts are conveniently
ignored. The neocons have little sympathy for all that humanitarian
crap (although, as Walt says, they are shameless when it suits them --
cf. the Bushes fawning over all those Afghan schoolgirls they liberated),
but what gets them worked up is any threat to US power. Thus, the US
had to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, not to help anyone but to remind
the world that the US can still kick their asses.
The neocons are back now because one of their cherished myths is
being tested: that the US occupation of Iraq had been a success, leaving
a stable, viable allied government in place. (Conveniently, the neocons
don't have to prove that any such thing ever existed, because they can
quote Obama saying just that.) They argue that Obama has to act now not
because lots of Iraqis may be killed -- their kind of action will just
make that happen earlier rather than later -- but because if he doesn't
act the myth of American omnipotence will be lost. And it looks like
Obama believes them, not because they're credible so much as because
the ideology they all adhere to is beyond question.
Also, a few links for further study:
Hailey Branson-Potts: Oklahoma coming to terms with unprecedented surge
in earthquakes: For thirty years Oklahoma averaged only two magnitude-3.0
or higher earthquakes per year. In 2013 the number jumped to 109, and this
year there have already been more than 200. "Scientists say the more likely
cause of the recent increase is underground injection wells drilled by the
oil and gas industry. About 80 percent of the state is within 9 miles of an
injection well, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey." Oil industry
officials want to study the matter further.
Paul Krugman: Does He Pass the Test?: Review of Timothy Geithner's
book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.
Beccy Tanner: Longtime activist Alice Powell dies at age 85: A
good friend, dearly missed.
Finally, a bunch of miscellaneous links on Iraq:
Andrew J Bacevich: The Duplicity of the Ideologues: US Policy & Robert Kagan's Fictive Narrative: "Back in 1996, in a famous Foreign Affairs
article co-authored with William Kristol, Kagan identified 'benign global
hegemony' as the proper basis for US policy. It was incumbent upon the
United Staes to exploit its Cold War victory. Armed with a combination
of 'military supremacy and moral confidence,' Washington needed to put
existing and potential adversaries in their place. The idea was "to make
clear that it is futile to compete with American power."
Phyllis Bennis: Don't Go Back to Iraq!.
Bob Dreyfuss: Obama Sets the US on a Slippery Slope to War in Iraq.
Tom Engelhardt: Who Won Iraq?: "The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful
sense that they were building an American protectorate. . . .
And not a thing -- nothing -- worked out as planned. You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred. For
those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it's long been
apparent that their war and occupation would cost the US, literally and
figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove
beyond calculating). More than two trillion dollars later -- without
figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come -- Iraq is a
Simon Jenkins: Further military intervention in Iraq? The very idea beggars belief:
"Tony Blair returned this week from beyond the grave and showed no concern
for justice, reason or even national interest. He is a confirmed Iraq
disaster-denier. Civilisation may advance in leaps and bounds over
millennia, but politics remains stuck in Homer's day, in human vanity
and tribal loyalty." "That is why the causes and effects of 2003 must
be nailed to the wall, time and again. Trillions of dollars were spent
and tens of thousands of people died, for no good reason then and no
good reason now. It was a total disgrace."
Marc Lynch: How can the US help Maliki when Maliki's the problem?
Robert Naiman: The President Has No Mandate to Bomb Iraq or Syria:
Obama claims that Bush's 2002 AUMF resolution is all the authority he
needs to bomb Iraq (or to bomb ISIS in Syria). "On Thursday night, 182
Members of the House voted yes on Representative Barbara Lee's amendment
defunding the use of the 2002 Iraq Authorization for the Use of Military
Force." Not a majority, but close.
Bernie Sanders: Flashback: All the Ways the Neocons were Wrong about Iraq:
quotes from Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Waldman: On Iraq, let's ignore those who got it all wrong: Names
names, too, including: "Yet today, the media once again seek out John
McCain's wisdom and insight on Iraq, which is kind of like saying, "Jeez,
it looks like we might be lost -- we really need to ask Mr. Magoo for
Russ Wellen: Why ISIS Shouldn't Be Branded Terrorists: "Terrorism
leads to panicked over-reaction" -- although that's precisely the
neocon intent: to panic us into over-reaction. I'd add that before
we panic at the mention of some Al-Qaeda-wannabe, we need to figure
out whether that group has adopted Bin Laden's "far enemy" doctrine.
Sunday, June 8. 2014
Spent most of the past week working on a stand for a large TV as
we attempt to adopt some 21st century technology. Project should be
done by now, but for lack of some muscle isn't. Very frustrating.
As, of course, is the news, once again generating some scattered
links this week:
Fred Kaplan: What People Don't Understand About the Bergdahl Deal:
Quite a bit, then there's what Kaplan doesn't understand either. It's
been amusing to watch the right react with horror and disgust over this
all-too-human soldier as if he's the reason their holy war went down the
shitter, much as it's been something else (silly?) as Obama and company
have tried to paint his recovery as a triumph. Still, I take it to be
good news that one of the war's loose ends has been tied up. I also
regard it as a plus that the population of Guantanamo drops by five --
locked up they may not be personal threats but they're glaring symbols
of US injustice, and that's a far more dangerous game. Finally, this
shows some promise for negotiating an end to the Afghan civil war --
a vast improvement over the more likely course, which is to continue
the war through proxies.
Greg Sargent: On Bowe Bergdahl, lawmakers need to do better.
Elias Isquith: Wingnuts' war on the troops: The ugly lesson of Bowe Bergdahl
and Sarah Palin:
We're all familiar with how conservatives -- but especially extreme ones
like Palin -- deify, romanticize and claim ownership of the men and women
in the armed forces. [ . . . ] Less understood is that
when a member of the military fails to adhere to the far right's rigid
formula of what a soldier should be (nationalistic, religious, obedient;
conservative) right-wingers like Palin come down on them like a ton of
bricks. Where they once were heroes of almost mythic proportion, now they
become charlatans -- or maybe even traitors. During these moments, the far
right's hatred for the apostate soldier can only be understood if it's
recognized as a mirror image of their usual reverence. It's not just that
Sarah Palin is disappointed with Bergdahl for loathing the war in
Afghanistan so much that he was "ashamed to be an American"; it's that
she now considers Bergdahl to be someone who is worth so little that the
president's acting to secure his life and liberty is, effectively, an
insult to the rest. [ . . . ] Taken together, the
far right's dehumanization of the American soldier is clear. If he or
she is willing to promote the Sarah Palin version of patriotism, honor
and masculinity (or at least allow themselves to be used for that purpose),
they are not human beings but rather legends and gods. And if they refuse,
they lose their humanity once more, now becoming contemptible beyond all
The right's love-hate relationship with the American soldier shows
up again in their approach to the VA. In particular, they tend to treat
something like PTSD as a character flaw, a disgrace to hero status they
automatically assign to soldiers, until they prove human. They prefer
that the VA only serve soldiers who prove worthy of their worship, as
opposed to the ordinary people who get caught up and spit out by the
military's cult of violence.
Phillip Longman: VA Care: Still the Best Care Anywhere?, and
Part II: A few weeks ago we accidentally picked up a robocall from
Senator Pat Roberts promising to get to the bottom of the VA Scandal --
you can imagine how reassuring that was. Then, as now, the news was
dominated by political reaction with a minimum of facts. On any given
news topic there are people you expect to be able to weigh in with
informed and intelligent opinions, and there are many more you are
best off ignoring. On the VA health care system, the one person I
wanted to hear from was Phillip Longman, who wrote a long article
in 2005 touting the VA as offering
The Best Care Anywhere, which he later expanded into a short book,
Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours
(paperback, 2007, Polipoint Press). Longman's argument runs against
the common wisdom, which basically argues that government bureaucracy
is intrinsically self-interested and therefore careless or incompetent
when it comes to fulfilling its chartered duties. Indeed, the history
of the VA is littered with political cronies with a very mixed record
of performance. However, Longman attributes two moves by Bill Clinton
as leading to a major turnaround at the VA: the appointment of Kenneth
W. Kizer as VHA undersecretary of health, and a 1996 law which greatly
expanded eligibility for VA coverage. Historically, one of the major
problems with VA health coverage has been determining eligibility. Vets
with combat injuries are covered, but vets without combat injuries are
not, and there is a lot of gray area between the obvious cases, and a
lot of the controversy surrounding the VA is over eligibility. Bush,
in 2003, reversed Clinton's expansion of eligibility, probably because
he wanted to make the Iraq war look cheaper, and indeed future medical
needs for veterans are a large component of the costs tallied up by
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes in The Three Trillion Dollar
War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Obama, in 2009, loosened
up VA eligibility, but it still remains a bureaucratic battlefield
and a background component of the scandal.
Longman's article and book detail just how the VA health system was
reformed. The key point is that the VA is a single-payer, single-provider
system: all the hospital staff, including doctors, are employees, and
the patients are lifetime wards of the system. This explains why the
VA was able to pioneer the use of electronic records, and thereby to
almost totally eliminate common errors like giving patients the wrong
medication. This also made the VA a leader in measuring outcomes and
determining best practices, and ultimately in building tools to give
management a fine-grained picture of system performance. That should
work very well, but it turns out that one of the metrics -- wait time
for various procedures -- was scammed by various administrators who
risked the health of their patients in order to fake a metric. As
Longman explains, this scandalous practice only happened in Sun Belt
hospitals where resources have been strained by migration. Still,
it's unlikely that the problem ends there. It's rare for managers to
lie like this unless they feel other incentives are more important,
like the desire to limit costs. (Otherwise, any bureaucrat worth his
salt would highlight increasing wait times are proof that he needs
more resources.) Indeed, despite all the sanctimonious blather about
supporting the troops, costs are a contentious issue. Republicans,
in particular, have ideological problems with the VA, which first
and foremost is a welfare organization -- a parasite on the country
which encourages soul-crushing dependency on the state -- plus it's
proof that the most cost-effective way to provide high qualify health
care is through a fully non-profit public system.
But if taxpayers are willing to put a little more money into the
system, the "scandal" can be fixed easily enough. First, of course,
get rid of the administrators who tried to game the system. In the
short term, allow services that the VA system cannot perform in a
timely fashion to be outsourced to commercial. In the medium term
do a better job of tracking veterans' migration and make sure the
resources you'll need are there in time. In the long term, stay out
of war, but that would bring into question the need for a separate
system for veterans -- although even as the number of veterans drops,
the vitality of the system could be extended by allowing non-veterans
to choose the VA as a "public option." (For starters, I wish all VA
hospitals would offer free abortions to all comers. Doing so would
defend a constitutional right of the American people, and it would
be very hard for anti-abortion mobs to disrupt the VA.)
PS: also see
Phillip Longman: How VA Outsourcing Hurts Veterans.
Also, a few links for further study:
Kathleen Geier: Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System:
Review of Suzanne Mettler's Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of
Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (2014, Basic Books).
For affluent students, an elite college education represents a crucial
opportunity for networking and resume-building on their paths to prosperity
and success. But students from low- and moderate-income families are finding
it increasingly difficult to complete their bachelor's degrees, even when
they boast academic qualifications identical to their wealthier counterparts.
Indeed, one study cited in Mettler's book showed that a student with high
test scores from a low-income family is no more likely to graduate than a
low-scoring rich kid. Research has identified rising tuition in public
colleges as the chief reason for lower college completion rates among the
Most people run into crises of some sort during college, but the big
advantage of the wealthy is that their money cushions the blows and gives
them extra opportunities. (I know, for instance, that personal crises,
including lack of money, kept me from the Ph.D. and an academic career
that I was easily capable of. And I'm pretty certain that if G.W. Bush
had been Bill Clinton's cousin, the only way he would have got out of
Tyson's chicken factory was jail.) The poor are more vulnerable, and
they carry the burden of higher costs -- unconscionable debt load is
the best known, but working odd jobs and such take their toll. And in
the end, they don't even get the same education. As inequality increases,
the value of an education shifts from what you learn to who you meet and
how agreeable you are to them. (Clinton and Obama are prime examples of
smart poor kids who met many rich patrons and proved most agreeable.
That used to be an important path to upward mobility, but one wonders
whether future generations will be able to point to similar examples.)
Daniel Schulman: Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch:
He "Considers Hmself Above the Law": More from Schulman's book,
Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful
and Private Dynasty. Back in the mid-1970s I worked in a type shop
in Wichita. We did occasional work for Koch Industries. The toughest
job I had there was doing some math-intensive technical papers on oil
viscosity, but I was also given whole books by Murray Rothbard to type,
and as such became intimately familiar with the contorted gymnastics
Rothbard went through to come up with schemes for conflict resolution
and justice that didn't involve government. At that point I pretty much
loathed everything associated with government, and I had a relatively
generous view of human nature, but I still couldn't see any way Rothbard's
schemes could work, or even should work, so that was the point when I
soured on libertarianism. It's not clear if Charles Koch also decided
that Rothbard's schemes were unworkable, as it was Rothbard to split
from his sponsor, charging Koch with abusing his political theories for
personal gain. That, of course, rings true.
Sunday, May 25. 2014
Once again, my links are more scattered than usual, most picked up at
the last minute scrounging through the usual suspects.
Barry Eisler: 'Journalist' Argues in NY Times That Publishing Decisions
Should Ultimately Be Made by Government: "Journalist" in question
is liberal opinion "buckraker" Michael Kinsley, who occasionally has an
interesting insight (cf. his characterization of the American people as
"big babies") but is often the first to throw in the towel, believing
that liberalism is better protected by surrendering to "common wisdom"
than by employing principles. The occasion is Glenn Greenwald's new book,
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance
State, with Kinsley defending the NSA: after all, what could go bad
"in a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are)"? Eisler
places "journalist" in quotes, citing George Orwell: "Journalism is
printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is
Glenn Greenwald: A Response to Michael Kinsley.
Thomas Frank: Congratulations, class of 2014: You're totally screwed:
Welcome to the wide world, Class of 2014. You have by now noticed the
tremendous consignment of debt that the authorities at your college have
spent the last four years loading on your shoulders. It may interest you
to know that the average student-loan borrower among you is now $33,000
in debt, the largest of any graduating class ever. According to a new
study by the Pew Research Center, carrying that kind of debt will have
certain predictable effects. It will impede your ability to accumulate
wealth, for example. You will also borrow more for other things than
people without debt, and naturally you will find your debt level growing,
not shrinking, as the years pass.
As you probably know, neither your parents nor your grandparents were
required to take on this kind of burden in order to go to college.
Neither are the people of your own generation in France and Germany
and Argentina and Mexico.
Of course, all that school debt is only the starter. Not even Frank
can describe in one sitting all the way you're screwed.
Martin Longman: Some Dude Wrote a Manifesto: Among the week's news,
some "dude" named Elliot Rodger exercised his "second amendment rights"
and killed a bunch of people in Santa Barbara [CA] this week. He seems
to have given his rampage a lot of premeditation, going so far as to
write a "137-page manifesto" -- Longman quotes a bit of it here, e.g.:
"Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am
more than human. I am superior to them all." And: "It is my purpose to
punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong
with it." In the aftermath, most are quick to declare Rodger mentally
ill, although some also point out Rodger's rampant misogyny (e.g.,
Katie McDonough: How toxic male entitlement devalues women's and men's
Jessica Valenti: Further proof that misogyny kills). Still, what
most struck me from the newsreel footage was the spiffy, very expensive
BMW the "dude" was driving. Clearly, he comes from and has access to
a lot of money, and presumes himself entitled to the perks of his class.
Even more characteristically, when he's denied satisfaction, he has the
inbred self-esteem to reaffirm his superiority.
Nick Turse: The US Military's New Normal in Africa: The real
meaning of Benghazi is that even a relatively well managed military
intervention is liable to produce all sorts of surprising and often
malign consequences. As Tom Engelhardt points out in his introduction:
In response to Boko Haram's kidnapping of 276 young women, the Obama
administration has already sent in a small military team (with FBI,
State Department, and Justice Department representatives included)
and launched drone and "manned surveillance flights," which may prove
to be just the first steps in what one day could become a larger
operation. Under the circumstances, it's worth remembering that the
U.S. has already played a curious role in Nigeria's destabilization,
thanks to its 2011 intervention in Libya. In the chaos surrounding
the fall of Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi, his immense arsenals of
weapons were looted and soon enough AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades,
and other light weaponry, as well as the requisite pick-up trucks
mounted with machine guns or anti-aircraft guns made their way across
an increasingly destabilized region, including into the hands of Boko
Haram. Its militants are far better armed and trained today thanks to
But while "Benghazi" should be read as a cautionary tale against
the hubris of military intervention, the lesson the military has taken
is that it needs to be able to act faster with less oversight -- the
drift of the Republican hawks who've been most vociferous in their
congenital desire to depict Obama as a weak leader. (Indeed, he does
wobble at the knees way too much, but mostly when the hawks seek to
trap him in future wars -- the insertion of US troops into Chad,
ostensibly to solve a problem in Nigeria, is a case in point.)
For a broader survey of what's followed the intervention in Libya,
Seumas Milne: Coups and terror are the fruit of Nato's war in Libya:
But it's not just Libya that's living with the fallout from Nato's
intervention. Blowback from the Libyan war has spread across Africa,
destabilising the Sahel region and beyond. After Gaddafi's fall,
Tuareg people who had fought for him went home to Mali, bringing
Libyan arms caches with them. Within months, that had tipped northern
Mali into full-scale armed rebellion and takeover by Islamist fighters.
[ . . . ]
But, as elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, each outside
intervention only spreads the cycle of the terror war. So the call
for action over the outrage of the Boko Haram kidnapping has brought
US, British and French forces to oil-wealthy Nigeria, just as the
Mali crisis last year led to the establishment of a US military
drone base in neighbouring Niger.
US armed forces are now involved in 49 out of 54 African states,
along with the former colonial powers of France and Britain, in what's
becoming a new carve-up of the continent: a scramble for resources and
influence in the face of China's growing economic role, underpinned
with an escalating military presence that spreads terror as it grows.
That will bring its own backlash, as did the war in Libya.
Also, a few links for further study:
The Cooperative Economy: A Conversation With Gar Alperovitz: Author
of several notable books, most recently What Then Must We Do?: Straight
Talk About the Next American Revolution.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations: I spent a good deal of
time this past week with a dear friend who eloquently and persuasively
argued that the middle class has been decimated in New York -- in no
small part due to landlords like her employer -- then seemed to believe
that non-whites were making out like bandits on welfare. I know a lot
of people believe that, but I've never found any evidence of it: either
that welfare is disproportionately routed to non-whites or that anyone
can live off it at anything more than subsistence levels. Moreover, it's
clear to me that the chronically poor (of all races) have many structural
disadvantages that keep them poor. Also, I'm old enough I recall when
racist discrimination was both the law and custom of the land, and while
I've seen much progress in civil rights during my lifetime, I know good
and well that the past lingers on. So I've never been bothered by even
superficial attempts to balance the scales through "affirmative action" --
even though the ideal of eliminating race correlation at every income
level strikes me as a hollow victory compared to reducing inequality for
all. But reparations rubs me wrong, not least because it depends so much
on inheritance as a means of rectifying past wrongs.
Kevin Drum: Retired Army General Explains Why We Lost in Afghanistan and
Iraq: Quote from and comment on Daniel P. Bolger's Why We Lost: A
General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (release date
November). Interesting mostly as a signpost on how Afghanistan/Iraq will
be viewed by military elites: as an inevitable defeat due not so much to
bad policies as to the deep structure of the military. Bolger doesn't go
so far as to criticize why Bush started those wars, and seems to think
that a quick incursion and speedy exit would have been just peachy, but
this does not bode well for the Petraeus types who hope to restructure
the military around counterinsurgency struggles that stretch out forever.
One needs to push this analysis further, but the first step to recovery
is recognizing you have a problem.
Don Leffer: Chanute aims to provide speedy Internet service to all homes,
businesses in town: Chanute is a small town in southeastern Kansas
(pop. 9119 in 2010). Unable to get any company to provide high-speed
internet, they decided to do it themselves as a public utility, and to
their (but not my) surprise they found they can do it much cheaper:
for $13.5 million they could hook up every house and business in town,
but won't be going quite that far, instead offering a wired gigabit
service for $40/month, a bit more for businesses. (Also see
City-run Internet system helps Chanute businesses grow.) The
response of the companies that spurned Chanute? They tried to get
a bill passed to prohibit cities from offering broadband access. (See:
Proposed bill to outlaw community broadband service in Kansas met with
Daniel Schulman: Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America's
Most Powerful Family: An excerpt or so from Schulman's new book, Sons
of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private
Dynasty. Mostly background, focusing on the family feuds that moved
brothers Fred and Bill out of the spotlight, leaving control of the family
business to the ideologically compatible Charles and David.
I should also note that Richard Kieffer Feeley died this past week,
way too young at age 34. He was the son of friends from my years in
Boston, so I first met him when he was in his teens, looking forward
to a life of much promise and interest. I never knew him well, but I
do know that chronic illness dimmed those prospects. Such things
happen, more frequently than most people realize. Indeed, it is only
a deranged mind that thinks each person fully responsible for his or
her fate, or indeed that ascribes fate at all.
Sunday, May 11. 2014
Some scattered links this week, somewhat shortened because I've been
distracted with other things today:
Kathleen Geier: What the "Mad Men" Economy Can Teach Us About Ours:
I have a slightly different theory about what Peggy's big raise on Mad
Men meant, one based mostly on personal experience. I got a job with
a start-up in 1986, and got a salary bump from $45k to $53k, which with
a couple other factors was enough to move me out of the red. The company
was hard-strapped for a couple years, then hit a point when they could
afford to hand out a round of raises. Mine was 10k, a little less than
Peggy's bump percentwise, but close. I was floored, but had moved from
individual engineer to working engineer + manager in the meantime, and
the raise was management's way of saying "you're one of us now." Same
with Peggy, plus the added political angle that Lou is trying to use
her for leverage against Don. Pretty straightforward, and given the
management-motivation overtones something that can still happen today:
indeed, given that the gulf between management and workers has grown
so wide, and that management has become so much more self-serving (the
word I first thought of was "evil"), this may be even more prevalent.
Money, after all, is the one thing that managers can count on their
own ranks as responding to -- not least because the right-wing work
so hard to prevent government from doing anything that would lessen
the desperate fear that drives managers to seek ever more money.
The rest of Geier's piece illustrates why large raises are so
unfamiliar to most people. In particular, see this chart on how
wages have been unhooked from productivity gains ever since the
right-wing revival in the late 1970s. (The growing difference goes
to the owners, and that's where most of the gains of the 1% come
from -- what you might call the solid gains, as opposed to a lot
of financialization, corporate predation, and asset inflation
a/k/a bubbles. In between are tax breaks and other efforts to
reduce democratic government's tendency to redistribute income
Ann Jones: How to Lose Friends and Influence No One (The State Department
Way): On funding cuts for the Fulbright scholar exchange programs, $30
million at a time USAID spends $46.2 billion on things like their twitter
spoof for Cuba and their neverending Afghanistan boondoggles. Jones quotes
Senator J. William Fulbright on why he created the program that bears his
name: "Aw, hell, I just wanted to educate these goddam ignorant Americans."
If that's the reason, the program should be more in demand than ever, but
increasingly ignorance is seen as a desirable political goal, not something
that happens naturally in the absence of remedying policy. But in this case
the problem seems to be that the State Department wants programs that they
can manage for their assumed security ends, rather than for the public
good (either our public or anyone else's):
Now the landscape has shifted, and the globe has tilted to match the slant
of America's exceptional (and mostly classified) interests, as well as a
version of "national security" dependent upon secrecy, not exchange, and
war, not peace. You can see how the land lies today by tracing the dispersal
of U.S. troops around that badly bashed and lopsided globe or tracking the
itinerary of President Obama, just back from an Asian trip that included
a new agreement extending the reach of soldiers, not scholars.
You can search hard and find little trace of those quaint old notions
of international understanding and peace on the American agenda. Consider
it a sign of the times that a president who, from his Nobel acceptance
speech putting in a good word for war to his surges in Afghanistan to the
"kill list" he regularly mulls over in the White House, has hardly been
a Nobel Prize-quality executive, yet must still repeatedly defend himself
against charges that he is too slow and far too wussy to go to war,
perhaps as a result of his own "un-American" international childhood.
Robert B Reich: How to Shrink Inequality: I don't mean to be harsh on
the little guy. His insight that the gated communities and exclusive clubs
of the rich were effectively a way of "seceding from America" -- distancing
themselves from the rest of us, and thereby freeing themselves from any
sense of moral responsibility for the welfare of the country -- was major,
almost making up for his idiot notion that the future of the working class
was to become high-paid "symbol manipulators." His heart is usually in the
right place, he recognizes the major problems of our times, and his ideas
about what to do about them aren't the worst, but often they're not the
best either. He clearly recognizes that increasing inequality is a major
problem these days, but consider his list of solutions:
- Make work pay. [raise the minimum wage to $15/hour, peg it to
inflation, abolish the tipped minimum wage, expand the Earned Income Tax
- Unionize low-wage workers. [I prefer regulatory measures which
improve workplace rights and standards, and various mechanisms to give
workers more equity and management responsibility in companies. Unions
compete for resources and that causes strife and inefficiency. Other
arrangements seek to align worker and investor interests around greater
productivity that is more equitably shared.]
- Invest in education. ["Education should not be thought of as
a private investment; it is a public good that helps both individuals
and the economy."]
- Invest in infrastructure. [Reich is vague here. One thing to
look for is opportunities to eliminate toll booths, especially where the
marginal cost of reproduction is near zero -- free software, internet
access, entertainment are examples, as are literal toll booths on
turnpikes and bridges.]
- Pay for these investments with higher taxes on the wealthy.
[You can also increase the overall tax level with consumption taxes like
a VAT, but income and estate taxes should be more progressive to better
balance out inequality.]
- Make the payroll tax progressive. [Better to make the income
tax more progressive. The payroll tax wouldn't even be necessary if the
income tax was extended to cover Social Security, etc.]
- Raise the estate tax and eliminate the "stepped-up basis" for
determining capital gains at death.
- Constrain Wall Street.
- Give all Americans a share in future economic gains.
- Get big money out of politics.
One important thing that Reich doesn't mention is patents: they're
a major source of corporate rents, and if anything they hamper innovation.
Another is aggressive antitrust enforcement, which again limits inequality
by supporting more competitive markets. Basically, anything which helps
to reduce the return on capital helps to reduce inequality. One might,
for instance, make it easier to form cooperatives and nonprofits to
compete with corporations. The other major approach is to attempt to
decouple inequality from regressive social policy. The more things
are treated as a public right, the less practical advantage the rich
enjoy, hence the less inequality matters. To a large extent how, the
problem isn't that X makes more or has more than you do; the problem
is that X's advantage converts into a priority and privilege over you
in so many important aspects of everyday life. Redistribution is one
way to redress that problem, but there are others, and probably the
best approach is some combination of both.
Also, a few links for further study:
Kathleen Geier: R.I.P., Gary Becker: Not an obit for the late, arguably
great economist so much as an extended argument with him, as if his death
was just a diversion from everything that matters. Becker was a pioneer
in applying microeconomic logic to numerous everyday situations that we
rarely think of as determined by economics. Geier, a former student of his,
takes him to task for his theory of the family (and various related affronts
to feminism) and his theory of human capital.
Anand Gopal: How to Lose a War That Wasn't There: Excerpt from Gopal's
new book on Afghanistan: No Good Men Among the Living: America, the
Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.
To understand how America's battle in Afghanistan went so wrong for so
long, a (hidden) history lesson is in order. In those early years after
2001, driven by the idée fixe that the world was rigidly divided into
terrorist and non-terrorist camps, Washington allied with Afghan
warlords and strongmen. Their enemies became ours, and through faulty
intelligence, their feuds became repackaged as "counterterrorism."
The story of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who turned from America's potential
ally into its greatest foe, is the paradigmatic case of how the war on
terror created the very enemies it sought to eradicate.
Several pieces on the FCC's attempt to end "net neutrality":
This week's Piketty pieces:
John Cassidy: The "Piketty Bubble" Is More Than Hot Air
Kathleen Geier: What Piketty's Conservative Critics Get Wrong: "Send
in the clowns!" Reads (so you don't have to) and links to: Reihan Salam,
Daniel Shuchman, Megan McArdle, Fredrik deBoer, Kevin Hassett, Scott
Winship, Tyler Cowen, Joshua Hendrickson, Clive Crook.
Paul Rosenberg: Thomas Piketty terrifies Paul Ryan: Behind the right's
desperate, laughable need to destroy an economist: links to several
of the pieces below, and also reviews Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting
Doug Henwood: The Top of the World
Sunday, May 4. 2014
Some scattered links this week. First, Crowson today, on Governor
Sam Brownback, following the news that his Arthur Laffer-approved
tax cuts have resulted in a massive shortfall in state tax revenues,
while the state economy has lagged behind virtually every other state:
Phillip Brownlee comments in WE Blog:
Gov. Sam Brownback and GOP lawmakers blamed President Obama for why
Kansas tax collections in April were $93 million less than projected.
"There are . . . natural consequences for being in an
ocean, in a sea, that belongs to Obama," said Rep. Pete DeGraaf,
R-Mulvane. Though it is silly to blame the revenue drop on Obama,
it certainly is true that the Kansas economy is linked to the national
and global economies. That being the case, was it unrealistic to think
that Kansas' income-tax cuts, which were relatively small compared
with the larger economy, would act like "a shot of adrenaline into
the heart of the Kansas economy," as Brownback promised? So far,
Kansas' economy is lagging the nation and neighboring states while
personal income-tax collections are $508 million less than at this
point last fiscal year.
Other notable links this week, more than usual from my hometown paper:
Kathleen Geier: The Apple-Samsung Patent Wars and Our Broken IP System:
Regarding Apple v. Samsung, "threatening to become the longest, as well as
most pointless, legal dispute since Jarndyce v. Jarndyce."
In fact, an intellectual property regime that grants excessively strong
protection to rights-holders has the potential to stifle innovation,
incentivize unproductive economic activity, rip off consumers and
taxpayers, and generally increase economic inequality. That, unfortunately,
is the IP regime that has developed in the U.S. today. For instance, the
current system makes it difficult to combine patented features by different
companies in one product. Want to build a smartphone with Android-style
widgets and a Siri-type search function? Unfortunately, you're out of
luck. Firms can also harass the competition by threatening lawsuits,
especially against newer, smaller firms unable to afford access to our
pricey legal system.
Ed Kilgore: Perry "Next in Line?": I don't normally care much for
these presidential horse race pieces, especially when you're talking
about beings with as little human appeal as Republican presidential
aspirants, but I thought Kilgore's last line has broader applicability
than just to Rick Perry (the man who couldn't decide whether Oklahoma's
botched execution was inhumane):
[Dick] Morris deems Perry Next-In-Line simply by dismissing the other
2012 losers as, well, losers, and then suggesting that Perry can do
better this time if he does this and that and doesn't do this and that.
If he had some ham, he could make a ham sandwich, if he had some bread.
As Kilgore explains, "'Next In Line' is one of those theories that
sounds compelling thanks to the very limited sample size of recent
presidential nominating contexts." The evident series goes back to
Ronald Reagan in 1980 (he was runner-up to Ford in 1976), and didn't
apply in 2000 (GW Bush didn't run in 1996; the runner up to Bob Dole
was who? Pat Buchanan? Steve Forbes? no one else won a single primary).
So we're really just talking Reagan (1980), Bush (1988), Dole (1996),
McCain (2008), and Romney (2012). Like Bush (2000), those were all
candidates who quickly gained a consensus backing by the powers in
the party (whoever they may be). Rick Santorum may be next in line,
but I doubt if he can make that grade (although far be it from me to
claim to be able to read the minds of Republicans; on the other hand,
Dick Morris wrote a whole book about his dream match-up between
Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, so his track record may well
be worse than mine).
Tim Potter: In Wichita, gun storage around kids no longer set by law:
Last week in Wichita a four-year old child found a loaded gun in a drawer
and shot and killed his one-year-old brother (see story
here). We haven't yet degenerated to the point where we're trying
four-year-olds as adults, but some people wondered about the father
leaving a loaded gun where his kids could find it. Turns out that's
There was a time in Wichita when an ordinance required adults to properly
secure guns around children. [ . . . ] For 12 years,
Wichita had an ordinance regulating gun storage around children. The
Wichita law required that guns be properly secured if someone under 18
could have access and required that adults keep guns unloaded, locked
away or secured with trigger locks. [ . . . ] In
2005, the Wichita gun storage ordinance was repealed because a state
law nullified it.
After the ordinance was repealed, from 2007 through 2013, Wichita
police recorded on average eight accidental shootings at homes each
year, according to numbers Lt. Dan East provided Friday. In 2013, 10
shootings were reported. [ . . . ]
Last month, the governor [Brownback] signed into law a bill that
will prohibit local governments from enforcing local gun ordinances
and will make gun laws uniform across the state.
[ . . . ]
The death is devastating, but having a law dictating safe gun
storage is not the solution, said Phil Journey, a longtime gun rights
advocate, former legislator and current Sedgwick County District
Safe-storage laws "don't prevent the tragedy. They punish people
afterward," Journey said.
As a legislator in 2005, Journey pushed for passage of a state
law that eliminated the Wichita ordinance on gun storage. He argued
that the law impinged on the right to self defense.
Of course, that's true of most criminal law, but you don't find
many people (even Republican legislators) arguing that we shouldn't
have a law against murder because it won't prevent the tragedy. If
anything, they argue the opposite: that a law against doing something
bad deters people from doing it, as well as punishing them after the
fact. Moreover, it's not unusual to have laws that are only enforceable
when their breach turns tragic. For instance, it is illegal to drive
without wearing seat belts, but it is rare that anyone is charged
except after the violation was revealed by an accident. (I'm not
saying that these are all good laws, just that there is precedent
for them.) But many people seem to get stupid when it comes to guns.
Journey's statement is rather revealing. What he's saying is that
the personal need for self-protection is so urgent that it trumps any
concerns about safety. And he's also saying that having a gun is an
effective means for self-protection. Neither assertion seems all that
valid to me.
Also, a few links for further study:
Stan Finger: Arid opening to 2014 echoes Dust Bowl spring of 1936:
Wichita has had less than two inches of rain so far this year, the
lowest total since 1936 (or before, back to the advent of record-keeping).
Nowadays in Kansas 1936 is mostly known for its record-setting heat
wave -- many of which were finally broken in 2011, when we had 53 100°
days -- but at the time it was the peak year for dust storms, including
one that blew all the way to Washington DC. Wichita has had above-average
rainfall the last two years, so the reservoirs are relatively full, but
this year's crops are hurting. Global warming climate models generally
predict increasing drought in Kansas, so every year that doesn't happen
I figure we got lucky. Still, this year looks to be the reckoning. Last
couple summers were also much milder than the persistent heat waves of
2009-11, and this year has been relatively cool . . .
until, well, yesterday. But as Finger notes, the first of those 100°
days in 2011 was May 9, the earliest that temperature had ever been
hit in Wichita. Well, not any more: as I write this, on May 4, the
official temperature outside is 102°.
Dave Helling/Brad Cooper: Brownback's ties to lobbyists under scrutiny:
As well they should be, as the Kansas governor's aides move on to lucrative
careers in lobbying, selling their access to their old connections. The
counterargument, of course, is that that's the way the system works, but
once you buy into that argument it's tempting to play fast and loose with
rules, thinking they're not really meant to be taken all that seriously
in the first place. Add to that the streak of self-righteousness that
Brownback wears like a cloak and you have the makings for some serious
mischief. The article doesn't wrap it all up, but does help you get a
sense of how the system works. For example:
[Riley] Scott, the son-in-law of Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle,
later picked up Pittsburg State University as a $36,000 client even
though the school had not hired a lobbyist for at least four years.
"Riley fit the bill," said school spokesman Chris Kelly. "He seemed
to fit where we wanted to go."
Wichita Area Technical College, which runs the National Center for
Aviation Training, hired Scott after lawmakers cut funding for the
center by $2 million last year.
It paid Parallel Strategies $30,000 for six months after employing
a different lobbyist for several years.
"I've been in this business a long time, and it's about relationships,"
said the school's president, Tony Kinkel. But, he said, "no one ever told
us who to hire."
The Kansas Dental Association hired Parallel Strategies this year to
oppose legislation creating midlevel dental providers who could perform
some of the duties now handled by dentists.
"We needed to have someone with close ties to the tea party conservative
Republicans," said Kevin Robertson, the association's executive director.
People associated with the governor also have landed lobbying jobs with
the three private companies running the state's Medicaid program, now known
Scott works for United Health Services. Amerigroup Kansas hired former
social services official Gary Haulmark. Matt Hickam, a former partner of
Kensinger's, now lobbies for Centene and its subsidiary, Sunflower State
Phillip Longman/Lina Khan: Terminal Sickness: "How a thirty-year-old
policy of deregulation is slowly killing America's airline system -- and
taking down Cincinnati, Memphis, and St. Louis with it." Interesting to
no small extent because airline deregulation is often regarded as one of
the few successes (trucking is the other one) of the Carter-Reagan era
of deregulation mania.
And, of course, deregulated airlines have nothing to stop themselves
from acknowledging increasing inequality and providing (relatively) lavish
treatment to "woo the one percent": see
David Owen: Game of Thrones.
Kelsey Ryan: Mandated, costly disease-coding system on hold, for now:
In the past, every health insurance company had its own coding system,
requiring doctors offices and hospitals to recode their claims to fit
the insurance company requirements, and in the process creating lots
of opportunities for insurance companies to reject claims, as well as
a market for software companies to sell packages to manage all of that
complexity. Any way you look at it, these coding systems have been a
major source of anti-productivity and bloated cost in health care. It's
not clear from this article whether ICD-10 is meant to solve this problem
by standardization or whether it just piles on, but the reported complaints
of doctors offices shelling out "between $200,000 and $250,000" for
software and training is a red flag. This is clearly a case where a
small investment in free software (on top of a standardized coding
system) would make a huge difference, reducing hassle and ultimately
saving costs without in any way hampering care. In fact, standardized
electronic medical records have been shown to improve care as well
as reduce costs.
Derek Thompson: Why America's Essentials Are Getting More Expensive
While Its Toys Are Getting Cheap: The graphic:
Thompson quotes Jordan Weissmann (link below): "Prices are rising
on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty."
The line on education is the most striking, especially compared to
health care, which has been the standard for corporate rapaciousness
for decades now. This strikes me as a compounding effect of inequality:
the rich aren't satisfied with getting richer, they feel even better
watching everyone else fall behind, and especially the high achievers
who would compete with them.
This also suggests that there is something to the notion that
cheaper prices on manufactured goods reduce the perceived impact
of relative impoverishment. As Thompson points out, those falling
prices are achieved through no cost to profits, but rather by
moving manufacturing to cheaper labor markets. Some modern-day
Marx might conclude, "television is the opium of the masses."
Annie Lowrey: Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind, and
Jordan Weissmann: Why Poverty Is Still Miserable, Even If Everybody Can
Own an Awesome Television.
Some other brief notes on various aspects of the national rot:
Cut this short to wallow in my poverty and watch some TV. There's
just way too much wretchedness to follow, especially when the answers
are so straightforward.
Sunday, April 27. 2014
Woke up this morning with the electric power down, a forced reset of
my entire operating environment. Did manage to sleep through whatever
the morning's storm front wrought (aside from the outage, if that was
related). Meanwhile, I had a lot of this already stashed away.
Some scattered links this week:
Lindsay Abrams: The Koch brothers are going after solar panels:
Not as well known as the story of the Koch's opposition to wind power --
one of the few things the Kochs have been voted down on in Kansas, because
no one appreciates a good tax break more than farmers and farmers still
have some sway in Kansas, even with Republicans. The Kochs are men of
strict principle, sure, but somehow the only principles they recognize
are ones that align with their business interests, which is to say oil.
I mean, if you worry about tax breaks "picking winners in the marketplace,"
how can you miss all the tax breaks favoring oil and coal? Ask them and
they may even tell you they're against those breaks, but you don't find
AFP or ALEC struggling to repeal them, and you sure don't find them in
favor of a carbon tax or anything similar that would force the fossil
fuel industries (and their consumers) to pay for externalities like air
pollution and global warming -- the sort of thing that is truly necessary
for the price of fossil fuels to reflect their true costs.
By the way, the good folks of Wichita are becoming increasingly aware
of those true costs as they contemplate the financial burden that will
be imposed on them if/when Wichita's ozone levels rise above EPA limits.
(Of course, some blame the EPA, but they should worry more about the
polluted air they breathe.) The main cause of smog (low-lying ozone
concentrations) is burned (and especially unburned) gasoline from cars,
trucks, and (especially) lawn equipment, although the other big factor
is urban sprawl -- Wichita has escaped the EPA thus far mostly because
it's a pretty windy place so most of its pollution is quickly dispersed
in the ever-more-distant countryside.
On issues like global warming the Kochs usually play defense, mostly
by trying to confuse or minimize the issue, while stressing the economic
importance of fossil fuels. In fact, few companies with similar interests
go out of their way to fight renewables. However, in their campaigns against
solar and wind power, the Kochs are effectively claiming that burning
up more oil and gas (and coal) with all its attendant side effects is a
good thing, something we should never limit, avoid, or find alternatives
Good quote at the end of the article, where Barry Goldwater Jr. comes
to the defense of solar:
Compared to that, even Goldwater's insistence that utilities are anti-free
market ("Choice means competition. Competition drives prices down and the
quality up. The utilities are monopolies. They're not used to competition.
That's what rooftop solar represents to them") may not be enough to sway
the rhetoric back in solar's favor.
So the Koch's opposition to solar aligns them with the monopoly power
John Cassidy: Is America an Oligarchy? I'd say yes, but the rich
still have to watch what they say, not so much because they have to
worry about the masses as because the ruling class isn't totally
cohesive so some elites may feel obliged (or righteous) enough to
slap down other elites (as Donald Sterling is finding out). But you
don't have to take my opinion for it. There's new research by Martin
Gilens and Benjamin Page that "found that the preferences of rich
people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than
the views of middle-income and poor Americans." Cassidy's conclusion:
There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate
influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort
policy in ways that don't necessarily benefit the majority: the
politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is
about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to
it as oligarchy or as something else.
Stephen Kinzer: On CIA abuses, denial does Americans no favors:
I was tempted to expand the list of examples, both of other countries
that seem unable to face their pasts (Turkey? UK? Russia?), and of
the long history of American misdeeds (Tom Carson created a trope for
this in his novel Gilligans Wake in the character of Mary Ann,
who remains forever a virgin because she instantly forgets every
The United States is hardly the only country that instinctively rejects
suggestions of past misdeeds. Japan still denies that its soldiers raped
and murdered their way through China before and during World War II.
Indonesia does not acknowledge that pro-government forces massacred
hundreds of thousands of civilians in the mid-1960s. France denies its
role in the Rwandan genocide.
Some countries, like Chile and South Africa, have honestly sought to
confront the sins of their past. These efforts, however, usually come
after an old regime has fallen. That makes honesty less difficult,
because perpetrators have been deposed and blaming them is easy.
Considering our own responsibility is harder.
[ . . . ]
Our country's first torture scandal erupted during the Philippines
campaign that began in 1898. President Theodore Roosevelt named his
closest ally, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to head an investigating
committee. Lodge made sure the probe faded away without coming to
During the Cold War, a Methodist bishop suggested to Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles that the United States, not just other
countries, had promoted repressive violence abroad. "Why do we have
to run that down?" Dulles replied indignantly. "Why present ourselves
as such a terrible species of being?"
After an American missile destroyed an Iran Air jet over the Persian
Gulf in 1988, killing 290 civilians, then Vice President George H. W.
Bush famously proclaimed, "I will never apologize for the United States
of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are."
[ . . . ]
Instinct pushes us away from reckoning with the mindset that led our
country into disastrous foreign adventures over the last few decades.
We prefer not to ask why we misjudged the world and our ability to
change it. This form of denial is dangerous. Pretending that nothing
went seriously wrong can only lead us to future trouble.
Needless to say, the truth of the last line has been established
Alex Pareene: Blow up the Times Op-Ed page, and start again! Why Friedman,
Brooks and Dowd must go: Also Ross Douthat, Nick Kristof, Joe Nocera,
Frank Bruni, and Roger Cohen -- Gail Collins gets a pass for being funnier
on purpose than Friedman is inadvertently, and Paul Krugman is redeemed
by always being right (admittedly, mostly because he has to keep repeating
himself on the things he is right on because nobody else gets it). The
big problem here is that even Pareene is still caught up in the mystique
of "the most important newspaper in the world." I know a lot of people
who would like to think that, and they do on rare occasions produce some
bit of value, but realistically they produce very little for all their
resources. (It is worth recalling that in Matt Taibbi's 2004 Wimblehack
elimination tournament two of the final four hack journalists were from
the New York Times -- including winner Elisabeth Bumiller. And the other
wasn't Judith Miller, the Pentagon mouthpiece who helped Bush point out
that "even the New York Times" agrees with him on the need to invade
Iraq.) Sample paragraph:
Nick Kristof, the famous superhero, flies about the world rescuing women.
Sometimes that rescuing takes the form of "getting women arrested for sex
work," or "getting them jobs in sweatshops to produce cheap consumer goods
for Americans in appalling conditions." That sort of exploitation is, to
Kristof, more preferable than the other kind. His do-gooder liberalism
also involves the bizarre American conviction that bombing places is a
great way to help them. In a way he represents America's own delusions
about its power, and the supposed beneficence with which it exercises
that power, in columnist form.
Also, a few links for further study:
Alex Henderson: 10 Corporate Behemoths Stifling Competition and Delivering
Awful Service to You: Another laundry list piece, but for the record,
they picked: Comcast; Monsanto; Blue Cross; Bank of America; Verizon;
American Airlines; Wells Fargo; Koch Industries; Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan
Chase. Could have picked any of dozens more. For business, the surest way
to increase profits is to buy up and hobble your competition, and there's
been virtually no restraint on antitrust in decades (if Obama's tightened
standards one iota from Bush's lax free-for-all I haven't noticed it).
There should be a near-complete ban on mergers, even if they don't pose
an immediate monopoly problem: they undermine competition, often in
markets that are already undercompetitive, and they encourage excessive
leverage and predatory behavior. One example hit home here in Wichita:
Lytton Industries, which owns Cessna Aircraft, was allowed to buy up
archrival Beech Aircraft, both located here in Wichita. This week Lytton
announced it will lay off 575 workers scattered across the two
David Leonhardt/Kevin Quealy: The American Middle Class Is No Longer
the World's Richest: And, of course, it's even worse for the poor,
but real wages have stagnated all the way up to the median, and the
US has seriously fallen behind in areas like higher education where
we used to enjoy a huge lead. Lots of boring number crunching here.
I suspect the real effect is understated: in particular, that the
long-term effects of shredding the safety net have not yet been felt,
let along measured.
Timothy Shenk: Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of
Inequality: Review of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First
Century and several more pointedly leftist books -- Nikil Saval's
Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Benjamin Kunkel's
Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, and several
pieces from Jacobin: A Magazine of Culture and Polemic. Aside
from Piketty's, those books don't appear to be all that notable.
Lynn Stuart Parramore: Why Economist Thomas Piketty Has Scared the
Pants off the American Right. Parramore links to several right-wing
screeds, but doesn't provide a link to this quoted review (i.e., the
one worth reading):
James K Galbraith Takes on Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First
Century. Galbraith has some significant criticism of Piketty's work,
and not the silly stuff from Ross Douthat or David Brooks. In contrast
to Piketty's wealth tax proposal, Galbraith talks about the New Deal:
How did the New Deal tackle the fortress of privilege that was the early
twentieth-century United States? First, it built a system of social
protections, including Social Security, the minimum wage, fair labor
standards, conservation, public jobs, and public works, none of which
had existed before. And the New Dealers regulated the banks, refinanced
mortgages, and subdued corporate power. They built wealth shared in
common by the community as a counterweight to private assets.
Another part of the New Deal (mainly in its later phase) was taxation.
With war coming, Roosevelt imposed high progressive marginal tax rates,
especially on unearned income from capital ownership. The effect was to
discourage high corporate pay. Big business retained earnings, built
factories and (after the war) skyscrapers, and did not dilute its shares
by handing them out to insiders.
If the heart of the problem is a rate of return on private assets that
is too high, the better solution is to lower that rate of return. How?
Raise minimum wages! That lowers the return on capital that relies on
low-wage labor. Support unions! Tax corporate profits and personal
capital gains, including dividends! Lower the interest rate actually
required of businesses! Do this by creating new public and cooperative
lenders to replace today's zombie mega-banks. And if one is concerned
about the monopoly rights granted by law and trade agreements to Big
Pharma, Big Media, lawyers, doctors, and so forth, there is always the
possibility (as Dean Baker reminds us) of introducing more competition.
Finally, there is the estate and gift tax -- a jewel of the Progressive
era. This Piketty rightly favors, but for the wrong reason. The main point
of the estate tax is not to raise revenue, nor even to slow the creation
of outsized fortunes per se; the tax does not interfere with creativity
or creative destruction. The key point is to block the formation of
dynasties. And the great virtue of this tax, as applied in the United
States, is the culture of conspicuous philanthropy that it fosters,
recycling big wealth to universities, hospitals, churches, theaters,
libraries, museums, and small magazines.
Other recent pieces on Piketty:
David Cay Johnston: Too Big to Fail. Not Too Strong: Review of
another important new book, Nomi Prins' All the Presidents' Bankers:
The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. Goes as far back
as the 1880s, but of course the most notable travesties are recent,
In late summer 2008, banking practices that Glass-Steagall would have
barred combined with lax regulation to produce the worst financial
disaster since 1929. Citigroup ended up getting a bailout of almost
half a trillion dollars. The sum of money required to make good on all
the bad bets and misconduct came to $12.8 trillion, Bloomberg News
calculated -- not much less than the output of the entire economy
In contrast to the conviction of more than 1,000 high-level executives
following the savings-and-loan scandals of the early 1990s, bankers not
only avoided prosecution but turned this disaster into a boon. One major
beneficiary was Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. His 2013 pay package came
to $18.5 million, a 74 percent increase over 2012. He owns bank stock and
options worth north of $400 million at today's prices. Chase continues in
the routine business of retail banking, taking paychecks as deposits and
issuing credit cards and loans. It also underwrites stocks and bonds while
selling insurance, thanks to the absence of Glass-Steagall. Chase still
places huge bets in the casino game of swapping derivatives, too. In
spring 2012, gambling by a Chase trader known as the "London whale" lost
more than $6 billion, resulting in a $920 million fine. But what does
Dimon need to worry about? These risky bets are placed with the implicit
backing of taxpayers should anything go wrong, as it surely will again.
Philip Weiss/Adam Horowitz: Israel stops US-led peace talks citing
Palestinian unity: Looks like Israel has found an excuse to end
John Kerry's round of the "peace process": the prospect that Fatah
and Hamas might set aside their differences and form a united front
to negotiate with Israel:
The State Department briefing yesterday was dominated by the reports
that Palestinian factions have reached a reconciliation deal. The deal
was promptly denounced by the Israelis, who said it could not negotiate
a peace deal with a government that includes Hamas; and the U.S. State
Department spokesperson Jen Psaki echoed this line like a slave clock:
Israel can't talk with a party that does not recognize its existence.
I should write more about this, but haven't figured out the right
angle. Some relevant links:
The second Dreyfuss piece insists that the way forward would be for
the US to actually dictate a plan: something Israel could reject, but
not something they could indefinitely dither on, like they've been able
to do for the last 47 years. Dreyfuss sketches out the standard 2-state
plan (roughly speaking, the Clinton parameters, or Geneva Accords). I
have some other ideas.
Russ Wellen: Maliki: One of the Wrongest Horses the US Ever Backed:
Mostly built around the article by
Dexter Filkins: What We Left Behind, his reporting on the renewed
violence in Iraq after the US stopped actively contributing to it.
Much of the blame is laid on Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister the
US insisted on after the Bush administration decided that Ibrahim
al-Jaafari was too leftist and unmanageable.
Dave Zirin: Donald Sterling: Slumlord Billionaire: Some background
on the LA Clippers owner, in the news recently for a rant complaining
bout a girlfriend bringing black friends to Clippers games. Evidently
made much of his money as a slum landlord. Also seems to take
Israel as a role model for his own racism.
Sunday, April 13. 2014
Crowson this week, following up on the Kansas legislature's emergency
school spending bill, which stripped schoolteachers of the right to a
hearing if terminated:
Some scattered links this week:
John Feffer: NATO on Viagra: Asks the question, why does NATO still
exist? The Warsaw Pact, after all, set a good example and closed up shop
long ago. That the US and Russia are increasingly seen in conflict has
much to do with the persistence of NATO and its continuing encroachment
on (but exclusion of) Russia.
NATO has long resisted retirement. It has been cooking up new mandates
ever since the Iron Curtain unexpectedly melted away and with it the
alliance's raison d'être. First it rediscovered its military
mojo during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Then it got involved in
"out-of-area operations." September 11 offered a full-blown coalition
effort in Afghanistan. And Libya was an opportunity to test out the
"responsibility to protect" doctrine. Every time that NATO appeared
to be on its way out, a new crisis convinced everyone of the alliance's
necessity. And there has also been a steady stream of aspiring members
who want to shelter under the umbrella in case of rain.
[ . . . ]
During its Cold War youth, NATO didn't engage in military operations.
In the post-Cold War era, when the collective defense of members had
become largely moot, NATO justified its existence through combat. "It
is still struggling with a Hamlet-like identity crisis: to attack or not
to attack," I wrote at the time. "The Afghan war has only underscored
this central paradox. If the alliance doesn't engage in military
operations, everyone questions its ultimate purpose. But if it does go
to war -- and the war is unsuccessful -- everyone questions its ultimate
Five years later, just when the testosterone levels seemed to be on
an irreversible decline, NATO is back. The current crisis in Ukraine is
the geopolitical equivalent of Viagra. "This is the age where giving up
isn't who you are," the ads proclaim, and NATO has fallen for the
copywriter's hook. [ . . . ]
Geopolitics abhors an exception. Instead of emulating Japan's
"peace constitution," the United States has been pressing the country
to acquire a "normal" military. Instead of embracing the reductions in
military spending in Europe, the United States has been pushing NATO
members to "shoulder more of their burden." We need to be praising
European countries for their sensible military reductions and urging
other parts of the world to follow suit.
Of course, we can't rerun history to test whether how a different
decision, like abolishing NATO in 1992, would have played out. In the
1990s NATO expanded into eastern Europe, tightening their noose around
Russia, plus NATO intervened in Serbia against Russian interests --
threats and insults which, combined with the economic disaster of
privatization, led to Putin's nationalist resurgence. At the same
time, the persistence of anti-Soviet institutions in the US (NATO,
CIA, NSA, etc.) combined with the "Washington consensus" economic
dogma kept the US from providing any real aid as Russia floundered.
Moreover, those institutions have rarely missed an opportunity to
kick back at Russia for the slightest offense -- see
Stephen F. Cohen: Distorting Russia for a prescient piece dated
back on March 4 on American media coverage of Russia. Since then the
distortions have only gotten worse.
By the way, I got to Cohen's piece via
James Kirchik: How the 'Realists' Misjudged Ukraine, which
decries Cohen as "noxious" and says the piece "will go down in
history as one of the most slavish defenses of Putinism." Kirchik's
piece is a perfect example of what Cohen complained about. I can't
quite see in it what it is that Kirchik wants to do, other than to
sweep away any "realist" arguments that might inhibit the US from
vigorous intervention in the Ukraine. Kirchik doesn't go quite so
far as to rattle sabres, but he definitely wants to keep all those
deadly options on the table.
For my part, I'm not particularly sympathetic to Putin's point
of view there, but I do believe one has to be realistic. And one
thing I am fairly sure of here is that the Obama, so wrapped up in
the leftover rhetoric of the cold war, is missing an opportunity
for a mutually beneficial deal with Putin over Syria.
Paul Krugman: Offshore and Underground: Points out that economists
have established that "a lot of wealth at the top is held in offshore
I think this is telling us something important about how the world
really works. There was a flurry of interest in the offshore haven
issue when Mitt Romney's Cayman Islands accounts; a bit more interest
when Cyprus hit the wall, and the question of what it was doing arose.
But the issue keeps receding, I think due to a sense that it's somehow
trivial, a matter of a few Russians and maybe a handful of our own
In reality, however, it's almost surely a much bigger deal than
that. At the commanding heights of the US economy, hiding a lot of
one's wealth offshore is probably the norm, not the exception.
Also, a few links for further study:
John Cassidy: Forces of Divergence: Review of Thomas Piketty's
Capital in the Twenty-first Century, an (reputedly the)
new book on what's driving the massive increase in inequality over the
last few decades. Sample paragraph:
Piketty believes that the rise in inequality can't be understood
independently of politics. For his new book, he chose a title evoking
Marx, but he doesn't think that capitalism is doomed, or that ever-rising
inequality is inevitable. There are circumstances, he concedes, in which
incomes can converge and the living standards of the masses can increase
steadily -- as happened in the so-called Golden Age, from 1945 to 1973.
But Piketty argues that this state of affairs, which many of us regard
as normal, may well have been a historical exception. The "forces of
divergence can at any point regain the upper hand, as seems to be
happening now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century," he writes.
And, if current trends continue, "the consequences for the long-term
dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying."
One point only now occurs to me. In discussing "big pay packages"
for CEOs, Pikkety points out how hard it is to measure the "marginal
productivity" of any one individual in a large corporation, but I
doubt that anyone tries except at the corporation's margins. Pikkety
also notes, no doubt truly, "that people in a position to set their
own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously."
But it occurs to me that another factor contributes here, which is
the outsized self-regard CEOs typically have, reinforced by the myth
of individualism, itself an artifact of increasing inequality.
Also, see the review by Andrew Hussey:
Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world. Also, the
long-awaited review by Paul Krugman:
Why We're in a New Gilded Age. Brad De Long has more, including
An Ongoing Discussion: Democracy and Plutocracy.
Laura Gottesdiener: Fantasy, Greed, and Housing, the Prequel:
Reports that private equity firms are buying up housing -- she
identifies Blackstone Group as "the largest owner of single-family
rental homes in the nation" -- turning their debt leverage into
"rental-backed" derivatives, and squeezing their renters much like
they do the employees of companies they plunder.
David E Sanger: Obama Lets NSA Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials
Say: A more apt title was provided by Paul Woodward in linking
to this peace: "NSA pretends it can increase national security while
diminishing internet security." It's not clear now whether the NSA
knew about and exploited the recently disclosed "Heartbleed" virus --
it has been reported that they did, then denied -- but it would have
been extremely irresponsible had they done so. Otherwise all they are
doing is putting their own organization goals above the security of
the people they supposedly work for. Still, we have good reason to
suspect they did just that, as Sanger explains:
But documents released by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor,
make it clear that two years before Heartbleed became known, the N.S.A.
was looking at ways to accomplish exactly what the flaw did by accident.
A program code-named Bullrun, apparently named for the site of two Civil
War battles just outside Washington, was part of a decade-long effort to
crack or circumvent encryption on the web. The documents do not make
clear how well it succeeded, but it may well have been more effective
than exploiting Heartbleed would be at enabling access to secret data.
Dan Gillmor: How to stop the next Heartland bug: pay open-source coders
to protect us.
Sunday, April 6. 2014
After yesterday's post on Kansas Republicans' latest attack on the
environment, and the federal government's pathetic effort to protect it
Prairie Chickens) I thought of another point I could have tacked onto
the end. Most people think Kansas Republicans are a wholly owned subsidiary
of Koch Industries, but the Kochs suffered a dramatic setback in the House
a couple weeks ago when their campaign to end subsidies for wind power was
voted down. Aside from certain shorelines, Kansas is probably the windiest
state in the union -- constantly battered by front moving in from the north
and the south, both deflected by westerlies which pick up speed (and warmth)
descending from the Rocky Mountains. And Kansas has a lot of grazing land, so
many landowners have taken advantage of various tax shelters and subsidies
and installed "wind farms." The Kochs don't like this because they're in
the oil business, and wind power competes with them. Of course, that's not
how their propaganda arm -- the sorely misnamed Americans for Prosperity --
puts it. The party line is: government shouldn't pick winners and losers.
That's the market's job, especially since the market doesn't charge oil and
gas producers for externalities like pollution and global warming. If oil
companies had to pay the full bill for their wares, wind power wouldn't
need those subsidies to compete.
Of course, the Kansas House members don't understand externalities any
more than they understand global warming, biodiversity, or the need for
a competent school system. It's just that it's easier to satisfy the
landowners and businesses that profit from wind subsidies, and they know
good and well the oilmen will get their breaks too. Still, I have to
wonder whether the windmills didn't have a secret selling point: they
kill birds -- thousands every year. Maybe windmills are a secret weapon
in the GOP's jihad against avian freeloaders?
Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon this takes on the Kansas state
legislature's growing sense of omnipotence as they seek to nullify both
federal and local laws, aggregating all power to themselves:
The little dog in the lower right corner is a regular feature of
Crowson's cartoons. If its quote seems obscure, the endangered bird
is technically known as the lesser prairie chicken. Meanwhile, the
legislature continues to make news. The courts have ordered the state
to come up with $120 million in extra education funding to make up for
gross inequities in school funding, so the Republicans are begrudgingly
offering a bill, trying to make it as hideous as possible. One clause
denies teachers the right to a hearing on dismissal, inviting flagrant
abuses of power by administrators. Another offers property tax relief
to parents who undermine the public school system by home schooling
or sending their children to private schools. (But, alas, not for those
of us with no grade school children.)
The requirement for equitable school funding is written into the
state constitution. Many Republicans would rather repeal that plank
than cough up the money. [Also, it now appears that the House
killed the Senate's education bill, so back to the drawing board.]
[UPDATE: The bill was revived and passed both houses. They kept
the plank that denies due process hearings when teachers are fired --
the teachers unions have vowed to take that to court, but one way or
another it's an additional burden for teachers, and an invitation for
administrators to abuse their power. The property tax breaks seemed
to have died, but new tax breaks for corporations were added.]
Some scattered links this week:
Rhonda Holman: No future without water: Wichita Eagle editorial,
of interest for illustrating the amazing credulity of some people --
Holman is politically aware enough to be on the Eagle's editorial board --
that lets Republicans continue to be taken seriously despite amazingly
awful track records.
The jury is still out on much of Gov. Sam Brownback's first term, as
well as the certainty of a second. But hopes continue to build that
his legacy will include preserving and protecting Kansas' water supply
far into the century.
If so, that will be a big gift to his native state. As he said during
one State of the State address, "We have no future without water."
And that future long has looked grim, with lots of worried talk and
some helpful regional efforts but no viable statewide strategy. That's
unsustainable, either for Kansas' standing as an agricultural state or
Experts say that 85 percent of the water use in the state happens in
western Kansas and that the Ogallala Aquifer could be 70 percent depleted
in 50 years. By then, the state's reservoirs also could be 40 percent
Last fall Brownback launched a process to craft a 50-year water plan.
About 140 public meetings have been held and more than 7,000 people have
weighed in -- impressive numbers.
So, starting with a life-or-death problem, Brownback's leadership
contribution has been to "launch a process" aimed 50 years down the
road: what you might call "just-in-time disaster management," except
that would only call attention to the stupidity of the approach. Any
hack can start a process, and most do it precisely to avoid having to
make a hard decision -- how gullible is Holman? Well, she cites Local
Enhanced Management Areas (LEMAs) working on "voluntary plans to cut
consumption" as an early victory. Of course, conservation could mean
a thoughtful effort to make a limited resource last longer, or it
could be evidence of ongoing failure. For instance, she cites farmers
switching to crops that require less water, begging the question: how
many farmers do you know who would do that voluntarily if they still
had the water available? In recent years, farmers in southwest Kansas --
what used to be known as the Great American Desert, then later as the
Dustbowl -- used irrigation to grow a lot of corn. In the future they
can try wheat or sugar beets but eventually they'll wind up reverting
to grass. The Ogalala isn't renewable: the more water you pump from
it, the further it drops, and the more energy it takes to lift that
water. It ceases to be usable even before it dries up. How much worse
it is in 50 years depends solely on how much is pumped betwen now and
then. One can plan for this eventuality, but let's face it, Brownback
can't plan for it, because he's part of the Republican "wrecking crew" --
Thomas Frank's apt phrase for the narrow-minded partisans who are out
to destroy "big government" and turn out fates over to small-minded
profit-seeking private interests.
The only idea in the editorial that
seeks to replenish declining water resources is a hail Mary "aqueduct
from far-northeast to western Kansas to pipe excess water from the
Missouri River" with a (current) price tag of $4.4 billion. Someone
thinking fifty years ahead might well be thinking about how to pay
for that, but clearly Brownback isn't that person: his signature thus
far has been to cripple the state's income tax collections, promising
deficits and spending crises far into the future, and his stated dream
is to abolish the state income tax altogether. Moreover, the growth
that those tax cuts were supposed to generate hasn't happened: under
Brownback Kansas has benefitted from the nationwide economic recovery
less than any neighboring state. And his signature plan to offer tax
breaks to motivate people to move into the rural parts of the state
which have been depopulating for decades has been a total bust. And
we need hardly go into the issue that will have the most impact 50
years from now: given that every known model of climate change shows
that as the earth warms Kansas will become ever more drought-prone.
Needless to say, that's an issue that Brownback, like his sponsors
in Koch Industries, won't even give lip service to. So how can anyone --
even the dumbest writer on the Eagle editorial board -- think that
Brownback has answers, or even cares about the real world? Yet here
we have a trusted voice of the state's largest newspaper continuing
to take the governor seriously, to credit him with good intentions,
and to respect him as a credible future candidate. Nor is Brownback
the only Republican who has totally discredited everything he stands
for, yet still enjoys the deference of the press. Paul Ryan is the
first additional name that pops into my mind, but there are droves
more where he came from.
Thomas L Friedman: Sheldon: Iran's Best Friend: Speaking of morons
who write columns, in the New York Times this qualifies as "thinking"
(out of the box, for sure):
It occurred to me the other day that the zealously pro-Israel billionaire
Sheldon Adelson and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
actually have one big thing in common. They are both trying to destroy
Israel. Adelson is doing it by loving Israel to death and Khamenei by
hating Israel to death. And now even Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey
inadvertently got drawn into this craziness.
What's the logic? Very simple. Iran's leaders want Israel destroyed
but have no desire, in my view, to use a nuclear bomb to do it. That
would expose them to retaliation and sure death. Their real strategy
is more subtle: Do everything possible to ensure that Israel remains
in the "occupied territory," as the U.S. State Department refers to
the West Bank, won by Israel in the 1967 war. By supporting Palestinian
militants dedicated to destroying any peace process, Tehran hopes to
keep Israel permanently mired in the West Bank and occupying 2.7 million
Palestinians, denying them any statehood and preventing the emergence
of a Palestinian state that might recognize Israel and live in peace
alongside it. The more Israel is stuck there, the more Palestinians and
the world will demand a "one-state solution," with Palestinians given
the right to vote. The more Israel resists that, the more isolated it
becomes. [ . . . ]
Iran could not be happier. The more Israel sinks into the West Bank,
the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses
on Israel's colonialism rather than Iran's nuclear enrichment, the more
people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.
And now Iran has an ally: Sheldon Adelson -- the foolhardy Las Vegas
casino magnate and crude right-wing, pro-Israel extremist. Adelson gave
away some $100 million in the last presidential campaign to fund
Republican candidates, with several priorities in mind: that they
delegitimize the Palestinians and that they avoid any reference to the
West Bank as "occupied territories" and any notion that the U.S. should
pressure Israel to trade land for peace there. Both Newt Gingrich and
Mitt Romney took the money and played by Sheldon's rules.
[ . . . ]
I don't know if Israel has a Palestinian partner for a secure
withdrawal from the West Bank, or ever will. But I know this: If Israel
wants to remain a Jewish, democratic state, it should be doing everything
it can to nurture such a partner or acting unilaterally to get out.
Because, I'm certain that when reports about the "Adelson primary"
reached the desk of Supreme Leader Khamenei in Tehran, a big smile
crossed his face and he said to his aides: "May Allah grant Sheldon
a long life. Everything is going according to plan."
If that's the plan, well, you've got to admire the Ayatollah's
patience in laying out so much line just to hook Israel: 47 years
of occupation, 22 before Ali Khamanei became Supreme Leader of Iran
(in 1989), 12 before Iran's 1979 revolution. Moreover, while Iran
does provide some small backing to Hamas, Israel has been equally
incapable of striking a deal with Mahmoud Abbas, who is primarily
supported by the US and Europe. It's much more likely that Israel
has no peace deal because Israel's leaders want no peace deal: they
are quite happy with a status quo which allows them to bomb supposed
enemies on the slightest arbitrary whim, while no one is able to
threaten them with anything worse than scornful looks. Indeed,
nothing Friedman says about Iran has the slightest air of truth to
it, least of all the plainly invented quotes. Friedman assumes that
the Iranian leader's hates Israel because that's what his Israeli
friends tell him, and doesn't give it a critical thought.
Friedman's a little sharper when it comes to Adelson, but that
is probably dumb luck. He's right that Adelson is able to make his
politician cronies like Gingrich, Romney, and Christie dangle from
his strings, but there's no evidence that he's anything more than
a loud cheerleader for Israel's ultra-right. In pressuring someone
like Christie to apologize for using the common and legally proper
term "occupied territories" he has managed to embarrass everyone
involved, and through this chain of subservience he's given Israel's
ultra-right all the more reason to be confident of their ability to
wag America any way they want, whenever they want. When Americans
jump through hoops to pledge allegiance to the craziest shit Israeli
right-wingers can imagine, they thrill in their power, and push on
to demand even more. The facts are: they don't want peace, let alone
any whiff of one-state or two-state equal rights, and they are very
confident in their ability to eventually grind the Palestinians into
submission (and preferably exile, although they're not going to close
their jails and interrogation rooms either), regardless of world
opinion. Adelson isn't their leader; he's their stooge, and through
him the Republican Party, and through them Obama.
But poor Friedman, his tiny brain unable to grasp the fact that his
1990s propaganda points, so carefully memorized and internalized back
when he was Israel's stooge, has no clue how washed up and useless he's
become. But he's so committed to those propaganda points that he feels
compelled to try to save Israel from itself but he's still unable to
blame Israelis, so he conjures up this imaginary Adelson-Khamanei axis
of evil. Despite his dementia, I suppose we can count as progress that
he's admitting that the occupation and settlements are driving Israel
to ruin -- if not physically, at least in the minds of potentially most
people all around the world. But that's been clear enough for long enough
that most of the Israeli right have moved on, groping towards what strikes
them as a better solution: it smells like fascism in that it's racist and
wed to a cult of violence, but it's more of an ethnocratic caste system,
with trappings of democracy for those on top and serfdom for those on
the bottom. Sooner or later Friedman will have to decide which side of
that he's on. Unfortunately, it will involve thinking -- something
Friedman is not only bad at but will probably ead to even greater
By the way, it looks like all that embarrassing "Sheldon Primary"
publicity paid off for Adelson in a
$2.1 billion stock market uptick, so he's likely to become even
Kathleen Geier: 460,000 people with college degrees are working in
minimum wage jobs: This casts doubt on the common nostrum that
sending more people to college is "the main fix for inequality."
Indeed, it suggests that raising the minimum wage would be a much
more immediate fix: raising the floor, although getting people off
the floor matters too.
According to the report, there are 260,000 workers with bachelor's
degrees and 200,000 workers with associate's degrees who are making
the minimum wage. As a reminder, the federal minimum wage is $7.25
an hour, and the minimum wage for tipped workers is a shockingly low
$2.13 an hour. In some cities and states, the minimum wage is higher,
but the BLS report defines only those making $7.25 an hour or less
as "minimum wage workers."
Some other fun facts about the minimum wage: the U.S. has the
third lowest minimum wage of any OECD country, the value of the
minimum wage has declined dramatically since its peak in 1968, and
about half of the increase in inequality in the bottom half of the
income distribution is due to the decline in the minimum wage.
Alex Pareene: Want to cut the rich's influence? Take away their money!:
That advice is also pretty close to the Eddie Murphy line in Trading
Places: How's the best way to punish rich people? Make them poor.
Not that punishment is necessarily what we need, but we can look back
at the 1950s and see that when things like CEO salaries were more
compressed CEOs had less reason to misbehave.
So, if we think that money in politics is a problem; if we think it
creates the appearance of corruption, alienates non-wealthy citizens
from the democratic process, perverts incentives for politicians and
candidates, and creates an unequal system in which the speech of the
rich drowns out the speech of everyone else -- and all of those things
are already the long-standing status quo -- we can no longer seek to
address the problem by preventing money from flowing into politics.
The Supreme Court is clearly not going to meet a new spending
restriction that it likes any time soon. Instead of attempting to
dictate how the wealthy spend their money, we are probably just
going to have to take away their money.
If the super-rich had less money, they would have less money to
spend on campaigns and lobbying. And unlike speech, the government
is very clearly allowed to take away people's money. It's in the
Constitution and everything. [ . . . ]
There is one glaring problem with my plan, of course, which is
that Congress is already captured by wealthy interests, and is not
inclined to tax them. But all I'm saying is that would-be campaign
finance reformers ought to give up on their lost cause and shift
their energies toward confiscation and redistribution.
Also see Parene's
The conservative book industry isn't dead, it's just embarrassing.
I've noted before the astonishing decline in sanity (much less quality)
in conservative publishing around the election of Obama. There appears
to be very little new on that front now -- just a couple briefs for
Also, a few links for further study:
Robert Christgau: They Bet Your Life: Review of several books on
hedge funds and the relevant chapter of Jeff Madrick's excellent Age
of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to
the Present. Sample quote:
Two points, then. First is that, at the very least, the financial markets
attract natural gamblers. There are exceptions, and some gamblers are more
mindful of risk management than others. But there are always going to be
addicts and high rollers, just as there are always going to be crooks, and
it's in the public interest to constrain both. Second is that philanthropy
will always involve, at the very least, unnecessarily rich men (and a few
women) riding their hobbyhorses. Wealthy speculators may indeed underwrite
causes that save some real ordinary lives and improve many others. But their
careers as championship number pushers limit their insight into -- and
sympathy for -- the duller struggles of their fellow citizens.
Kathleen Geier: Piketty-mania: progressives are going gaga about a sobering
new book about economic inequality. Why is that?: Thomas Piketty's
Capital: In the Twenty-First Century has been at the top of my
Amazon recommended new books list for a while now -- a suggestion I had
initially resisted as someone who never got more than a hundred pages
deep into Marx's Capital and has far less interest in trying to
do so now. (Although I did make my way through David Harvey's The
Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism and Philip Mirowski's
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived
the Financial Meltdown, two long books that were deadly slogs but
occasionally brilliant.) I've known for some time that Paul Krugman's
writing a review of it, but initially I wasn't clear whether that's
because he learned things from the book or just wanted to use it to
teach. Geier finally convinces me with this cheery note, although
I should have noticed her
review first. When I went back to Amazon, I saw that the book
is "temporarily out of stock." I also noticed that the blurbs
section has exploded. Robert Skidelsky's quote:
You many think that it doesn't require 600 pages to get this message
across. This would be wrong. The strength of Piketty's book is his
close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive
documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his
impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the
richness of 'political economy' compared to its thin mathematical
successor that has attained such prominence.
As I've mentioned before, I want to write a lengthy essay (or
small book) on inequality, and one challenge there is to detail
the many ways -- other than political favoritism; that's obvious --
the economy generates inequality. It sounds like Pikkety has done
the right legwork there.
Sunday, March 30. 2014
I haven't posted anything since last Monday's Music Week. Not sure
where all the time has gone, but after Monday's Music Week I should
have a books post and a Rhapsody Streamnotes coming pretty quick.
Tried to knock out a links post today and didn't get through nearly
everything I wanted to look at. Still, a few things to chew on:
Tom Engelhardt: In Memoriam: Jonathan Schell: He died on March 25,
of cancer, age 70, after a life as one of the one of our most important
writers on wars real and potential. His early book on Vietnam, The
Village of Ben Suc, was an instant classic. He had wangled some
press credentials, dropped in on the war for just a couple weeks,
but in that time witnessed an atrocity which turns out to have been
remarkably common in that war. (Nick Turse's recent Kill Anything
That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam finally gives us a
sense of just how common such atrocities really were.) He wrote many
eloquent "opinion" pieces, perhaps most notably during the Watergate
scandal and in the lead up to the Iraq War. He wrote about nuclear
weapons and what war with them would be like (The Fate of the
Earth), and in 2003 he wrote a prescient book about how difficult
it is to impose new political orders: The Unconquerable World:
Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People -- just in time
to forecast the horrible failure of the Iraq War and so much more,
but more importantly the folly of man's appetite for conquest. The
obituaries have focused more on the bestseller, but the latter book
is the one I read and will return to. This link touches on much I
have mentioned, but from the vantage point of someone who knew and
worked with Schell. It also includes an interview Chris Appy did
with Schell focusing on the Vietnam War, but even there he winds
up cycling back to nuclear war -- where the war we couldn't afford
to fight somehow excused the lack of limits when fighting people
who didn't have the luxury of nuclear weapons: instead of causing
a cascade where the impossibility of big wars ruled out any war,
those weapons made small wars all the more vicious. They called it
"credibility" back then. Perhaps you've heard that term recently.
More on Schell:
Katrina vanden Heuvel: This Week in 'Nation' History: The Horrific Legacy
of the Invasion of Iraq:
This Monday marks the eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq --
a solemn punctuation mark to the steadily increasing violence that has
gripped that country over the past two years. Sectarian violence claimed
more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013 alone, and this year's toll has already
surpassed 2,000. Iraq today is a broken and failing state: the war that
many would prefer to believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with
Iraqis continuing to suffer, as much as ever, the fallout from this
country's callous lies and avoidable mistakes.
Vanden Heuvel goes on to cite a number of articles, some old like
Jonathan Schell's 2003 editorial,
American Tragedy, and some new, like
John Feffer: Revisiting the Pottery Barn Rule:
The real Pottery Barn rule -- the same rule that all retailers have --
is to write off the broken merchandise as a loss. And that is what we
have done to Iraq.
The latest violence in Iraq rivals the levels last seen during wartime.
Last year, between 8,000 and 10,000 civilians were killed, the highest
number since 2008. According to one recent study, half a million Iraqis
have died from war-related causes since the 2003 US invasion, a figure
that includes indirect casualties from the breakdown of the country's
Most Iraqi deaths since 2003 were the result of sectarian violence
between Iraqi shiite and sunni groups, and that violence was the direct
result of US invasion policy: specifically the arming of shiite and
Kurdish militias to aid the invasion forces. From the very beginning,
the US made virtually no effort to restrict killing by "friendly"
militias. (Evan Wright's Generation Kill helps provide a time
line here, as the troops he was embedded with were locked down at
night as soon as they arrived in Baghdad so that shiite bands could
rove the streets and exact whatever revenge they felt entitled to.)
Later on the US learned to fine tune the sectarian warfare, mostly
to prevent any kind of unity that could threaten US occupation
(either with war or peace).
Alex Pareene: Our Glorious Golden Era of Nepotism: When I read
Robert Townsend's Up the Organization, I was a bit surprised
to see its brief section slamming nepotism, then I remembered what
happened at a printing company I once worked for when the founder
became incapacitated and his idiot son took over. When I asked for
a raise, the son told me I was already making for max for Wichita,
but if I really needed more I should move to a higher wage market,
like Tulsa. When I did quit, he coughed up $2/hour more plus free
parking, but after a couple months I left anyway and moved to New
York City. Next time I checked the company, which when I left still
had more than 50 employees, was out of business. Townsend's argument
was considerably subtler than nepotism favors morons. It included:
The fatal fact about nepotism is that the really good people won't go
to work for you in the first place or will quit or quit trying for
your job when they spot your uncle, brother, nephew, wife, mistress
or son on the payroll.
In other words, ambitious hard-workers will know the organization
won't be evaluate them fairly. It also means that the whole incentive
scale is skewed, which probably means that the organization is sliding
into dysfunctionality. Nepotism has been spreading in recent years --
it's hard to tell whether political dynasties like the Bushes, Romneys,
and Gores are a symptom or a cause, but Bush must have set the record
for crony appointments (e.g., the sons of Antonin Scalia and Colin
Powell). Pareene has a long list of these people, and didn't even
think of my examples. The trend is not only toward more of them, but
to more prominence of inherited wealth. Moreover, I suspect recent
moves against opportunity and mobility, like the ever-increasing debt
burden of education, are meant to open up jobs for the excess progeny
of the rich. Even among family farmers and small-time businessmen,
nepotism attempts to create an air of aristocracy, but that's nothing
compared to what the real aristocracy does.
Also, a few links for further study:
Bernard Avishai: Truman's Folly?: A lengthy review of John Judis:
Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli
Conflict (2014, Farrar Straus and Giroux) -- a book I am currently
about two-thirds of the way through, which gets the point when Britain
decided to withdraw from Palestine and turn responsibility for it back
to the United Nations. Avishai starts by hailing the Truman-period
section as "a provocative, learned, even masterful book," while arguing
that Judis let his moral views slant his treatment of the "prehistory."
I actually found his history of the theory and practice of Zionism in
Europe, Palestine, and the US to be remarkably well balanced given its
succinct length -- the main contention being how exclusivist the various
advocates for a Jewish state were at various points in history. Avishai
prefers to believe that Israel's founders were less destined to ethnic
cleansing than what actually happened, and to that aim he does a fair
amount of nitpicking on the latter sections of the book. That is an
interesting question, one that is perhaps even urgent in a day when a
writer like Ari Shavit can write a book arguing that Israelis should
embrace the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramleh as an
essential milestone in Israeli history. But I doubt Judis will go
that far. The more likely "lesson for today" is that the US political
system is still susceptible to the sort of pressures that led Truman
to support policies he didn't think right, and that Israeli politicians
are still able to manage US lobbying in ways that prevent them from
having to compromise. But even there, Judis would not be drawing an
insight from history to explain the present. Rather, he is showing how
the current dynamic worked even in the much simpler Truman period.
Another Nation book review, of Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life
and Loathing in Greater Israel:
Nadia Hijab: In 'Goliath,' the Past Is Always Present for Palestinians.
Several minor problems with the review, starting with the title. The book
has relatively little to do with what Israel does to Palestinians -- more
so about what right-wing Israelis would like to do, but much more of the
book is about the chilling effect the ascendant right-wing is having on
democracy and freedom within Israel. Moreover, you soon discover that Israeli
Jews are not immune from having to reface the past in the present: indeed,
they face constant reminders of the whole history of anti-semitism, always
culminating in the Holocaust. Hijab identifies two main themes in the book:
the growth in power of the extreme right-wing (certainly the main theme),
and "the way in which today's Israel is the logical evolution of the Zionist
enterprise from its inception in the late nineteenth century." Blumenthal
actually offers very little of the history you'd need to hang that point
on, and I suspect that if you pressed him he'd be more inclined to find
the roots of today's right-wing in the ongoing process of occupation and
settlement building -- along with things like the draft and the thorough
propagandizing process known as hasbara -- as opposed to ideology
handed down from Pinsker and Herzl. In many ways this is an offshoot of
the old "zionism = racism" argument. Historically you can probably find
a few individuals who could keep those threads separate, but most Europeans
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were significantly racist, and
that certainly didn't preclude them from being zionist. Moreover, decades
of exposure, misunderstanding, and violent conflict were much more likely
to reinforce those prejudices than relieve them. And Israel is currently
so severely segregated that few people have any opportunity to learn
better, so the practical equivalence of "zionism = racism" is very real,
even among the ideologically ignorant.
Nick Turse: US Military Averaging More Than a Mission a Day in Africa:
The last thing the American people need these days is another war to stop,
and the US military certainly doesn't want to provoke any sleeping giants,
so AFRICOM tries to keep whatever it is it's doing under the radar. Still,
546 "activities," "a 217% increase in operations, programs, and exercises
since the command was established in 2008," suggest there is a daily risk
of something small ("airstrikes targeting suspected militants, night raids
aimed at kidnapping terror suspects") blowing up into something big. The
only way to keep that from happening is to illuminate what they're doing
now, and question it.
Stephen Zunes: Straight Talk on the US and Ukraine: Useful
general perspective on the Ukraine crisis, condemning Russian
expansion into Crimea but also point out that the US, by its
own longstanding behavior, has little credibility to stand on.
What is needed here is application of international law, but
to make a persuasive moral case against Russia the US would
have to show some respect of its own for international law --
as opposed to just invoking it when it's convenient, as here.
On the other hand, Americans continue to say really stupid
things about Crimea, as in this report:
Obama Suggests Russian Annexation of Crimea Is Worse Than Iraq
Invasion. (John Glaser comments: "This is perhaps the most
aninine thing the president has said in the entirety of his
presidency.") There was once a rumor, widely circulated c. 2008,
that Obama had opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq, but as Zunes
pointed out, Obama has persistently undercut the credit he gained
from opposing the Iraq war by appointing supporters of that war
to key foreign policy positions (Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe
Other links related to Ukraine:
Wednesday, March 12. 2014
Meant to pull one of these together last Sunday, but I got sidetracked
on the many horrors of gun mishaps.
Brad DeLong: The "Bush Boom" and the Obama Stagnation: Big chart
contrasts the very different "recoveries" from the tech crash in 2000
and the housing/banking crash in 2008. The Bush period was slightly
more productive than the Obama (3.2% vs. 2.8%), but both barely qualify
as recoveries, and if you looked closer you'd find that virtually none
of the gains trickled down to the majority of workers. But DeLong is
more focused on component sectors, which show two things: the Obama
period has actually been much more favorable for business than the
Bush one -- exports and nonresidential investment are up, whereas all
Bush had going was deficit war spending and a housing boom largely
based on fraud; but what killed Obama has been the poltiically imposed
austerity that not only kept government from compensating for the
crash but actually added to it. DeLong concludes:
When the economic history of 2002-2020 comes to be written, it will
be all about at least three extraordinary self-inflicted economic
disasters: the deregulation of housing and high finance and the
consequent Greater Crash of 2007-2009; the failure to nationalize
and then rationalize housing finance and so restore the housing
credit channel at any point starting in 2009; and the extraordinary
counterproductive wave of short-term austerity beginning in late 2010.
Paul Krugman: Nation of CRINOs: Links to
John Sides, quotes, and adds:
Sides surmises that when people call themselves conservative, they're
talking about lifestyle choices -- and we're talking about their personal
lifestyles, not necessarily their desire to impose their choices on others.
Americans who go to church, and/or are faithful to their spouses, and/or
are devoted to their children, say that they are conservative -- but more
often than not also favor a higher minimum wage and stronger social safety
Basically, economic conservatism has very little popular constituency.
If it has often dominated policy nonetheless, that has to do with the
power of organized money and the popularity of conservative ideas among
the political elite.
I'll add that a lot of Ronald Reagan's popularity among white middle
class folk was because the feel-good rhetoric hadn't yet impacted their
bottom lines. Also that the triumph of right-wing policy usually occurs
behind closed doors, due to the easy corruptibility of our political
Joseph E Stiglitz: Stagnation by Design: One of the odder terms to
have emerged in economic discourse lately is "secular stagnation" --
Larry Summers' term for a lengthy period of post-recession slow growth,
much as Japan suffered after its real estate bubble burst in the 1980s.
This time is no different, but in some ways it could be worse: the sectors
that should be growing, reflecting the needs and desires of citizens, are
services like education and health, which traditionally have been publicly
financed, and for good reason. But, rather than government facilitating
the transition, austerity is inhibiting it.
Malaise is better than a recession, and a recession is better than a
depression. But the difficulties that we are facing now are not the result
of the inexorable laws of economics, to which we simply must adjust, as we
would to a natural disaster, like an earthquake or tsunami. They are not
even a kind of penance that we have to pay for past sins -- though, to be
sure, the neoliberal policies that have prevailed for the past three
decades have much to do with our current predicament.
Instead, our current difficulties are the result of flawed policies.
There are alternatives. But we will not find them in the self-satisfied
complacency of the elites, whose incomes and stock portfolios are once
again soaring. Only some people, it seems, must adjust to a permanently
lower standard of living. Unfortunately, those people happen to be most
Also, a few links for further study:
David Bromwich: The Leader Obama Wanted to Become and What Became of Him.
A rather vague article poking around but never quite settling the basic
evasiveness of Obama's presidency. The only sense you get of "the leader
Obama wanted to become" is that there wasn't any. Backtracking through
his previous posts you find a wily figure who prefers to be a tabula
rasa onto which both friend and foe can project their hopes and fears,
knowing that while he will never satisfy he'll never prove you wrong
either. One representative paragraph (plus):
Perhaps the thin connection between Obama's words and his actions does
not support the use of the word "conviction" at all. Let us say instead
that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be
trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it
will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out
what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser
evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a
category of permanent prisoners in "this war we're in" (which he declines
to call "the war on terror") was an early and characteristic instance.
Such is Obama's belief in the power and significance of his own words
that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent
second-best to doing the right thing. [ . . . ]
He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the
Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings).
Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference
for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001
era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then
give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of
killing must stop.
Ryan Gallagher/Glenn Greenwald: How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions" of
Computers with Malware: A pretty detailed summary of NSA efforts to
hack into computers, initially with "hundreds" of targets but increasingly
aiming for "millions" -- the typical approach being to infect those target
machines with malware, mostly to snoop but sometimes to damage them. The
inside info comes from Edward Snowden's leaks, and if this is true it
shows a government organization that has completely gone off the rails.
Very scary stuff. And while I note that the picture at the top only
shows the NSA attacks targeting the rest of the world, I can take no
comfort from that. Among other things, the US is establishing a world
norm where unbridled cyberwarfare is the order of the day -- a standard
which practically begs Russia, China, and others to do the same unto
us. We are already plagued with spambots and viral mischief coming out
of those countries, something the US government should be working with
others to suppress. Instead, the NSA is working to make the cyberworld
a Hobbesian hell, and doing it in secret where most Americans never
get the chance to second guess them.
Kathleen Geier: How Economic Inequality Kills: Reviews a recent
book by Göran Therborn, The Killing Fields of Inequality (2013,
Polity Press). Therborn sees inequalities as "multidimensional barriers
to human functioning in the world," which makes them "violations of
human rights" -- "human rights" being one of the quintessential equality
definitions (something that most of us believe everyone should be equal
Farhad Manjoo: T-Mobile Turns an Industry on Its Ear: The cell phone
industry, like cable TV, has always been a pursuit for monopoly profits,
but having failed to get antitrust permission to merge, T-Mobile suddenly
decided to compete and drive prices down. Especially since Bush became
president (although to a large extent even before then) the government
has made little effort to enforce antitrust law, let alone to take an
active role in fostering competitive markets, so this is a most welcome
Josh Ruebner: Overcoming the "Manufactured Crisis" with Iran: A
review of Gareth Porter important new book, Manufactured Crisis:
The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. No surprise that the
picture on the cover is that of Benjamin Netanyahu with a ticking
bomb graphic. Trita Parsi has written two earlier books on Israel's
obsession with Iran (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of
Israel, Iran, and the United States in 2007, then A Single
Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran in 2012), but this
book brings the conflict -- perhaps the most dangerous in the world
today -- up to date. As Ruebner writes:
Porter unravels a complicated, sordid tale in which the United States
and Israel -- sometimes separately and sometimes symbiotically -- act
to ensure the perpetuation, rather than the resolution, of outstanding
concerns about Iran's nuclear program.
Jerome Slater: On John Judis's 'Genesis,' and its critics: Next on my
reading list is John Judis' new book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews,
and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. This is less a review
of the book than a review of the usual negative reviews, including ones
by Leon Wieseltier, Bernard Wasserstein, and Ronald Radosh (whose own
book on Truman and Israel basically cast Truman as a pro-Israel saint,
when in fact there was a great deal of ambivalence throughout Truman's
administration). I personally expect to find the origins of conflict
much earlier -- I'm rather partial to Amy Dockser Marcus' Jerusalem
1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which not only
specifies that early date but makes clear that it was decided in Vienna
and not in Palestine -- but the 1945-49 period does appear to be the
crucial one for the formation of the Zionist lobby in America. For
more on Judis' book, see
Heather Hurlburt: Broken Promised Land. And for more on Wieseltier,
albeit in a different theater of warmongering, see
Jim Sleeper: Leon Wieseltier's Moral Posturing on Crimea Suggests He
Learned Nothing From his Moral Posturing on Iraq.
Sunday, February 9. 2014
Some scattered links this week:
Uri Avnery: Netanyahu's Pipe Dream: In their neverending search to
make peace terms as unpalatable as possible, Israel's right-wing has put
a lot of emphasis in demanding that others, especially Palestinians,
recognize Israel not only as a de facto governing authority but as a,
or more pointedly, the Jewish state. Avnery points out:
A state is a reality. Ideologies belong to the abstract realm.
When the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, it
recognized the state. It did not recognize its communist nature.
[ . . . ]
Some Israelis (including myself) would like to change the
self-definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," omitting
the word "Jewish." Some other Israelis would like to omit or demote
the word "democratic." Neither of us believe that we need the confirmation
of the Palestinians for this.
It's just none of their business.
I don't know what the real intention of Netanyahu is when he presents
this demand as an ultimatum.
The most flattering explanation for his ego is that it is just another
trick to sabotage the "peace process" before it reaches the demand to
evacuate the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. The less
flattering explanation is that he really believes in it, that he is driven
by some deeply rooted national inferiority complex that needs outside
assurance of "legitimacy." Recognizing the "National State of the Jewish
People" means accepting the entire Zionist narrative, lock, stock and
barrel, starting from the divine promise to Abraham to this very day.
Part of the problem is that "Jewish state" means different things to
different people at different times, so asking someone else to acknowledge
Israel in just those terms winds up being dangerously open-ended. Herzl's
founding Zionist document was called The Jewish State, but the
idea was described there is utopian terms. The actual Israel is far from
the conflictless dream Herzl imagined: a state which divides its citizens
up into Jews and others and treats them more or less inequally depending
on other factors like where they live. One worries especially that the real
reason the right-wing pushes the "Jewish state" declaration so ardently is
that it provides cover for even more inequal treatment, aimed ultimately
at pushing non-Jews into exile, extending the "ethnic cleansing" of 1948.
This would, of course, be less of an issue if Israel returned to its 1967
borders, where the demographic balance is overwhelmingly Jewish. Conversely,
as the right-wing seeks to consolidate political integration with the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, the privileging of Jews looms even more important.
Many of their recent initiatives have been directed at non-Jewish citizens
of Israel -- loyalty oaths, attacks on free speech, etc. (Max Blumenthal's
book Goliath covers this well). As such, the "Jewish state" is
increasingly part of the anti-democratic efforts of the far right.
The polite thing to do at this point is to change the subject any time
the phrase pops up. Obama made a serious mistake in using the phrase --
one of many reasons Netanyahu has making him think he's got the president
eating out of his hand.
Tithi Bhattacharya/Bill V Mullen: Why is the American elite scared of
BDS? As Max Blumenthal reports in Goliath, the reaction of
Israel's dominant right-wing majority to BDS is to attempt to criminalize
the speech of anyone who advocates boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions
against Israel. As this piece shows, Israel's American cronies are, once
again, following in lock step, even though the US traditionally has a
much stronger tradition of free speech than Israel (e.g., it's in the
constitution, whereas "democratic" Israel doesn't have a constitution).
Much of this effort to muzzle academics comes from nominal liberals --
the two states considering bills to punish pro-BDS profressors are New
York and Maryland -- but it's especially concentrated among university
administrators. I would suspect that university administrators are a
particulary soft touch for well-heeled pro-Israeli donors, but the
authors suggest a deeper orientation:
This history sets a clear pattern in which U.S. University administrators
are keen to become first responders to ideological objectives of the
government. Yet in many ways, events since 9/11 in the U.S. most clearly
index the militarized U.S. University, and best explain the blowback in
higher education against the ASA Boycott vote.
[ . . . ]
Universities were also retooled after 9/11 in specific ways to provide
clear ideological direction to a new generation of students. More than
400 colleges and Universities established Homeland Security Programs,
many receiving direct funding from the government. Duke University,
whose President has condemned the ASA Boycott of Israeli Universities,
offers a Counterterrorism and Public Policy Fellowship Program; the
Fellowship, according to its website, "fulfills the Senior Service
Education (SSE) requirements for military officers and other U.S.
national security professionals."
It is politically of a piece, then, that militarization of the US
university has accompanied a tightening of relations between Israel's
settler-colonial state and a U.S. state which provides it roughly two
billion dollars a year in military assistance.
For more on BDS, see:
Also see Blumenthal's Goliath. And you could also take a look
at Thomas Friedman's confused piece,
The Third Intifada. Given his proven knack for trivializing things,
Friedman has decided that non-violent protests and international pleas
for recognizing the human rights of Palestinians and the enforcement of
international law constitute another uprising, perhaps because Israel's
response is the same as it was during the Intifadas: heavy-handed and
Russell Brand: Philip Seymour Hoffman Is Another Victim of Extremely
Stupid Drug Laws: Of course:
People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even
remotely deterred by prohibition. What prohibition achieves is an
unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where
drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the
worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.
Countries like Portugal and Switzerland that have introduced
progressive and tolerant drug laws have seen crime plummet and
drug-related deaths significantly reduced. We know this. We know this
system doesn't work -- and yet we prop it up with ignorance and
indifference. Why? Wisdom is acting on knowledge. Now we are aware
that our drug laws aren't working and that alternatives are yielding
positive results, why are we not acting? Tradition? Prejudice? Extreme
stupidity? The answer is all three. Change is hard, apathy is easy,
tradition is the narcotic of our rulers. The people who are most
severely affected by drug prohibition are dispensable, politically
irrelevant people. Poor people. Addiction affects all of us but the
poorest pay the biggest price.
John Cassidy: The CBO's Real Message: Six Million Jobs Are Already
Missing: Republicans have seized upon something commonsensical
in the CBO's employment report: that the ACA, by making it possible
for people to buy health insurance without having a job (and by
making health insurance much less costly for people who make very
little money) will (most likely) result in two million workers
leaving their jobs. This they're trying to frame as a burden to
the economy, but it's basically a relief to workers, most of whom
have been saddled with crappy, unsatisfying jobs they really didn't
need or want except for the threat of illness-induced bankruptcy.
(This is especially true of people who have some savings they can
lean on. I know because I am one such person.) All this upsets
Republicans because everything about ACA upsets them, but also
because they really like forcing people to take crappy low-paying
jobs -- something which makes me think conservatism hasn't really
progressed much since its diehard defense of slavery. Cassidy:
But, first, something the C.B.O. said that you probably missed, which
is based on actual facts rather than on informed speculation: in the
past five years or so -- and this has nothing to do with
Obamacare -- some six million jobs (and workers) have already gone
missing from the U.S. economy.
That figure was in a separate report that the C.B.O. released on
Tuesday, titled, "The Slow Recovery of the Labor Market." As someone
who has written several times about the "missing millions" of workers
in this recovery, I was, naturally, drawn to the new report, particularly
to the estimate that the missing number is six million, which is about
the population of Missouri.
Based on history, all these people should be earning a living and
paying taxes. Instead, they've dropped out of the work force,
and . . . well, the truth is, we don't know exactly
what they've done. Some of them have probably taken early retirement.
Others may be working part time in the black economy. Many of them are
almost certainly sitting at home, doing nothing. A few may be glad
they're no longer working, but, from studies of how being jobless
affects people, we know that many of them are feeling depressed and
worthless. Their inactivity represents a tragic human and economic
waste, but, for some reason, it's not one that the G.O.P. seems
particularly indignant about.
What makes the loss of those six million jobs bad news isn't that
fewer people are enjoying the fruits of a healthy work ethic nor that
more people are depending on others for their sustenance (and you can
be damn sure that the taxpayers are picking up very little of the tab)
nor that the overall effect depresses an already depressed economy.
It's that so few of those people had any real choice in the matter:
maybe some could have settled for lower-paying, less-productive jobs
and simply refused -- count me in that group -- but most didn't even
have that option, and as time has passed they've become less and less
attractive to potential employers while many companies have continued
to downgrade and degrade their job openings.
By contrast, the ACA's liberation of "insurance slaves" is pretty
good news all around. It gives many people a chance to choose time over
money -- to retire early, to spend more time with children, to pursue
non-lucrative projects like art or volunteer work, or even to take a
risk and start a business. It also leaves real jobs unfilled, so many
companies will have to recruit replacements, and maybe even pay and/or
treat them better.
Further relevant links:
Andy Kroll/Daniel Schulman: The Koch Brothers Left a Confidential Document
at Their Last Donor Conference -- Read It Here:
There's one main rule at the conservative donor conclaves held twice
a year by Charles and David Koch at luxury resorts: What happens there
The billionaire industrialists and their political operatives strive
to ensure the anonymity of the wealthy conservatives who fund their
sprawling political operation -- which funneled more than $400 million
into the 2012 elections -- and to keep their plans private. Attendees
of these summits are warned that the seminars, where the Kochs and their
allies hatch strategies for electing Republicans and advancing conservative
initiatives on the state and national levels, are strictly confidential;
they are cautioned to keep a close eye on their meeting notes and
materials. But last week, following the Kochs' first donor gathering of
2014, one attendee left behind a sensitive document at the Renaissance
Esmeralda resort outside of Palm Springs, California, where the Kochs and
their comrades had spent three days focused on winning the 2014 midterm
elections and more. [ . . . ] The one-page document,
provided to Mother Jones by a hotel guest who discovered it, offers a
fascinating glimpse into the Kochs' political machine and shows how
closely intertwined it is with Koch Industries, their $115 billion
Many names follow, both of donors and "players." Any time the
Kochs' political fronts are mentioned I feel obligation to point
out that their aim isn't to influence elections -- it is to
Stephen M Walt: The Top 10 Mistakes Made in the Afghan War: Not
my list, which starts in 1979 -- actually in 1975, but 1979 was the
point when US policy turned from malign neglect to subterfuge, sabotage,
and terrorism in a campaign to destroy the most progressive government
in Afghan history and arm the most reactionary Afghans imaginable. That
said, the 2004 constitution and the 2009 "surge" were huge mistakes,
and he's right that the first problem with the COIN strategy was that
the US Army could never implement it (which is why Petraeus, whose
star rose in the US by promoting it, abandoned it as soon as he took
command in Kabul).
Also on Afghanistan:
Also, a few links for further study:
Chase Madar: The Folly of Arming Israel: The largest recipient of US
foreign aid, mostly in the form of military gear.
Overall, the United States covers nearly one quarter of Israel's defense
budget -- from tear gas canisters to F-16 fighter jets. In their 2008-2009
assault on Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces made use of M-92 and M-84
"dumb bombs," Paveway II and JDAM guided "smart bombs," AH-64 Apache attack
helicopters equipped with AGM-114 Hellfire guided missiles, M141 "bunker
defeat" munitions, and special weapons like M825A1 155mm white phosphorous
munitions -- all supplied as American foreign aid. (Uniquely among Washington's
aid recipients, Israel is also permitted to spend 25% of the military funding
from Washington on weapons made by its own weapons industry.)
Dani Rodrik: When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and
Policy Innovations: PDF of an academic journal article. Reminds me
of Keynes' warning about how the world is ruled by little but ideas,
especially ones of defunct economists.
Sunday, February 2. 2014
Some scattered links this week:
Jonathan Chait: Wall Street Journal: Okay, Obama Isn't Hitler,
But He's Pretty Hitler-y: On the WSJ editorial doubling down on
venture capitalist Tom Perkins' Kristallnacht complaint:
The Journal's editorial underscores that the widespread mockery
of Perkins, far from piling on a bewildered plutocrat, actually understates
the broader problem. Perkins's letter provided a peek into the fantasy world
of the right-wing one percent, in which fantasies of an incipient Hitler-esque
terror are just slightly beyond the norm. The Journal editorial defines
persecution of the one percent as the existence of public disagreement.
Liberals are mocking Perkins, therefore Perkins is basically right. For
Perkins to be wrong -- for the rich to enjoy the level of deference the
Journal deems appropriate -- a billionaire could compare his plight
to the victims of the Holocaust and nobody would make fun of him at all.
Chris Dillow: Why Inequality Matters:
Instead, we lefties care about inequality not because we have some idea
of what the Gini coefficient or share of the top 1% should be, but because
we fear that three things that would make inequalities tolerable are -- to
some extent -- missing.
Firstly, inequalities don't all arise from fair processes.
[ . . . ]
Secondly, we fear that inequality has adverse effects. I'm not thinking
so much here of its impacts on economic growth, social cohesion and other
aspects of well-being; the evidence here is convincing if you're prepared
to be convinced, and not if you're not. Instead, the danger is that
inequality is, as Sean McElwee says, an "affront to democracy."
[ . . . ]
Thirdly, we've no great beef with inequality if it is combined with
some form of risk-pooling. Even if our first two conditions were met,
we'd favour some redistribution to mitigate the effects of bad luck --
be it the bad luck of a bad draw in the genetic lottery or of being
hurt by a recession.
Mark Thoma: Sharing the Gains from Economic Growth:
Nevertheless, this represents an important shift in the emphasis of
economic policy. For the last thirty years or so, we have focused
mainly on production -- on enhancing economic growth -- based upon
the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. By lowering taxes on
businesses and on the so-called job creators at the top of the income
distribution, the economy would grow faster and the gains from growth
would be widely shared. Sure, those at the top might do relatively
better than others, but so long as everyone was gaining from growth
that would not be a problem.
But that is not what happened. Tax cuts and other policies favorable
to business and the one percent did not produce a growth miracle as
promised, and the economic gains that we did realize went mainly to
those at the very top of the income distribution. The result was
stagnating wages for the masses and staggeringly high gains for the few.
Aside from consulting Smith and Ricardo, I don't see much here that
fixes the problem, especially when Thoma talks about what Obama talks
about. Thomas does admit: "Workers are not getting what they deserve
according to economic theory and the societal norms we have adopted
that say people should be paid according to their contribution to the
productive process." He admits that declining union power has much to
do with this. Then he adds:
The unequal power relationship has allowed wages to stagnate while
incomes at the top have soared. But whatever the cause, the mechanism
that distributes income to various groups in society is broken, and
this important problem needs to be better studied and better understood.
That is why Obama's shift in emphasis from inequality to opportunity
and his fear of being accused of class warfare is a mistake. We need
better opportunity, particularly at the lower end of the income
distribution, but we also need to be sure that when those opportunities
are realized income rises with productivity.
When it doesn't, correcting the problem through taxes and transfers
or other means is not class warfare. It simply takes income that was
undeserved according to societal norms, and sends it where it rightfully
So unions were a traditional private-sector way of balancing incomes,
but transfers might be more efficient. In particular, they're less likely
to cause workplace strife and inflationary spirals.
Andrew Fieldhouse: 5 Years After the Crisis: Why the Income Gap Is
Widening: This has been reported before, but bears repeating:
Recent U.S. income inequality data published by economists Emmanuel Saez
and Thomas Piketty show that the top 1 percent of households by income has
captured a staggering 95 percent of total income gains between 2009 and
2012, compared with 68 percent of gains between 1993 and 2012. Rather than
sharing in the gains, the bottom 90 percent of households have seen income
fall steeply -- by an amount equivalent to 16 percent of all the
income gains between 2009 and 2012. By comparison, between 1993 and 2012,
the bottom 90 percent lost income equivalent to 5 percent of gains.
In other words, the vast majority of households have been falling
behind even faster than before. Income gains have accrued almost exclusively
to the very top of the income distribution, while the broad middle class
and lower-income households are losing ground.
[ . . . ]
When aggregate demand is depressed below supply, slack in the labor
market makes it easier for firms to cut employee compensation, thereby
increasing profits and capital income as a share of total income. In the
three years since the Great Recession officially ended, non-financial
sector corporate profits have jumped 62 percent per unit of output, while
employee compensation has fallen more than 1 percent per unit of output.
Domestic corporate profits as a share of gross domestic product have
jumped from 7 percent to 10 percent since the fourth quarter of 2007
(the eve of the recession). And as a share of corporate income, both
pre-tax and after-tax corporate profits recently reached post-war highs.
Lower-income workers also suffer disproportionately, as they lose
already scant bargaining power to oppose nominal wage cuts or reduced
hours. We've seen this play out in the Great Recession and its aftermath,
with changes in real household income taking a bigger fall as you move
down the income distribution.
The final section of the piece is called "Monetary Policy is No
Panacea": indeed, how could it be? What the Fed does is to push money
out into the economy through the banks, so it has a long ways to go
to trickle down, and the financial sector has become very adept at
soaking all that money up.
Igor Volsky: 6 Ways Extreme Income Inequality Is Making Your Life
Worse: Assuming, that is, you're not one of the extremely rich,
although I suspect someone could do something with that case as well:
- Income inequality forces Americans into debt.
- Income inequality makes America sick.
- Income inequality makes America less safe.
- Income inequality makes America less democratic.
- Income inequality undermines the American dream.
- Income inequality is undermining long-term economic growth.
"The American dream" is a hack cliché, usually meaning greater upward
economic mobility from generation to generation. The point about debt is
true, but one can argue with how much of it is forced. The basic fact is
that for a long time Americans compensated for lagging income growth by
assuming more debt. That practice took a very severe hit in the 2007-08
collapse, and may not even be an option going forward. A second aspect
is that as credit becomes harder for people to obtain, it quickly gets
to be prohibitively expensive and even predatory.
Kathlee Geier: Walmart's holiday profits are way down. Food stamp cuts
are a big part of the reason.
The Financial Times reports that, according to estimates, fourth quarter
sales and profits were down for Walmart, the nation's largest retailer.
Previously, Walmart had announced that sales were expected to be flat,
but now it's saying sales are likely to be "slightly negative." Official
results are due out on Feb. 20.
What's especially interesting is that Walmart is citing food stamp
cuts as one reason for declining sales. Fully 20 percent of Walmart's
customers use food stamps.
The plain fact is that food stamps are not just a form of welfare
for poor people, they're also a subsidy for corporations. They also
help some companies get away with paying workers less: in fact, see
the cartoon on the right, which also singles out Walmart.
Also, a few links for further study:
John Cassidy: Ten Ways to Get Serious About Rising Inequality:
Ten ideas ("none of which are original"), not my laundry list but some
are obvious, some are stretches, a couple I'm not sure what good they'd
- Establish a guaranteed minimum income for all American households.
- Abolish the payroll tax.
- Replace the payroll tax with a consumption tax.
- Raise the top rate of income tax.
- Tax wealth properly.
- Give ordinary Americans "homestead" grants.
- Nationalize the public-education system.
- Copy the Germans and greatly expand technical education.
- Abolish private schools and legacy admissions to private universities.
- Introduce a financial-transactions tax.
The financial-transactions tax would not only raise money that could be
spent more productively, it would slow down the rate of transactions, and
might suppress the temptation to capture small gains through fast-triggered
trading. I associate a lot of that with hedge funds and don't see how it
helps the economy at all, although it does make a handfull of traders very
rich. Of course, taxing their gains is another approach.
Tom Engelhardt: Ending the World the Human Way: A rant on climate
change as "anti-news" -- not news because it's been rehashed so many
times already, but not accepted as fact either because certain private
interests prefer not to acknowledge it:
What makes climate change so challenging is that the carbon dioxide
(and methane) being generated by the extraction, production, and burning
of fossil fuels supports the most profitable corporations in history, as
well as energy states like Saudi Arabia and Russia that are, in essence,
national versions of such corporations. The drive for profits has so far
proven unstoppable. Those who run the big oil companies, like the tobacco
companies before them, undoubtedly know what potential harm they are doing
to us. They know what it will mean for humanity if resources (and profits)
aren't poured into alternative energy research and development. And like
those cigarette companies, they go right on. They are indeed intent, for
instance, on turning North America into "Saudi America," and hunting down
and extracting the last major reserves of fossil fuel in the most difficult
spots on the planet. Their response to climate change has, in fact, been
to put some of their vast profits into the funding of a campaign of
climate-change denialism (and obfuscation) and into the coffers of chosen
politicians and think tanks willing to lend a hand.
In fact, one of the grim wonders of climate change has been the ability
of Big Energy and its lobbyists to politicize an issue that wouldn't
normally have a "left" or "right," and to make bad science into an ongoing
news story. In other words, an achievement that couldn't be more criminal
in nature has also been their great coup de théâtre.
One thing that became obvious back in 1999 with the "Y2K" scare was
that people don't have a good sense of what is or is not a threat to
their lives or way of life. Terrorism, for instance, is one thing that
people get excessively bent out of shape over, but it is much rarer
and far less dangerous than incompetence -- an everyday problem we
rarely think about. Lots of people tend to overreact to climate change.
I first noticed then during a period when I was reading a lot about
extinction crises in paleontology. It turns out that lots of people
think that every extinction crisis was caused by climate change, even
though few can explain plausible scenarios of how that may have worked.
There can be no doubt that there have been large climate swings over
the course of earth history. Nor can we doubt that those swings have
pushed species hither and yon, have selected for adaptations, and
have on occasion doomed species that couldn't move or adapt. Still,
that rarely adds up to a major extinction event, except in the fevered
imagination of people stuck on the idea. So when someone like Bill
McKibben reaches for an "end of nature" metaphor, or Engelhardt
"borrows" the notion of "anti-news," my bullshit detector goes off.
Still, I'm not into denying the science. I don't see anything there
that mankind cannot adapt to, but it does seem clear that people who
are confined to specific parcels of land -- you know, property owners --
will feel the brunt of the impact of climate changes as assumptions
about what a given piece of land is good for sometimes improve but
often fail. You'd think that property owners -- which is to say the
class of people a good deal richer than the likes of me -- would take
notice and seek to limit climate chance, but land isn't the source of
wealth it used to be, and most owners operate under the notion that
land, being finite and fixed, can only appreciate, so it turns out
they're not much of a factor.
The people who are a factor are the oil men, and they make for a
very peculiar political class. Oil is one of few commodities that is
finite and exhaustible, so one would expect a public bias in favor
of conservation: we should only use a minimum necessary amount of
oil now so we can reserve some for future generations. In virtually
every nation in the world oil is owned by the public, but in the US
it is owned privately, and that fact urges owners to pump it as fast
and completely as possible. Unlike most businessfolk, oil men are
almost exclusively created by luck and law: the luck to own property
that has oil underneath, and the law which lets them turn their luck
into riches. But rather than acknowledge a system so tenuous, and
ultimately so mindless, they have a remarkable intellectual bent
which allows them to take credit for everything, to style themselves
as self-made individuals, and to espouse a political ideology that
is ultimately little more than self-worship. You may think that the
issue of climate change is above left-right politics, but oil men
are the backbone of the far right in this country's politics, and
anything that limits their ability to convert their property into
money must be an ultra-leftist conspiracy.
Public ownership and stewarship of oil (and other minerals) would
make it much easier to have a rational discussion over how fast we
wish to deplete those resources, and what sort of risks to the climate
and to the environment we are willing to tolerate. It may seem too
late for that, but one could reform estate taxes to collect mineral
rights as current owners pass away, and one can introduce taxes to
compensate for the externalities of burning oil. Moreover, those are
things we should do, not so much because climate change is such an
overwhelming threat as because the basic principles make them good
things to do. And if, in the process, we defund the conservative
political movement, that too would be a blessing. It's founded on
a lot of intellectual fallacies, but none so glaring than the notion
that successful oil men (most notoriously at the moment, the Kochs)
are most qualified to run the country.
Greg Grandin: The Terror of Our Age: The Spindletop oil field was
discovered in 1901, so packed with oil it gushed through the first
wells. But everyone who owned property over the field could drill into
it, and they pumped so much oil out of it that first the price crashed
then within three years the field was dry. That's the logic of the oil
industry, but it wasn't new or unique to oil. Grandin has the same
story from a century earlier, about killing seals:
At first the frenetic pace of the killing didn't matter: there were so
many seals. On one island alone, Amasa Delano estimated, there were "two
to three millions of them" when New Englanders first arrived to make "a
business of killing seals."
"If many of them were killed in a night," wrote one observer, "they
would not be missed in the morning." It did indeed seem as if you could
kill every one in sight one day, then start afresh the next. Within just
a few years, though, Amasa and his fellow sealers had taken so many seal
skins to China that Canton's warehouses couldn't hold them. They began
to pile up on the docks, rotting in the rain, and their market price
To make up the margin, sealers further accelerated the pace of the
killing -- until there was nothing left to kill. In this way, oversupply
and extinction went hand in hand.
This is from a new book by Greg Grandin: The Empire of Necessity:
Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World (2014, Metropolitan
Books). Same logic applied to seals and oil: you make your fortune as
fast and ruthlessly as possible, and leave nothing for anyone else.
Joshua Frank: Inside Israel's Apartheid State: Interview with Max
Blumenthal, author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
(2013, Nation Books).
Sunday, January 19. 2014
Some scattered links this week:
Barbara Ehrenreich: It Is Expensive to Be Poor:
Most private-sector employers offer no sick days, and many will fire a
person who misses a day of work, even to stay home with a sick child.
A nonfunctioning car can also mean lost pay and sudden expenses. A
broken headlight invites a ticket, plus a fine greater than the cost
of a new headlight, and possible court costs. If a creditor decides
to get nasty, a court summons may be issued, often leading to an arrest
warrant. No amount of training in financial literacy can prepare someone
for such exigencies -- or make up for an income that is impossibly low
to start with. Instead of treating low-wage mothers as the struggling
heroines they are, our political culture still tends to view them as
miscreants and contributors to the "cycle of poverty."
If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the
recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for
temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and
imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion
of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government
to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means
by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent
in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame
poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the
No More Mister Nice Blog: The Problem Isn't Wealth Addiction. It's
Letting the Addicts Write the Laws. Starts with an op-ed by a
banker whining that his bonus last year was only $3.6 million, and
how he had become addicted to being filthy rich -- nothing the poor
fellow can do about it. M. argues that the real problem is:
In a way, this is what we do with guns in America, at least at the
national level and in the red states: we let the junkies control who
can obtain the stuff, how freely it's sold, and how few restraints
we can put on its exchange, by means of their unchallenged access
to elected officials. With great wealth, especially over the past
thirty-plus years, we've allowed the the wealthiest and greediest --
whose access to public officials is even greater than that of the gun
lobbyists -- to talk us into curtailing the tax and regulatory policies
that served as checks on their access to the stuff, and have thus
permitted them to do massive harm to society as a result of their
abuse. In a way, with wealth we have a sort of narco-state, where the
cartel leaders intimidate the authorities into avoiding crackdowns on
the trade. The only difference is that, in the case of wealth, it's
actually empowering to be high on your own supply.
Andrew Simmons: The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key
to Social Mobility:
The rhetoric echoes the oft-cited work of Jean Anyon, an education
researcher who died in September. Studying elementary schools, Anyon
looked at how schools can condition kids for positions in life. She
saw that schools teaching the children of affluent families prepared
those kids to take on leadership roles and nurtured their capacity for
confident self-expression and argument. Schools teaching children from
low-income families focused on keeping students busy and managing
behavior. A middle-class school deemphasized individual expression and
in-depth analysis and rewarded the dutiful completion of specified
rote tasks. In each case, according to Anyon, a "hidden curriculum"
has prepared students for a future role in society. Some students
learn to take orders and others learn to chart a course of action and
delegate responsibility. School can either perpetuate inequity through
social reproduction or have a transformative effect and help students
It's not enough for the rich that they are the beneficiaries of a
political-economic system that increases inequality, they also wish
to impose on everyone their insistence that inequitable returns are
the standard by which people should judge their lives, and be judged
by others. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake, taking satisfaction
in non-monetary achievements -- those are heretical ideas that fail
to show sufficient respect for moneymaking. Also worth noting that
the constant harping about how higher education provides a way out
for the lower classes is one of the few plausible options the system
can offer. It is, however, increasingly discredited both by the high
debt loads it imposes and by the efforts of the upper class to lock
its privileges in.
Hedrick Smith: Boeing's power play: For decades Seattle was first
and foremost among Boeing towns, and its fortunes rose or fell with the
company. But then Boeing moved their corporate headquarters to Chicago,
sending a message to Seattle workers that Boeing execs wouldn't feel a
thing if they pulled the plug on their Seattle plants. Boeing had set
up a process where they auction jobs all around the world, and they've
made the state of Washington pay dearly to keep workers employed that
any sane company would be proud to have. They've moved their 787 work
around so far that the plane was years late. And once again Boeing is
shaking down the unions for further concessions.
Boeing's stingy treatment of its highly skilled workforce offers a
vivid example of how America's new economy has created gaping economic
inequalities and steadily squeezed the economic life out of the
U.S. middle class over the past three decades, even as corporate
profits and CEO pay have skyrocketed.
Boeing's case epitomizes that sharp economic divide. For just as
the company was wringing concessions from its workers, its board of
directors approved a 50 percent increase in the company's stock
dividend and a $10 billion stock buyback that will richly reward
investors and executives who get paid in Boeing shares.
Boeing contends that it is not the first to impose such concessions
but that it is merely following the market.
True enough. In 1980, 84 percent of American workers at companies
with 100 or more employees received lifetime pensions from their
companies, and 70 percent got health insurance fully paid for by their
employers. Today, fewer than 30 percent have lifetime pensions and
only 18 percent have fully employer-paid health insurance.
What these numbers mean is that every year hundreds of billions of
dollars in benefit costs have been shifted from company books to the
pocketbooks and checkbooks of average Americans, helping to boost
corporate profits and to leave roughly half of the baby boom
generation facing near poverty in retirement.
Boeing's new contract will accelerate that trend. And it's not as
if hard economic times forced Boeing to slash labor costs. Its profits
and demand for its planes are at record levels.
Over the past decade, Boeing rolled up more than $35 billion in
profits and paid no federal corporate taxes. In fact, Boeing reaped
about $2 billion in federal tax rebates from 2003 to 2012, as well as
the most generous long-term state tax subsidy in U.S. history from
Also, a few links for further study: