The Weekly Sift

Pulling Up the Stakes

2012-01-23T14:28:00.001-05:00

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

– Rousseau, On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

While property in some form is possible without liberty, the contrary is inconceivable.

-- Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom

In this week's sift:

Property vs. Freedom. You won't often hear the debate over SOPA/PIPA phrased that way, because Property is supposed to be Freedom's inseparable partner. But they actually have a fairly contentious relationship.
The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes. A wild week of Republican politics tempts me into covering the horserace instead of the issues.
We Need More Bureaucrats and other short notes. IRS budget cuts increased the deficit and hurt customer service. One million signatures to recall Walker. Obama wants to see Betty White's birth certificate. That famous McDonald's coffee lawsuit might not be what you think. And more.
Last week's most popular post. Four Fantasy Issues of the Right got 167 views. Under the radar, Why I'm Not a Libertarian continues to rack up about 80-90 views a week, and is over 20,000 now. The most-clicked link was What If Tim Tebow Were Muslim?.
This week's challenge. Don't let the media filter tomorrow's State of the Union address for you. Watch it yourself before anybody tells you what's in it.

The sequel to Escalating Bad Faith got crowded out again.

Profit and Property, or People?

2012-01-16T12:52:00.001-05:00

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

-- Martin Luther King

In this week's sift:

Four Fantasy Issues of the Right. It's hard to have the political debate our country really needs, when so much of what we end up talking about is baseless: creeping Sharia, things Obama never said, voter fraud, and lies about Obama's birth, religion, or political philosophy.
What is Job Creation? What keeps our businesses from hiring isn't lack of capital, it's lack of customers.
Truth Vigilantes and other short notes. The Times gets an earful from its readers. Defending corpse desecration doesn't support our troops. What if Tebow were Muslim? Colbert's Super-PAC demonstrates the absurdity of our campaign-finance system. The Republican establishment shuts down criticism of Romney. The charming geekiness of Vi Hart. And more.
Last week's most popular post.The Four Flavors of Republican got 441 views on this blog, and was also popular on Daily Kos. The most-clicked link was Explaining Socialism to a Republican.
This week's challenge. Friday is the anniversary of the Citizens United decision that expanded the corporate personhood doctrine and let corporate money flood into our elections. Occupy the Courts is organizing a national day of protest at federal court buildings around the country.

The sequel to last week's Escalating Bad Faith is delayed to next week.

Inventing the Narrative

2012-01-09T13:53:00.001-05:00

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly,
not about “the democratic process,”
or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs,
but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized
that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals,
to those who manage policy and those who report on it,
to those who run the polls and those who quote them,
to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows,
to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers,
to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them;
to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out,
the narrative of public life.

– Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” (1988)

In this week's sift:

Escalating Bad Faith, Part I: Recess Appointments. The controversy over President Obama's recent recess appointments sounds boring and technical, but it's a symptom of a cancer in our democracy that has been growing for decades.
The Four Flavors of Republican. How NeoCons, Corporatists, Theocrats, and Libertarians co-operate and conflict.
My Boring Primary Season and other short notes. Ah, for the halcyon days of 2007, when presidential candidates by the dozen vied for my attention all summer. Mitt as "locust capitalist". Why "equality of opportunity" is a risky meme for conservatives. The real lesson of Kim Jong Il. Santorum's Grampa was "free" to owe his soul to the company store. Montana's Supreme Court rejects corporate personhood. And more.
Last week's most popular post wasn't that popular: Under-reported Stories of 2011 got 143 views. The most-clicked link was the Salon Hack List.
This week's challenge: If you don't already know, find out who the likely congressional candidates are in your district, and whether you have a senatorial election this year.

Predictions

2012-01-02T13:44:00.001-05:00

I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years . . . Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions. -- Wilbur Wright, 1908

Within the next few decades, autos will have folding wings that can be spread when on a straight stretch of road so that the machine can take to the air. -- Eddie Rickenbacker, 1924

In this week's sift:

Is a Boom Coming in 2012?Karl Smith and Matt Yglesias predict one, for not-entirely-crazy reasons.
Iowa Preview. Santorum? Could it really be Santorum?
Under-reported Stories of 2011. While the media was telling you about Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian, some genuinely important things were happening.
Strategic Voting and other short notes. When does it make sense to vote in the other party's primary? WikiLeaks has a priceless commercial. What real 3DTV looks like. Why Romney won't release his taxes. And two good Krugman columns.

The Yearly Sift of 2011

2011-12-26T13:23:00.001-05:00

What's past is prologue.

-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

In this week's sift:

Sifting the Sifts of 2011: Escape From Bizarro World. This year I got tired of playing whack-a-mole with bogus news stories, and instead focused more on the question of how the Right creates and maintains its bizarre worldview.
Politics in 2011: The Tragedy of the Tea Party. The main story of 2011 was the assumption of power by the Tea Party candidates elected in 2011, which exposed all the Party's tragic flaws.
The Sifted Books of 2011: Rethinking Economics. I didn't set out to have a theme in the books I reviewed, but there was one: looking for a new way to think about economics.
The State of the Sift. The Sift got lot more page-views after it moved to weeklysift.com in July -- half of them from one post.

Pressures From Below

2011-12-19T13:53:00.001-05:00

Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below.

-- Roger Baldwin

In this week's sift:

Detention Without Trial. President Obama isn't going to veto the NDAA after all. How big a problem is that?
Christopher Hitchens and the Politics of Atheism. I come to bury Hitchens, not to praise him. But all the same, there are some things you have to give him credit for.
Victoryish, and other short notes. What's the right way to mark the end of the Iraq War? NPR can't find the jobs that a millionaires' tax would kill. Are co-ops the future? More Rick Perry parodies. Links to my holiday stories. And more.
Last week's most popular post. In an extraordinarily slow week on the Sift, Perry and Parody was the most popular post with 107 views. (Whenever I have a low number to report, somebody always reminds me that around 300 people access the Sift in ways that don't show up in these statistics.)
This week's challenge. As you plan your holiday donations to charity, check out the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. Don't just give your money away, give it away as effectively as possible.

Campaign Update

2011-12-12T14:02:00.001-05:00

It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

-- attributed to just about everybody

In this week's sift:

Your 2012 Deep Background Briefing. Forget the day-to-day of who's up and who's down. What's this campaign going to be about?
Evangelicals and the New Newt. Mainstream pundits are puzzled by how the religious right can rally to a morally challenged Newt Gingrich. It's really not that mysterious.
Perry and Parody. Rick Perry's "Strong" is the most disliked and most parodied political ad ever.
Hallelujah and other short notes. Now that corporations are people, they have reason to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Not even rats are so ratty that they don't have empathy. What "freedom" means to MasterCard. Jon Stewart declares war on Christmas. The Santa Venn diagram. And more on news deserts.
Last week's most popular post. Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation was the most popular post for the second week in a row.

Have an unchallenging week, everybody.

Bird's Eye View

2011-12-05T14:11:00.001-05:00

I will ascend above the tops of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.

-- Isaiah 14:14

In this week's sift:

Forgive Us Our Debts. Some large percentage of the major news stories are tied somehow to the issue of debt. Each one has its labyrinth of details, into which your attention can vanish and never return. But let's go the other way and try to look at the big picture: This is bigger than economics. It's about democracy and how we even start to think about morality.
Bankers' Law and other short notes. A judge rejects a sweetheart deal between the SEC and Citi. TARP was only a small part of the bailout. Illegal foreclosures. Congress approves detention-without-trial. 100 notable books. Inoculations against Ron Paul fever. Marxist Muppets. Perry, Cain, Romney. Gas leases say more than farmers realize. And stop blaming Barney Frank.
Last week's most popular post. Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation was the most popular post in nearly two months. It's the fifth post in weeklysift.com history to get more than 2000 views. Last count: 2328.
Expand your vocabulary: news desert. A news desert is any segment of society so invisible to mainstream media that it's hard for the desert-dwellers to keep track of what's going on in their own community.

Mildly Revolutionary

2011-11-28T14:19:00.001-05:00

I've laid down in the rain before
hoping I would drown and wake up upon your shore.
But even God can't hire everyone any more.
Even God can't hire everyone any more.

-- The Mild Revolution "Working Man Blues"

In this week's sift:

Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation. Everybody knows that journalists are (sort of) liberal. So why does so much coverage slant to the right?
Where Occupy Goes Next and other short notes. Should Occupy Wall Street support a legislative agenda and candidates to carry it out, or would that just corrupt and co-opt the movement? Plus: The pepper-spraying cop becomes iconic. The world's lightest material. Do conservative policies promote conservative values? And Mitt Romney gets a taste of his own medicine.
Last week's most popular post. At last count, Now Look What You Made Me Do had 699 views, making it the sixth most popular post since the Sift moved to weeklysift.com in July.
This week's challenge: Listen Local. If you're trying to eat local and shop local, you really ought to check out your local music scene too. (That's where I picked up this week's quote.)

Refraining From Violence

2011-11-21T13:30:00.001-05:00

I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.

-- President Barack Obama,
January 28, 2011

In this week's sift:

Now Look What You Made Me Do. When police attacked peaceful protesters in cities around the country this week, the media's unwillingness to "take sides" insured that Middle America would blame the protesters.
Will the Court Throw Out Obamacare?The Supremes will rule on the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality sometime between now and June. Two conservative appellate judges just gave us a preview of what they might do.
Paterno and the Bishops. Comparing the Penn State scandal to the Catholic Church scandal, it's clear that the public attitude towards sexual abuse has changed.
Last (two) week's most popular post. Jobless Recoveries Are Normal Now had 322 views.
This week's challenge. At your church, business, club, or other institutions, raise this question: Where do we do our banking? Many institutional accounts might be ineligible for credit unions, but could your institution move to a local bank more likely to keep your money in the community?

The length of this week's main articles crowded out Short Notes. As compensation, I offer this amazing photo from Iceland: The full moon illuminates a waterfall, the moonlight creates a rainbow in the spray, and between the foreground of the bow and the background of the starry night sky shine the Northern Lights.

As the Christmas carol says: "O, that we were there."

Seemingly Moral

2011-11-07T13:46:00.001-05:00

No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on November 21st.

There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt -- above all, because it immediately makes it seem like it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

-- David Graeber
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

In this week's sift:

Jobless Recoveries are Normal Now. One very instructive graph and the disturbing conclusion you can draw from it: The fundamental nature of recessions has changed, and most of the policies we fight over have nothing to do with it.
The Cain Scandal After a Week. Scandals just have entertainment value until they start driving your supporters away. So far that's not happening.
The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes. Herman Cain's China problem, a food-industry insider defects, a true blue supporter of the family is a deadbeat dad, the iPod of government, SB-5 is going down tomorrow, the importance of the smart grid, a couple particularly stunning scenes from nature, and more.
Last week's most popular post. Nonviolence and the Police, with 329 views.
This week's challenge. Remember to vote in your local elections tomorrow. Also, Saturday was Bank Transfer Day, when people all over the country closed their accounts at too-big-to-fail banks and moved their money to community banks or credit unions. If you missed, it's not too late. AlterNet's Lynn Parramore gives a step-by-step.

The System's Game

2011-10-31T12:37:00.001-04:00

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you: pull your beard, flick your face to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.

-- John Lennon
[it took me forever to source this;
for the longest time I thought it must be misattributed]

In this week's sift:

Nonviolence and the Police. If the recent police attacks on Occupy protesters either enrage or discourage you, take some time to remember how nonviolence works, and the important roles the police play in that strategy.
It's Mitt Romney's Economy. Vast inequality? Paper profits and no jobs? It's all part of a revolution in corporate behavior that started in the 70s. And one of the major revolutionaries was Mitt Romney.
Three-eyed Fish and other short notes. Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant. My Halloween column. Occupy Mordor's statement. Perry's flat tax. Some very pretty pictures of the northern lights. Bad Lip Reading does Herman Cain. And more.
Last week's most popular post. For the third week in a row, Turn the Shame Around, with 352 views (7400 total). The most-viewed new post was Eliminate the Work Penalty(183). (Whenever I report such a low number, somebody reminds me that the blog page views don't count the readers who get the Sift via email or RSS feeds. That's around 300 people total, as best I can figure.)
This week's challenge. Lots of state and local elections are happening a week from tomorrow. These elections are won on turnout, so make sure to turn out. The headline vote is in Ohio, where a No on Issue 2 will repeal the anti-union bill passed by the legislature. They could still use your help.

Vampires

2011-10-24T13:27:00.001-04:00

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

-- Karl Marx

In this week's sift:

Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don't know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right's regressive flat-tax idea doesn't simplify anything. But there's an obvious progressive reform that would.
Koch-Funded Study: "Global Warming is Real". Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to "man up" and face her rather than go after her staff.
Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can't Republicans be as gracious about President Obama's successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading's Mitt Romney video.
Last week's most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Aroundgot the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It's the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you've been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.

Manipulations

2011-10-17T13:25:00.001-04:00

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

– Eric Hoffer

In this week's sift:

Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us. Last week I talked about how the economic system uses our shame against us. This week I focus on the flip side of that phenomenon: pride.
A View From Dewey Square. I visited Occupy Boston the afternoon after the police had dropped by. Too bad we missed each other.
Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes. Molly Erdman's parody captures everything I love about Elizabeth Warren. I couldn't make myself watch the Republican debate, so I let other people fact-check it. Plus, I whole bunch of other fact-checking and lie-exposing about Occupy Wall Street and the economy.
Last week's most popular post. Turn the Shame Around (5700 views at last count) had the second most popular first week in weeklysift.com history.
This week's challenge.Woody Tasch presents an interesting challenge: What if ordinary people who were doing well enough to have savings stopped investing it all in financial institutions and instead invested in local businesses they can see and use and understand? Especially in local food enterprises: "I'm talking about investing with your friends and neighbors in small organic farms, grain mills, creameries, small slaughterhouses, seed companies, compost companies, restaurants that source locally, butchers and bakers and, sure, a bee's-wax candlemaker or two. Take 1 percent of your money out of the stock market and put it into food hubs, community kitchens, community markets, school gardens, niche organic brands, makers of sustainable agricultural inputs, and more." Doing this right is more than a one-week challenge, but how would you start?

Public Shamelessness

2011-10-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

-- Benjamin Franklin, Sayings of Poor Richard

In this week's sift:

Turn the Shame Around. It took Herman Cain to teach me what Occupy Wall Street is about: casting off shame and putting it where it belongs. The Powers That Be would have us be ashamed that we weren't good enough to crack the top 1%. But what is really shameful is an economy that only works for the top 1%.
What Kind of King Do You Want To Be? Wednesday I had to explain to a teen-ager why the news is important. I told him that in a democracy the People are King, and the children are in training to be King. Whatever we need to know to be a good King, that defines what news is. And when we're a bad King, people die.
Palin's Big Con and other short notes. Did Sarah Palin bluff running for president just to con money out of her fans? Jon Stewart thinks so. Stephen Colbert apologizes to a ham that looks like Karl Rove. The secret "kill list" for American citizens. Hank Williams Jr., Scott Brown, and Rick Perry deal with PR problems. Occupy Sesame Street. And more.
Last week's most popular post. It was a slow week. For the second week in a row, the short notes were the top new post. The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street and other short notes garnered 127 views. Meanwhile, Six True Things Politicians Can't Say (from September 19) got 193 views. At 67K, it has accounted for about half of the page views since this blog moved to weeklysift.com in July.
Expand Your Vocabulary. A new feature, which will alternate with This Week's Challenge. This week I want to call your attention to the term composition fallacy: assuming that what works for one person will work if everybody does it. (The classic example is standing up to get a better view at a football game.) In politics, composition fallacies are used to make structural problems in the economy look like individual moral failings. One unemployed person can network and pound the pavement and retrain until he finds a new job. Does it follow that unemployment would go away if all the unemployed tried harder? No.

Changing the System

2011-10-03T13:49:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved. Check out the new site at WeeklySift.com.

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

-- attributed to Emma Goldman (but I'm having a hard time sourcing it)

In this week's Sift:

ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground? In the current money-dominated system, neither the liberal nor the conservative grass roots can pass any kind of fundamental change through the bottleneck of Congress. What if the two sides could trust each other long enough to reform our democracy, and then have the kind of democratic struggle the Founders envisioned?
Execution Without Trial. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who supported al Qaeda and may have been actively plotting to kill Americans. Friday he was killed by a drone missile, despite never having been indicted or convicted of any crime. How should we feel about that?
The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street, and other short notes. Does it make sense to have a protest movement but no demands? More poor, poor bigots. You still don't know how bad paperless voting machines are. 85K Americans died last year because they weren't French. Christians face the failure of abstinence. Plus more depressing stuff, leading to baby pandas. Because who doesn't like baby pandas?
Last Week's Most Popular Post. At 146 views, Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes was the first short-notes post ever to out-draw the week's longer articles. Everything I posted last week ran well behind Six True Things Politicians Can't Say from September 12 (438 views last week, 67,000 total).
This Week's Challenge. A college teacher says civics education has gotten so bad we all need to work on it: "Each one of us who does know how the system works, who votes, who has strong feelings about democracy and justice, has a responsibility to teach someone who as of yet doesn't know this." That means you, right?

Tinkering With Death

2011-09-26T12:35:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved. Check out the new site at WeeklySift.com.

From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
dissenting opinion in the capital punishment case Callins v Collins (1994)

In this week's sift:

Talking About Killing.Troy Davis' execution galvanized death-penalty opponents. But they're still talking past (not to) death-penalty advocates.
The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight.How Israeli prison made a peace activist out of Sami al Jundi.
Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes. Why military chaplains are not the victims of DADT repeal. The Republican debates are making the party "sound like crazy people" and hurting Rick Perry. The outrageous lie that put Herman Cain's campaign back on the map. Amusing political images. Elizabeth Warren goes viral. And more.
The previous Sift's most popular post. Six True Things Politicians Can't Say was on its way to a respectable showing when it suddenly took off last Monday, got 8000 hits in an hour, and set a Weekly Sift record with (so far) 66,000 views. Economics Works Backwards Now got over 400 views, which would have made it the top post of a typical week. Both were voted onto the recommended list when reposted to Daily Kos -- the first time I ever hit that list two days in a row. Meanwhile, One Word Turns the Tea Party Around was having a third burst of popularity, and is now up to 17,000 views. I don't know how long I can resist the Hollywood urge to write "Six More True Things Politicians Can't Say" or "Another Word Turns the Tea Party Around".
This week's challenge. Check out a couple of proposals that could use your support: The People's Rights Amendment declares that only "natural persons" (not corporations) have constitutional rights. And the National Popular Vote Bill circumvents the Electoral College through a compact among the states.

Turn the Crank

2011-09-12T12:46:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved. Check out the new site at weeklysift.com

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

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

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

In this week's sift:

Economics Works Backwards Now. It used to be about working to produce scarce goods. Now what's scarce is work.
Six True Things Politicians Can't Say. Remember how in high school you sometimes couldn't say obvious things, because the other kids would ridicule you for it? Politics is like that.
Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes. Toucans can't symbolize a Guatemalan educational non-profit, because they already symbolize Froot Loops.
Last week's most popular post. The whole site still lives in the shadow of Why I Am Not a Libertarian, now up to 18,000 views, and One Word Turns the Tea Party Around (8000). But though last week's Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence (231) and Blowing Smoke About Clouds (165) posted much more modest numbers, both did well when reposted on Daily Kos.
This week's challenge. The next significant campaign is the Ohio referendum called Issue 2, which will be voted on this November. Issue 2 is the old S.B. 5, Ohio's union-busting bill, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Kasich, but is still in limbo now that enough signatures have been gathered to force a referendum. Find out how you can help at WeAreOhio.com.

Strategies

2011-09-05T11:59:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved. Check our our new digs at weeklysift.com.

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

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

In this week's sift:

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

Truth Among Friends

2011-08-29T10:08:00.002-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved. Check our our new digs at weeklysift.com.

Though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

-- Aristotle

In this week's sift:

Barack, Can We Talk? I can live with the budget compromises, even if I don't like them. But we need you to build a Democratic brand and defend a progressive view of reality. When you start repeating deceptive Republican rhetoric -- that's just wrong.
A Primary Issues Guide. As the Republican presidential campaign gets national attention, any misinformation the major candidates agree on is going to get a big boost. Let's try to head that off.
Irene and Uncle Sam, and other short notes. Natural disasters underline the importance of government, unless you're Ron Paul.
Last week's most popular post. Traffic went crazy last week. Why I Am Not a Libertarian is about to pass 17,000 hits. The previous week's One Word Turns the Tea Party Around picked up a second wind on Thursday and had over 4,000 hits this week, pushing it above 6,000. (About 400 came from a link on this knitting blog. Thanks, Norma.) Both totals are higher than any previous post in the Weekly Sift's 3 1/2 year history.
This week's challenge. Add a comment to an article on a news web site. (At some sites you might have to register, but it's easy and free.) Short comments hit hardest, and there are some simple comparisons worth making: Our Libya intervention was so much smarter than our Iraq intervention. And Irene got handled a lot better than Katrina.

Objections

2011-08-22T12:41:00.001-04:00

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

-- Clarence Darrow

In this week's Sift:

Why I Am Not a Libertarian. I still remember the points I found so convincing when I was a 19-year-old Libertarian. But 35 years later the world looks very different to me.
Horse Race 2012. In general the corporate media over-covers the presidential horserace, and I hate to compound the problem. But they also cover it badly, so now-and-then I feel like I have to comment.
The Great Flabbergasting and other short notes. Rachel Maddow coined an amusing term for a head-shaking phenomenon: Republicans turn against their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart confronts ideas that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist and that the poor should have their taxes raised before the rich.
Last week's most popular post. Last week was something of a break-out for the Weekly Sift. One Word Turns the Tea Party Around just passed 1900 hits on the blog, in addition to the via email or RSS. And when I cross-posted it on Daily Kos, it drew over 800 recommendations and 224 comments. What's more, these blog visitors showed some signs of hanging around: The second-most-popular post last week was the Who Am I and Why I Started the Weekly Sift post that is always up. The popular posts of previous weeks have been driven by Reddit; One Word was driven by Facebook. Thanks to all of you who linked and liked and otherwise helped get it out there.
This week's challenge. When you hand your money to a big corporation, chances are a slice of it will go to ALEC or the Chamber of Commerce and be used to promote corporate rights over human rights. In the economy as it currently exists, you can't avoid corporations completely unless you're ready to live like the Amish. But chances are you can find some way to give them less of your money. This week, investigate whether a credit union could serve you better than a bank. Or patronize a locally-owned shop or restaurant, a farmer's market, or some other human-scale business rather than a national chain.

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com.

Turn Back

2011-08-15T12:34:00.001-04:00

Turn back, O Man.
Forswear thy foolish ways

Clifford Bax (1919)

In this week's Sift:

One Word Turns the Tea Party Around. Want to transform annoying Tea Party rhetoric into motivating Progressive rhetoric? It's easy: Just replace all occurrences of government withcorporations. Who knew that Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, and Ronald Reagan could make so much sense?
Building the Rioters of the Future. Pundits tried very hard to stuff the British riots into some simple box: a crime spree, a revolution, bad parenting, mass insanity. When that failed, they proclaimed the violence a great mystery. But is it really so hard to understand why people with little to lose would loot or burn?
After Wisconsin. Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats picked up two seats in staunch Republican districts, but fell short of re-taking the state senate. So was that a win or a loss? And now we move on to Ohio.
Noah's Dinosaurs and other short notes. Should a Bible theme park get tax breaks? Is it OK for a county board to begin its meetings by praying to Jesus? How the Republican 2012 field looks after the Ames Straw poll. Global warming in one graphic. Mitt Romney embraces corporate personhood, and the DNC strikes back. What countries are still AAA? Socialist ones, mostly.
Last week's most popular post.Voter Suppression 101 had 464 views at last count. Last week's most-clicked link backed up my claim (in Voter Suppression) that the League of Women Voters has stopped registering voters in Florida in response to a voter-suppression law there.
This Week's Challenge is only a little self-serving: Figure out how you can draw more attention to the kinds of things you like. If you've mostly been a passive user of social media, figure out how to Like or Link or Retweet. Or sign up at Reddit or Digg or StumbleUpon and start trying to influence the wisdom of crowds.

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com.

The People Repelled

2011-08-08T12:24:00.001-04:00

The discussion shows that are supposed to add to public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that "issues" don't matter except as items for politicians to squabble about. ... The press, which in the long run cannot survive if people lose interest in politics, is acting as if its purpose was to guarantee that people are repelled by public life.

James Fallows, Breaking the News (1995)

In this week's sift:

Voter Suppression 101. Imagine you are a politician who serves only the top 1%. What's your plan for getting enough votes to win?
Tea By Any Other Name. After the disastrous end of the Bush administration, conservatives used their money and media power to ditch the wounded Republican label and rebrand themselves as the new (and therefore blameless) Tea Party. Now that the Tea Party's public image is tanking, how long before they try the same trick again?
A Week of Down. Bad as it looked, the debt-ceiling deal was supposed to keep the stock market from crashing and the ratings agencies from downgrading our bonds. Funny how that worked out.
The Solar Oil Field and Other Short Notes. Oman uses solar to bring up more oil. Protesting Obama's 50th birthday. Sponge Bob, propagandist. The E-Trade baby loses everything. Matt Damon sticks up for teachers. The EPA saves money. And a manufactured snub of Easter.
Last week's most popular post. At last count Confessions of a Centrist in Exile had received 240 views on the blog. The most-clicked-link was the solar-powered bikini.
This week's challenge. Six Republican state senators face recall elections in Wisconsin tomorrow. If three of them lose, the state Senate flips to the Democrats. This would send a powerful message to state governments around the country about union-busting and favoring corporations over people. It's too late for your money to do much good, but they need people to make get-out-the-vote phone calls and you can do it from home.

A special note to RSS subscribers. If you read the Sift via Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you've probably noticed all the out-of-date posts you're getting. Here's what's happening: When I moved the Sift to weeklysift.com a few weeks ago, the archived posts didn't transfer perfectly. So I've been fixing them little by little. Unfortunately, those fixes have been showing up in the RSS feed as if they were "updates". I'm not sure what to do about this other than just get the fixes done as fast as possible. Any Weekly Sift post that shows up on anything other than a Monday is the result of this glitch. My apologies.

Not Going Home

2011-08-01T11:50:00.000-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com.
You should adjust your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions accordingly.
In the meantime, I'll continue posting weekly summaries here that will link to the new blog.

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

-- Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

In this week's Sift:

Confessions of a Centrist in Exile. My natural home is in the Center, not the Left. But I can't go back there now, and I don't know if I ever will.
The Mosler Proposals. If you believed (as Warren Mosler does) that in the current economy government spending cannot create any kind of problem -- short term or long -- what would you do?
Short Notes. Obama surrenders to the Tea Party. Even the Tooth Fairy is cutting benefits. Solar-powered bikinis. Apple is the new boss, same as the old boss. How much of a nuisance is it to get a voter ID? Southampton University prints an airplane. Why not let environmentalists bid on oil rights? Good ratings didn't save Cenk Uygur. If the victim is Planned Parenthood, it's not terrorism. Perry is the new Republican favorite. And Jon Stewart takes on conservative delusions of victimization.
Last week's most popular post. The Dog Whistle Defined got 360 views.
This week's challenge. This week's challenge is to keep your spirits up. The news has been relentlessly negative for some while, and that's probably going to continue this week. Breathe. Look at the sky. Find somebody young enough to get excited when you propose playing a silly game. Things change, and it won't be long until you feel like changing them yourself.

"Hear that, Fido?"

2011-07-26T11:13:00.000-04:00

We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption.

-- George Creel, How We Advertised America (1920)

In this week's Sift:

The Dog Whistle Defined. How Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry send messages to the Religious Right that they don't want you to hear.
Digging Into the Deficit. When you gather together the rights charts and graphs, the deficit isn't that complicated: We cut taxes too far, and healthcare costs are rising exponentially.
Short notes. If you're not Muslim, it's not terrorism. The debt ceiling comes down to the wire. Yesterday's talking points are today's deadbeats. The hazards of lying to Al Franken. Dogs and smurfs. And the week's most interesting question: Did communists raise Captain America?
Last week's most popular post. Hands down it was Meet ALEC, which at last count had 878 views (most of which came through Reddit, if I'm reading the stats right). That's part of a national wave of attention to the secretive American Legislative Executive Council. This week the story escaped the liberal blogosphere and made it to Bloomberg News and NPR. A good way to go deeper is to look at one state in detail: ALEC Bills in Wisconsin.
This week's challenge. Sign a petition to make corporations impersonal again. If it takes a constitutional amendment, let's get one started.

I promised a follow-up on last week's review of Warren Mosler's Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, where I would describe his proposals. But I ran over my 3000-word weekly limit, so I'll put that off to next week.

Spoonless

2011-07-18T12:20:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com.
You should adjust your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions accordingly.
In the meantime, I'll continue posting weekly summaries here that will link to the new blog.

This week's summary is on the new blog at: http://weeklysift.com/2011/07/18/spoonless/

BOY: Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible.
Instead, only try to realize the Truth.
NEO: What truth?
BOY: There is no spoon.

-- The Matrix

In this week's Sift:

Welcome to the new WeeklySift.com. This week the Weekly Sift moves to weeklysift.com. Simultaneously, I've changed (and, I hope, improved) the design of the blog. But the content, philosophy, and purpose of the Weekly Sift is not changing.
The Sifted Bookshelf: The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.Warren Mosler's short, free, and very readable book explains why all the common-sense things you know about the economy are wrong. In particular, dollars (like Neo's spoon) are just patterns of data.
Meet ALEC.How did those new conservative governors all suddenly come up with the same detailed agenda after they took office? By using the model laws that the corporations who run the American Legislative Executive Council had already written behind closed doors. Now those model laws have all been leaked.
Short Notes.Will 3-D printers someday kill the last of the manufacturing jobs? Nobody but a reporter comes to Sarah's premier. Krugman, Mahr: If you just noticed how crazy the Republicans are acting, where have you been? Fox forgets 9-11. A song explains fracking. Stephen Colbert explains the Rupert Murdoch scandal. And more.
This Week's Challenge.The Wisconsin recall elections are mere weeks away, and the good guys are being outspent.

Trimming the Fat

2011-07-11T12:11:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Austerity in America. We can afford tax breaks for millionaires, but can’t afford five-day school weeks.

-- Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly

In this week's Sift:

Is Obama on Our Side? What if President Obama isn't being out-negotiated by Republicans? What if he's getting what he wants?
The Hard Line. The Republican inclination not to compromise goes all the way down to the grass roots, where three kinds of fundamentalism are replacing the 20th-century conservative's respect for the status quo.
What "Spending" Really Means. Cutting government spending sounds good until you have to get specific. Do we want safe food and fire engines that work?
Short Notes. Fiore's biting animations. We had a revenue crash, not a spending orgy. New light bulbs and solar panels. The debt ceiling is constitutional. And Ohio says that poll workers don't have to be helpful.
This Week's Challenge. As I redesign the Weekly Sift blog, now is a good time to make your suggestions.

Is Obama on Our Side?

When Barack Obama's 2008 landslide carried such unlikely states as North Carolina and Indiana, and swept in large majorities in Congress, many progressives imagined a transformational presidency like FDR's. Katrina Vanden Heuval wrote:

[F]uture historians may well view Barack Obama's victory as the end of the age of Reagan and the beginning of something substantially new.

So far, it hasn't worked out that way.

Not that President Obama hasn't had accomplishments. The Bush economic crisis did not become a second Great Depression, as it threatened to do. With all its compromises, the Affordable Care Act is still a historic step in the right direction. Obama's two appointments have slowed down the rightward drift of the Supreme Court. In thousands of ways that don't make headlines, regulatory agencies have gone back to protecting the American people. On gay rights, President Obama has not led, but at least he has not stood in the way. The Iraq War has continued to wind down, our relations with other nations in general are less belligerent, and we finally nailed Osama Bin Laden.

That's not nothing. But by now the list of liberal disappointments has gotten long.

Too-small stimulus. All it did was mask cutbacks on the state level, and total government employment has shrunk since Obama took office.
Trivial Wall Street reforms. Frank Rich summed it up:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe.

No public option. Given the public option's popularity, a great speech might have made a difference to wavering Democrats in the Senate, but Obama didn't give one.
Ratifying Bush's power grabs. On Inauguration Day, the new president had a chance to define the Bush administration as an aberration and turn the corner. Obama could even have enforced the law and prosecuted Bush officials for ordering torture. Instead, he let his initial effort to close Guantanamo fail, and has continued to practice and has systematically defended in court many of the Bush administration abuses of power.
Afghanistan. To be fair, Candidate Obama portrayed Afghanistan as the good war that got ignored because we fought the bad war in Iraq. So Afghan escalation shouldn't have been a surprise. But we still have no coherent goal or exit strategy.
Libya. Again: goal? exit strategy? By ignoring the War Powers Act -- in defiance of the advice of his own top lawyers -- he's expanded executive power beyond even Bush.
Global warming. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, Al Gore credits Obama for at least starting to take action, but then says:

President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that "drill, baby, drill" is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.

Taxes. When Republicans wouldn't extend the Bush tax cuts just for the middle class, Obama had a perfect place to make a popular stand. Imagine: "I wanted to keep your taxes low, but the Republicans blocked me to protect the millionaires." Instead he agreed to extend all the Bush cuts -- and didn't even get a debt-ceiling increase written into the deal.

And now, he seems ready to make significant concessions on Social Security and Medicare in those debt-ceiling negotiations he might have avoided. Like the public option only moreso, Social Security and Medicare are popular. There's a significant rabble waiting to be roused, if a silver-tongued president were so inclined. So far, nothing.

Explanations. In the beginning, progressives explained these disappointments with some combination of 1) He's doing the best he can given political reality and the power of the special interests and 2) He's a bad negotiator who compromises when he doesn't have to. Lately, though, a third explanation is getting louder and louder: 3) Maybe he's not really on our side.

Bringing up Explanation 3 -- even to deny it -- is the surest way to start a blood feud on a liberal web site like Daily Kos. Emotions run high. Some liberals feel strongly that Obama has betrayed them, while others are just as strongly attached to him.

The problem is: All three explanations work, and each explains things the others can't. For example, I think Obama was genuinely surprised by the popular resistance Republicans raised to closing Guantanamo. (Scary, scary terrorists were going to be housed in flimsy jails down the street from you.) Otherwise, why make a grand promise only to back off of it? And I believe he did (foolishly) expect Republicans to negotiate in good faith on vital issues like the debt ceiling.

True intentions. In spite of all the socialist and Marxist and big spender rhetoric from the Right, what if Obama has always been a centrist? Left and Right alike imagined that the centrist positions he campaigned on were masking a deeper progressive agenda, but what if they weren't?

From the beginning, the role Obama has written for himself has been to let liberals and conservatives fight it out in Congress, and then to come in at the end with a compromise. (The problem has been that liberals are largely shut out of the corporate media -- when was the last time you saw Dennis Kucinich on TV? -- so the public debate has been between the most moderate Democrats and the most conservative Republicans, with Obama coming in at the end to make a center-right compromise rather than a left-right compromise.)

I think the way he has handled entitlement reform tells us a lot. The Simpson-Bowles Commission Obama appointed to study long-term deficit issues was stacked from the beginning. (Digby kept calling it "the Catfood Commission".) When the commission was appointed, Unsilent Generation posted:

Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle-right former Clinton chief of staff.

It should have surprised no one when Simpson called Social Security "a milk cow with 310 million tits". And it should have surprised no one that the Commission recommended Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Presidents do this kind of spadework to cover unpopular actions they want to take later. It's where you can see presidential intention in its purest form. Obama has believed all along that Social Security and Medicare need to be cut. So while he's not likely to get on board with the Ryan privatization plan, he's also not likely to make a bold stand against cuts that he's been maneuvering towards from the beginning.

Framing is another place you can see presidential intention at work. The other side can force you to accept deals you don't like, but they can't make you repeat their deceptive rhetoric. Recently, though, Obama has said things like:

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs

Paul Krugman comments:

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

My conclusion. Consider the possibility that Obama is a Clintonian centrist whose liberal actions have been forced on him by events. I don't think he's a bad guy or a traitor to the cause. I just don't think he's ever been a progressive.

Deep down, I think Obama wants to be the president who steers the center course -- fixing the long-term growth in entitlement spending without gutting the safety net. The ACA is part of that vision, because health-care inflation is the main long-term fiscal threat, and the private sector is never going to stop it. The near-depression forced a half-hearted stimulus on him, but expanding government services is not his fundamental inclination.

He never said it was.

Conservative columnist Ross Douhat on the deficit negotiations: "The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose."

Rick Perlstein was all over this more than a year ago.

The Hard Line

Two articles this week explained why Republicans are (depending on your point of view) either (1) able to hold together on hardline positions, or (2) unable to compromise. Turns out, it's not just the party leadership or elected officials that are different, it's the rank-and-file:

NYT blogger Nate Silver looks more deeply at the polling data and concludes that while polarization is hitting both parties, it has a more profound effect on the Republicans. Republican is becoming identical with conservative, while the Democrats remain a coalition of diverse philosophies. So Democrats worry about alienating their moderates, while Republicans focus on energizing their base.

In The three fundamentalisms of the American right, Salon's Michael Lind notes a long-term philosophical shift in conservatism. William F. Buckley modeled the mid-20th-century conservative movement after 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who argued that people underestimate the values embedded in traditional practices, so change should be measured and thoughtful rather than sweeping and giddy.

But increasingly, 21st-century conservatism is built around fundamentalist reaction rather than thoughtful prudence. Christian fundamentalism (the Bible), constitutional fundamentalism (the Constitution and carefully selected quotes from the Founders), and market fundamentalism (Atlas Shrugged) each have a holy scripture that teaches unquestionable Truth. And that creates a problem for democracy.

Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

A Burke-Buckley conservative respects the status quo, but to a fundamentalist the status quo already represents a fall from a lost Golden Age -- often an imaginary one.

It's tempting to respond to all three types of right-wing fundamentalist with scorn, especially when they make up facts about their respective Golden Ages. But in the long run scorn may be counterproductive. Fundamentalism is a reaction to a loss of identity and community. (No one who feels at home here and now pledges loyalty to a lost era or an ancient text.) Ultimately, fundamentalists need to be healed, not beaten down further. The candidate-Obama message of Hope and Yes We Can seems exactly right to me, if we can see it through.

This move conflicts with my healing strategy, but I'll be interested to see if it works tactically: The American Values Network points out that two of the right-wing fundamentalisms contradict each other. Jesus and Ayn Rand are not at all on the same page.

Less-extreme Republicans have finally started protesting against the hard line: David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Robert Samuelson.

What "Spending" Really Means

Cutting government spending always sounds good until you start looking at specifics. In Wilmington, NC, "cutting spending" specifically means not replacing an ancient fire engine that tends to die when the firefighters need water pressure. In California, Arizona, and Nevada it means a shorter school year. And in parts of Idaho and New Mexico it means a four-day school week -- not for any academic reason, but because (as Rachel Maddow summed up) "In America now, we can't afford to keep all our schools open five days a week."

This 11-minute clip from Rachel's show on Wednesday is worth watching in its entirety, because it pulls together so much.

For example: Alto, Texas has scrapped its police force -- not just furloughed a few officers, but padlocked the door and sent the whole force home for a minimum of six months. Not because they're not needed -- even when it had police, Alto's crime rate was higher than the Texas average -- but because Alto is out of money.

On the federal level, the House has eliminated funding to test American vegetables for the E-coli strain that killed 50 people in Europe. Georgia Republican Rep. Jack Kingston isn't worried: "The food supply in America is very safe because the private sector self-polices." But whether we're talking food or crime, self-policing only works up to a point. Somehow, even before the testing cutbacks, 3000 Americans died each year from tainted food.

State after state is laying off teachers -- not because they've found some better way to educate children, but because they can't afford to pay them. We're slashing transportation funding too, because high-speed trains belong in China, not America.

But don't tax the rich. We are eliminating all this stuff rather than raise taxes on anybody, even the wealthiest Americans. Republicans claim they are taking this stand because, as John Boehner says, "The American people don't want us to raise taxes."

Except that they do. Politifact did the research:

we found a number of polls that indicate people do want the government to raise taxes. That was most clearly the case when it comes to raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

Like these polls. Rachel quotes a poll saying that 81% of Americans would accept higher taxes on millionaires to cut the deficit. 68% could support eliminating the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 a year.

The American people also want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. By a 60-32 margin, they said that maintaining Social Security and Medicare benefits was more important than cutting the deficit. By 61-31 they said that Medicare recipients already pay enough of their medical costs. 58% think "Low income people should not have their Medicaid benefits taken away."

And don't tax corporations. A significant majority of Americans (56% on Question 36) say that corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes. And the most stunning poll result is this (Question 40): 61% say that corporations use tax breaks to pay higher dividends and bonuses; only 4% say they use the money to create jobs.

That jaundiced public perception is accurate. Rachel lists a number of large American corporations (Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, etc.) who pay significantly less than the official 35% corporate tax rate (GE: 7.4%) and have been cutting jobs rather than creating them. Moreover, American corporate taxes are low, not high: Compared to 25 other developed countries, only in Iceland are corporate taxes a smaller percentage of GDP than in the US.

Rich people, poor country. Let me sum up: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says "the people that put us here" want to change "the way the system works so that we’re no longer spending money that we don’t have." The question that goes unasked is: Why don't we have that money?

Is the United States a poor country now? Can we simply not afford to have police and full-time schools and safe food? Can we not afford to take care of Americans who are sick or old? To fix our potholes and keep our bridges from falling down?

Other countries manage to pay for such things. They aren't richer than the United States. The difference is that in America, billionaires and corporations have become so powerful that they can dictate to the government how much tax they are willing to pay. And those dictates are put forward by the corporate media as "the will of the people", even if (when you ask them) the people say the exact opposite. So if the billionaires and corporations are only willing to pay for four days of school a week, that's what we'll get.

At least as long as Eric Cantor believes that billionaires and corporate CEOs are the people that put him where he is.

Short Notes

Mark Fiore's animations are very sharp satires. Check out "Trickle Down Tales". And Tom Tomorrow is pretty good today too.

Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee have put together a chart explaining what happened to the surplus in Clinton's final budget. It's mildly deceptive (everything except defense is adjusted for inflation and population growth), but ignoring the too-high defense number, it makes a great point: We had a revenue crash and the population got older, but there was no discretionary-spending orgy.

Last week I mentioned the possibility of Obama invoking the 14th amendment to ignore the debt ceiling. Lawrence Tribe has convinced me that's not a legitimate option.

Slate's tech reviewer loves the new LED light bulb. It lasts 20 years, uses about 1/5 the power, and emits the spectrum we expect from incandescents. The problem: They cost $20 each. Long-term it's a good deal, but people aren't used to thinking about light bulbs as investments.

What if your windows could be solar panels?

If Republican election-reform laws aren't about suppressing legitimate votes, then why does the new Ohio law say that poll workers don't have to direct confused voters to their correct polling places?

This Week's Challenge

I'm working on a redesign of the Weekly Sift blog, which I'll roll out on weeklysift.com either next Monday or the one after. (Currently, weeklysift.com is a bit of a mess, like any unfinished construction project.) If you have any suggestions for improving the blog, now is a good time to make them. Like: What do you think of this week's embedded chart and video? I'm thinking of doing a lot more of that.

BTW, what do you think of this as a logo? If you've been getting the Sift via email, what do you think of the new MailChimp mailings? Have you noticed?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page or the @weeklysift Twitter feed, where you get the Link of the Day.

Handbook for Misconduct

2011-07-04T11:03:00.001-04:00

Today, … the Court invalidates Arizonans' efforts to ensure that in their State, "the people possess the ultimate sovereignty." No precedent compels the Court to take this step; to the contrary, today's decision is in tension with broad swaths of our First Amendment doctrine. No fundamental principle of our Constitution backs the Court's ruling; to the contrary, it is the law struck down today that fostered both the vigorous competition of ideas and its ultimate object -- a government responsive to the will of the people. Arizonans deserve better.

-- Justice Elena Kagan
dissenting opinion in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett (2011)

In this week's Sift:

Not the People's Court. Across the board, this was a great Supreme Court term for corporations. For humans, it sucked.
Gaffes Won't Beat Bachmann. The voters she's going for value heart over head, so a few misquoted facts won't bother them. To beat Bachmann, you need to argue that her heart is in the wrong place -- which is true.
The Logic of Worker Abuse. A 21st-century monopoly focuses more on abusing its suppliers than on abusing the consumer. And the ultimate supplier is the worker.
Short Notes. Glenn Beck slithers into the sunset. A CIA interrogator talks. Judge Prosser's anger management problem. Krugman and Yglesias sum up the debt-ceiling issue -- and I start to panic a little.
This Week's Challenge. This Independence Day, pay attention to the difference between independence and freedom.

Not the People's Court

Unlike a typical journalist, I'm happy to be scooped. Last week I promised I would summarize "a very pro-corporate Supreme Court term". Friday, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick did it for me, and did a darn good job:

The measure of success here isn't just the win-loss record of the Chamber of Commerce, although that's certainly part of the story. Nor is it news that—in keeping with a recent trend—the court is systematically closing the courthouse doors to everyday litigants, though that's a tale that always bears retelling. The reason the Roberts Court has proven to be Christmas in July for big business is this: Slowly but surely, the Supreme Court is giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct.

No more class actions. A big piece of that handbook is how to avoid class-action lawsuits. This is a big deal, because in many situations the threat of a class action is the only discipline a company has. Think about it: Suppose you're MegaCorp and you want to screw a million customers out of $1,000 each. That's a billion dollars -- real money, even for you.

And what are they going to do about it? No matter how valid their claims are, nobody is going to beat the MegaCorp Legal Department without spending years in court and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars. Who is going to do that just to get their thousand back?

The only thing that concerns you is that your victims might all get together in a class action, hire a top-flight law firm, and get their billion back in one case. Not to worry, the Roberts Court has you covered.

Screw your workers. If it's workers you're worried about, Justice Scalia gives you the blueprint in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (court opinion, ScotusBlog summary, cartoon that sums up even better). Because Wal-Mart's official policy said it didn't discriminate against women, it didn't matter that the company gave its (mostly male) managers enough leeway to discriminate, and that companywide statistics proved that they in fact did discriminate. The female workers couldn't prove that they all suffered identically -- somewhere in the Wal-Mart system there might have been a store whose manager treated women fairly -- so they aren't a class. LIthwick summarizes:

The greatest impact of the Wal-Mart decision isn't the blow dealt to class-action suits. It's the guidance it provides employers: Immunize yourself from claims of gender discrimination with a written policy that says "we don't discriminate" and a system of decentralized decision-making. The decision doesn't discourage future corporate discrimination. It just makes it harder to identify and prove it.

Screw your customers. Don't worry about your customers ganging up on you, either. AT&T Mobility v Concepcion (court opinion, previous Lithwick article), lets corporations stick clauses into their standard contracts (which you have to sign to do business with them) where you sign away your class-action rights -- or any rights they find inconvenient.

In this case, AT&T offered a "free" cellphone, and then charged customers $30.22 in sales tax that they had no reason to expect they would owe. A California court ruled that the cellphone contract's arbitration clause (which prevented a class action) was unenforceable. But the Supremes disagreed. Justice Breyer dissented, writing:

What rational lawyer would have signed on to represent the Concepcions in litigation for the possibility of fees stemming from a $30.22 claim? The realistic alternative to a class action is not 17 million individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $30.

Nan Aron of Alliance for Justice points out that this is about more than just $30, or even $30 times 17 million:

The upshot is that corporations will now be able to decide on their own which civil rights and consumer protections they want to obey, knowing that there will be no effective means available to their victims to find redress. Even worse, … [the Court] has effectively removed any incentive for corporations to behave within the law in the first place. Why act lawfully if your victims are helpless, especially in cases like this when the harm to each individual is small but the potential for profit is huge?

Screw your investors. In Janus Capital Group v. First Derivative Traders (court opinion), as ThinkProgress' Ian Millhiser sums up: "the Supreme Court has now given much of Wall Street a license to lie."

Basically, Janus wrote a false prospectus to mislead investors about an investment it was selling. But the Court let Janus get away with claiming that the responsibility lies with a dummy company Janus set up -- which can't be sued because it has no assets. Lithwick draws the lesson: "[Set] up a dummy corporation to make your false statements for you."

Lithwick's conclusion:

When you obliterate the very possibility of civil litigation, you are, by definition, helping big business screw over the little guy. But when you teach big business precisely how to screw over the little guy, and how to do it faster, cheaper, and without detection … well, that's not even an illusion of justice anymore. It's enabling.

Screw democracy. OK, maybe you can't fight corporations in court any more. But we still out-number them, right? So we should be able to control them through our elected representatives.

Well, the Court is working on that too. Last year's Citizens United decision opened the spigots of corporate cash for electioneering -- one reason why the 2010 election cycle went so well for the Republicans. This year, in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett (opinion, ThinkProgress commentary), the Court did its best to knock out the main alternative to bought-and-paid-for elected officials -- public financing of campaigns.

For years now, the Court has accepted the dubious idea that "money equals speech". (That is, you can't limit campaign spending without limiting free speech.) It makes sense up to a point: If I have an idea I want to promote, and I have the money to promote it, then why should anybody be able to tell me to stop?

Obviously, it stops making sense when we talk about corporate money, because corporations shouldn't have First-Amendment rights to begin with. (Were they "endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights"? On which of the six days of Creation?)

Money = speech also starts to fail when we get into the horse-race aspect of politics: Why should a candidate supported by rich people be able to out-shout candidates supported by poor people?

But that's precisely the principle that decided Bennett. Arizona, in response to a long history of corruption, established a public financing system in which the amount of public money would increase if candidates who opted out of the system started outspending the publicly financed candidates.

So privately-funded candidates were free to opt out of the system and free to spend as much as they wanted to promote themselves and their ideas. But what they couldn't do is out-shout the publicly funded candidates; if they spent more, the publicly financed candidates got to spend more.

That won't do, says the Court. Arizona's system is unconstitutional, because money shouldn't just allow you to get your ideas out, it should allow you to out-shout candidates with less money. The Court's conservative majority is moving past the simple money = speech equation, in the direction of money = votes.

Put it all together. Don't just look at one case, look at the pattern. The Court is pushing a vision of society in which corporations can make us sign away our rights in order to participate in the economy, can screw us out of our money without fear of consequences, and can then use that ill-gotten money to elect officials who will guard the advantages they have over mere humans.

Lest you think this term was an anomaly, check out a speech Al Franken gave last summer, in which he summarized the pro-corporate rulings the Roberts Court had made up to that point.

Legally, here's what's going on with abortion: For the last few years, pro-choice groups have been reluctant to challenge relatively minor infringements of the right to an abortion, for fear that the Roberts Court will overturn Roe v Wade completely. Predictably, anti-abortion forces have upped the ante. With their 2010-election majorities, Republican legislatures have passed laws that harass women (South Dakota) and/or doctors (Kansas) to the point that abortion would become impractical, if still technically legal. Lawsuits have been filed and injunctions granted delaying the implementation of the challenged laws in those two states. The cases will eventually make it to the Supremes, and then we'll see if they want to overturn Roe.

John Dean was in the Nixon Justice Department when they were pushing Abe Fortas off the Supreme Court -- in a case that closely resembles Clarence Thomas'. He explains the game plan, which may involve being more ruthless than liberals are up for.

Speaking of corporations funding elections, this still seems to be illegal: Wisconsin's new Senator Ron Johnson spent $9 million of his own money beating Russ Feingold last year. After the election, the corporation he runs wrote him a $10 million check for "deferred compensation".

Up until now, Republican-appointed judges have ruled against the constitutionality of ObamaCare and Democrat-appointed judges for it. This week, a Bush-appointed judge broke ranks and upheld the law.

Gaffes Won't Beat Bachmann

In Waterloo, Iowa, Michele Bachmann began her official presidential campaign with a gaffe: She said John Wayne was from Waterloo, when actually mass murder John Wayne Gacy is. (The Duke is from Winterset, on the other side of the state.) This is another in a long series of mistakes and missteps, like when she thought that the Revolutionary War started in Concord, NH instead of Concord, MA.

A lot of liberals seem to think that things like this will make a difference. And in the general election they may be right, but in the Republican primaries Bachmann's numerous gaffes will make no difference at all. Ronald Reagan used to screw up his facts and so did George W. Bush. It made no difference for them, and it won't for Bachmann either.

The reason why is simple, and I touched on it in 2005 when President Bush nominated qualification-free Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, saying that "I know her heart." The voters Bachmann is courting have a very different idea of what governing requires.

Most liberals (and some conservatives) think that a good leader needs to know and understand things. At the very least, a president needs a solid background education, so that experts can fill him/her in on the details when a decision needs to be made. And above all, s/he should be free from misinformation: If you don't know something, you can ask; but if you're sure something is true when it's not, you can do a lot of damage.

Bachmann's base -- like Reagan's and Bush's -- doesn't look at things that way. Leadership, to them, is not about doing the smart thing, it's about doing the right thing. All problems are simple at their root, and what a leader really needs is common sense and moral courage. It's a heart thing, not a head thing.

Closely related to this worldview is a resentment against the people who don't share it -- the people who think they're better than you because they knew what mendacity meant when they took the SATs. Bachmann voters resent the way that eggheads look down on them, and if eggheads are looking down on Bachmann the same way, that just proves that she's on the right side.

So while we should never let Bachmann get away with quoting false facts, that's not going to defeat her. An effective anti-Bachmann campaign needs to attack her strength by arguing that her heart is in the wrong place. She's on the side of the Wall Street swindlers, the polluters, and the people who moved your job to India. If you make minimum wage, she thinks you're overpaid. If you're unemployed, she thinks you're lazy.

She's not one of you. She's one of them dressed up to look like one of you. And she thinks you'll fall for it, because she thinks you're stupid.

Bachmann's InTrade shares (which will pay $10 if she's the Republican nominee) are at $1.70, up from $0.70 when I recommended them in April.

The Logic of Worker Abuse

Never doubt that a corporation will kill you if it thinks it can make a profit and not get caught. First case in point, from Wednesday's Salon:

Federal investigators say they have proof that Massey Energy kept fake safety records to throw off inspectors at a West Virginia coal mine where 29 men died last year, the deadliest U.S. coal field disaster in four decades.

Second, look at The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret by Ted Genoways in the current issue of Mother Jones: Hormel created a shell company to maneuver out of its agreements with its meat-packing union. The shell company hired a bunch of illegal immigrants for low wages, worked them in conditions that gave them a rare neurological disorder, and (when their medical bills started adding up) fired them.

Mother Jones' Tom Philpott goes on to explain the deeper economic/political reasons why companies are abusing their workers like this: In the old version of monopoly, corporations got bigger and bigger so that they could impose exorbitant price increases on the consumer. But voters hated that, so they encouraged politicians to enforce antitrust laws.

In the Reagan years, the strategy changed. Now companies get big so that they can impose price cuts on their suppliers, as Wal-Mart does. The result is relentless pressure to cut costs, which ultimately pushes companies to abuse their workers, either here or overseas. This abuse is largely invisible to anybody but the workers involved (particularly since the corporate media doesn't cover it), so it doesn't raise political pressure.

That shines a different light on the recent efforts to break public-sector unions in places like Wisconsin and Ohio: Government has largely been left out of the worker-abuse game, and (as this Wisconsin commercial by the Club for Growth makes explicit) the Right wants to convince abused private-sector workers that it's not fair.

Northeastern University report: Corporate profits have captured 88% of the financial recovery, wages 1%. Nothing like that has ever happened before.

Which leads to this Paul Krugman question:

If corporations already have plenty of cash they’re not using, why would giving them a tax break that adds to this pile of cash do anything to accelerate recovery?

Short Notes

Buh-bye, Glenn.

Wired interviews the author of the new book The Interrogator, which takes us inside the CIA's black prisons. Says the author, a former CIA interrogator: "Enhanced interrogation does not work, and is wrong. End of story."

Investigating the allegations that Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser choked Justice Bradley, the Milwaukee Fox affiliate tries to get comments from four of the seven justices. None of them say anything meaningful, but only Prosser lost his cool.

Paul Krugman asks another good question:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt?

Matt Yglesias boils it down even further:

The issue, after all, is that congress has passed contradictory laws. The tax code raises so much revenue, but legally authorized expenditures require so much money, and legally authorized borrowing doesn’t cover the gap. So what’s a president to do?

Hold a bake sale, I guess. Or ignore the debt ceiling and provoke a constitutional crisis.

I'm not qualified to offer investment advice, so I usually don't. This week, though, I made an important personal investment decision, and I feel like I'm keeping a secret if I don't tell you: I'm selling.

I don't think the market is taking seriously the possibility that the debt-ceiling talks will fail, with major bad financial consequences. I do take that possibility seriously, so I'm cutting my risks until I see what happens.

I regard this as a not-unreasonaable scenario: Republicans don't budge on demands that Social Security and Medicare be slashed with zero sacrifice-sharing by the wealthy. Democrats refuse that deal, and the Treasury has to stop paying the government's bills. The market crashes (as it did when TARP failed the first time), and then Obama invokes the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling. The House starts impeachment proceedings.

It's bad for the country, but it's win/win for the Republicans. They get to impeach Obama while accepting no responsibility for increasing the debt limit. And if we go back into recession, that's Obama's fault too.

This Week's Challenge

This Independence Day, try to pay attention to the difference between independence and freedom. In American history, the two go hand-in-hand: Declaring independence from England was how we got freedom.

But when we intervene in other countries, we offer freedom in exchange for independence. Saddam's Iraq was not free, but its decisions were made in Baghdad, not Washington. Iran today lacks freedom, but has its independence after centuries of Ottoman, British, and American domination. Protesters in Tehran want freedom, but not at the cost of independence.

So don't be fooled today when patriotic speakers or writers use freedom and independence interchangeably. It's a distinction we need to keep in mind.

Next Stop: Reality

2011-06-27T09:59:00.001-04:00

Nobody has acknowledged that
a) the bubble economies of tech and housing were not financially real,
b) we can not "recover" to a condition that was not financially real in the first place, and therefore
c) we need to start focusing on a transition to something close to reality,
which is a long ways from where we currently are.

-- Charles Marohn, The Growth Ponzi Scheme

In this week's Sift:

Presidents and Precedents. If President Obama's manipulation of the War Powers Resolution process stands, what might a President Perry or Bachmann build on that foundation?
Ponziville: The Suburbs Are Unsustainable. Charles Marohn claims that sprawling suburbs are an inefficient use of infrastructure. But the problem stays hidden until the initial developments start to wear out.
Short Notes. Funny fake news vs. scary fake news. New Yorkers notice that same-sex marriage has not destroyed civilization in Boston. Matt Taibi demonstrates how not to attack Michele Bachmann. A Pulitzer-winner fesses up to being undocumented. Without illegal aliens, Georgia reaps only a metaphorical harvest. It's not just the music that's synthesized, it's the girl. The First Amendment now protects data-mining. Vermont keeps heading towards single-payer health care. And more.
This Week's Challenge. If you want to help in the Wisconsin recall elections, here's how.

Presidents and Precedents

During the last administration, I often warned Republicans not to claim any powers for President Bush that they wouldn't want President Hillary Clinton to have. Maybe they trusted W with extraordinary powers, but I hoped it might slow them down to imagine some future Democrat tapping phones without warrants or locking people up without charges.

It never worked.

Even so, I think it may be time to take my own medicine: Sure, I mostly trust President Obama, so I haven't been watching our involvement in Libya as closely as I might. I know there are War Powers Resolution issues and Congress should be involved to some degree. But seeing congressional Republicans play chicken with the debt ceiling hasn't made me wish that they had more opportunities to get in Obama's way.

Still, today's actions are tomorrow's precedents. Eventually there will be another Republican president, maybe sooner than I think. And if someday President Bachmann decides to invade Sweden to protect the world from socialism, shouldn't she have to make her case to Congress? Or somebody?

Maybe it's time to pay attention.

The Founders' Vision of War. The Constitution divides the nation's war-making powers. The President is commander-in-chief (Article II, Section 2), but only Congress can raise armies or declare war (Article I, Section 8).

Why did the Founders do that? They believed that standing armies tempted rulers to impose their will by force. And the US had the unusual advantage of being far away from potential enemies. So they pictured a ground-up form of defense that would only require a sizable federal army on rare occasions.

Most common threats (criminal gangs, pirate or Indian raids) a community would handle itself, maybe with the help of neighboring communities. (Picture the colonial Minutemen or the posse that goes after the bank robbers in a western.) Larger threats (big Indian raids or slave uprisings) would be the responsibility of the state militias. Only when things really got out of hand, say if we were attacked by a European power, would a federal force be needed.

And those big wars would be rare, because we were going to stay out of "entangling alliances". In President Washington's Farewell Address, he wrote:

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

So most of the time the President would be commander-in-chief of not very much. When tensions rose, Congress would assemble an army and decide which countries to use it against. The commander-in-chief clause made sure those armies would report to a single commander, avoiding strategy-by-committee in Congress.

(BTW: This interpretation also makes sense out of the "well-regulated militia" clause of the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The people should keep and bear arms not so that they can overthrow the government -- as the Tea Party would have it -- but so that they don't depend on a standing army that could be used against them.)

Rep. Lincoln. As a congressman, Abraham Lincoln opposed President Polk's role in instigating the Mexican War. Arguing by letter with his law partner William Herndon in 1848, Lincoln wrote:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion … and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. ...
The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Historical drift. The Founders' vision slowly came apart. President Lincoln himself, facing an enemy within cannon-shot of the capital, acted on his own authority and sought congressional approval later. By 1900, the US had colonies of its own and intervened constantly in Latin America. We came out of the World Wars with global commitments and a world-spanning enemy. Now we were trying to entangle other nations in our alliances -- NATO, SEATO, CENTO, OAS, etc.

Eventually, nuclear missiles threatened to destroy our cities in less time than it took Congress to assemble. So power accrued to the President because no one else was in a position to wield it.

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first major conflict the US fought without a formal declaration of war. That looked like an aberration at the time, but instead it became the new model. Congress has not declared war since, but has indirectly signed off on presidential wars by continuing to fund them and occasionally endorsing them in resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

President Nixon pushed presidential authority too far by bombing Cambodia secretly in 1969-70 and delivering misleading records to Congress when it investigated in 1972-73. Congress needed to take some power back.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973. Passed over Nixon's veto, the WPR gives a president 48 hours to inform Congress of a military action, and then gives Congress 60 days to authorize it. If it does not, the President then has 30 days to disengage.

Subsequent presidents have groused, but have mostly gone along with the WPR, for the simple reason that it's sound practice. (It's a myth that presidents have all regarded the WPR as unconstitutional.) If you can't get Congress to endorse a war at the beginning, before the bodies start coming home, then you'd better hope you can go in, declare victory, and get out in short order.

Obama and Libya. The bombing in Libya started on March 19, and Congress has not passed any authorization. So President Obama's 30-days-to-disengage has run out. But instead of standing down, the administration sent a report to Congress making this claim:

The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities” contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.

Where did the President get that view? Not from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which is the official executive-branch body to study such issues. And not from the Pentagon general counsel, either. Instead, he followed the opinion of an ad-hoc group of executive-branch lawyers led by the White House counsel, who is not approved by the Senate and in some administrations is nothing more than the president's personal lawyer.

Constitutionally, the President is not obliged to follow any particular legal advice. But Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman explained in the NYT why circumventing the OLC is a bad practice:

If the precedent Mr. Obama has created is allowed to stand, future presidents who do not like what the Justice Department is telling them could simply cite the example of Mr. Obama’s war in Libya and instruct the White House counsel to organize a supportive “coalition of the willing” made up of the administration’s top lawyers. Even if just one or two agreed, this would be enough to push ahead and claim that the law was on the president’s side.

Remember Mukasey's Paradox from the Bush administration: Lawyers can't commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president, and presidents can't commit crimes when they act under the advice of lawyers -- any lawyers, even if they were hired precisely to give that advice.

We don't want to go down that track again, because it undermines the whole notion of the rule of law. Regardless of what you think of Libya or Obama or Congress, the really bad thing here is the precedent. Imagine what a President Rick Perry could do with it.

Ponziville: The Suburbs Are Unsustainable

In a classic Ponzi scheme, money from new investors pays off old investors -- who then brag about the rate-of-return they're getting and tempt even more new investors to get in. As long as inflow of new money grows exponentially, everybody stays happy. But that can't continue forever, and so the scheme collapses.

Charles Marohn claims this model fits the suburbs:

the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era -- our post-World War II pattern of development -- operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities.

The model has been that state and federal money, developer investment, plus a small amount of local-government borrowing, builds the initial infrastructure of a suburb -- roads, sewers, schools, etc. -- and so the local tax base goes up accordingly. But the infrastructure has a life span, and the increased tax base is not sufficient to rebuild it when it wears out. The only way to hide this is with more growth -- new sprawl that raises the tax base in the near term while adding more long-term liabilities.

In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. … The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern -- the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed -- is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. … We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive.

I wish Marohn had said more about the urban side of the equation: By moving our rich people to the suburbs, we've also wrecked the tax base of our cities.

I'm struck by how Marohn's vision dovetails with John Michael Greer's model of long-term decline. Here's my summary of what Greer says in The Long Descent,:

At its peak a society builds a larger capital base than it can maintain. From then on, the deferred maintenance periodically comes due in some big failure, which cascades through the system until things settle down at a lower level. Then the pattern repeats: The lower capital base generates enough resources to maintain itself day-to-day, but not long-term -- eventually leading to the next big failure.

So: News Orleans can't afford to maintain its dikes, which fail during Hurricane Katrina. Then New Orleans rebuilds, but not all the way. The new, lower tax base will be unable to maintain something else, which eventually will lead to another disaster and another contraction.

In the longer version of Marohn's article (on his Strong Towns site), he starts prescribing rather than diagnosing:

a rational response is to start insisting that our places show a positive financial return. That will require a completely different approach to building our cities along with a completely different understanding of growth. If you need help getting started on this, check out our Starter Strategies for a Strong Town as well as our Strong Towns Placemaking Principles.

Short Notes

lt's on: Funny fake news (Jon Stewart) is going after scary fake news (Fox).

Friday night, a same-sex marriage bill passed the Republican-controlled New York Senate, with 4 Republicans and 29 Democrats voting for it. Governor Cuomo signed it just before midnight, and it will take effect after 30 days, in late July. The NYT reports:

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did.

That's a much faster increase than you can get just by the passing of an older generation. To me, it's the natural result of the scare-tactics anti-gay activists have used. For a long time, their message has been that civilization will literally fall if men start marrying men. Such alarmism works as long as the practice is theoretical. But it starts to sound silly when New Yorkers can clearly see that civilization has not fallen in Boston or Montreal.

OK, California. You're up.

In the current Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi writes a strangely self-defeating analysis of Michele Bachmann. He convincingly characterizes her as a champion of the ignorant masses who feel abused by the ridicule of the educated. "Bachmann's stature rises," he writes, "every time she does something we laugh at."

But he still can't stop himself from heaping scorn on her rather than coolly cataloguing her flaws.

She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

The article goes on like that. Taibbi's rhetoric is entertaining if you already agree with him. But if you forward it to your fundamentalist cousin or aunt, they'll think Taibbi despises people like them for not being as smart as he thinks he is. And they'll want Bachmann to succeed, just to put Taibbi in his place.

The Des Moines Register has Romney and Bachmann neck-and-neck among likely Iowa-caucus-goers. Romney leads 23-22, but Bachmann is the second choice of 18% to Romney's 10%. When folks realize Cain and Santorum aren't going to make it, they'll go to Bachmann.

In one graph, Gallup explains why Jon Huntsman is no threat to be nominated. His polling data shows two clear trends: name recognition up, positive intensity down. The more Republicans know him, the less they like him.

Another recent poll has President Obama beating all major Republicans in an unlikely place: Tennessee. Steve Singiser from Daily Kos Elections explains it like this: Tennessee is experiencing the same kind of Republican over-reach that has wrecked their poll numbers in Florida and Michigan. 2010 voters who thought they were voting for traditional Republicanism suddenly find themselves living in Kochistan.

Remember the Paul-is-dead rumor of 1969? (OK, maybe not if you're under 50.) Well, Eguchi Aimi of the Japanese girl-band AKB48 has taken it one step further: She never existed to begin with. The uber-cute Ms. Aimi is a computer-generated synthesis of the cutest features of the other girls in the band.

Using the sad example of Chicago's parking meters, Senator Durbin warns against the temptation to raise cash by selling off public assets at fire-sale prices. In particular he proposes that if federal money builds a local asset which the local government then sells, the feds should get their money back.

The DREAM Act, if it ever passes, is supposed to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants who came here as children and have done well since they arrived. It makes sense: The original sin belongs to their parents, not them, and they know no other country they can go back to. As they become adults, they keep breaking the law -- forging documents, lying on forms -- because all the other choices are worse.

Wednesday, young journalist Jose Antonio Vargas put his own face on this problem. In My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant he tells his story: He came to America from the Philippines at age 12, and found out he was here illegally at 16. But rather than pick fruit or work in a sweatshop, he got himself a job with the Washington Post and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer.

He told a lot of lies and forged a lot of documents to give himself those opportunities. But now that he has fessed up, the moral onus is on us: Do we send him back to the Philippines?

Meanwhile, the harsh new law that was supposed to keep illegal aliens out of Georgia is working. Blueberries, onions, and cucumbers are rotting in the fields. They've tried getting criminals to do the picking, but it's not going so well.

In practice, "cutting the waste out of our school budget" means firing librarians.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was in Justice Ann Walsh Bradley's office last week, was asked to leave, and wound up with his hands around her neck. But it's her fault. Just like it was Justice Shirley Abrahamson's fault when Prosser called her a "bitch". Those female judges ... you know how they get. What's a real man to do?

It's been a very pro-corporate Supreme Court term, as I'll outline after it ends next week. But the worst of it may be Sorrell v IMS Health, where corporate First-Amendment rights got their biggest boost since Citizens United. The Court threw out a Vermont law that stopped pharmacies from selling prescription data to data miners, who could then advise pharmaceutical companies on marketing to doctors. If you can see any legitimate free-speech issue there, your eyes are sharper than mine.

Vermont's Senator Leahy called the decision "a win for data miners and large corporations and a loss for those of us who care about privacy not only in my home state of Vermont but across the nation."

But Vermonters keep plugging with their New England common sense: They're moving towards single-payer health care because it's cheaper and it works better.

This Week's Challenge

Right now Wisconsin is the central front in the struggle to defend the middle class and the public sector. Six Republican state senators and three Democrats are up for recall this summer, and the Republicans look far more vulnerable. Picking up three seats will flip the state senate to Democratic control. That would not only change the equation in Wisconsin, it would send a national message: Voters don't support taking away workers' rights, or cutting education to pay for corporate tax breaks.

You can contribute online through Act Blue. If you want to phone bank or volunteer in some other way, go to the Wisconsin Democratic Party web site.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Biases

2011-06-20T11:42:00.001-04:00

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

-- Stephen Colbert

In this week's Sift:

Propaganda Lesson: The Two-Step. If you have lots of time and resources, and you want to attack somebody, don't just smear them directly. Establish a stereotype first, and then attach it to them. So rather than talk about what Obama does, his enemies want to talk about what he is.
Already Refuted 97 Years Ago. Already in 1914, the economy was too complicated for the individual consumer to exercise the kind of judgment that the Republican health-care vision implies.
Wisconsin Update. The Wisconsin Supreme Court excused the legislature's unusual process by engaging in an unusual process of its own.
Short Notes. Past Supreme Court justices have resigned in disgrace for doing what Clarence Thomas does. Alabama outdoes Arizona's immigration law. The Pentagon as a model of left-wing social policy. A prominent climate-change denier faked his credentials. A young adult explains why his peers don't vote. And more.

Propaganda Lesson: The Two-Step

One of the axioms of 21st-century political campaigns is: If you're explaining, you're losing.

In other words: If the attack against you is simple, but the reason why it's unfair is complicated, then you're in trouble. Even if people listen to you long enough to understand your side of the story, you've lost valuable time that you could have spent spreading the vision of what you want to do when you get into office.

You saw lots of examples if you watched last Monday's Republican debate, but my favorite was Michele Bachmann's claim that "the Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs." The Washington Post's fact-checker explains:

In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)

So the CBO's 800K has nothing to do with anybody getting fired or not finding a job. But it took a whole paragraph to explain why "Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs" is deceptive. Advantage Bachmann.

The two-step. Obamacare-kills-jobs is a fairly direct attack. But if you have the time and the resources, a sneakier way to take advantage of the explaining-is-losing effect is to build up your attack in layers. The two-step attack works like this: Over time, you turn vaguely-defined words into negative stereotypes. Then you attack by attaching the word to your opponent.

Example: Obama is a socialist.

Last summer, the Christian Science Monitor spent two on-line pages debunking that claim. I doubt it helped.

If, like the Monitor, you want to be rational about this, you notice that the full attack is actually a syllogism: "Obama is a socialist. Socialists are bad. Therefore Obama is bad." In order for the syllogism to be valid, the word socialist has to carry the same definition all the way through. So the article examines the evidence that Obama promotes some bad kind of socialism, and finds that he doesn't.

It explains, so it loses.

Worse, Obama himself can't dispute either step without seeming to concede the other: If he argues that he's not a socialist, he seems to concede that it's bad to be one. If he argues that socialists aren't bad, he seems to concede that he is one.

Either argument misses the real point, because socialist represents a stereotype, not a definition. The right-wing media has been heaping scorn upon socialist and socialism for decades, so that (at least for their audience) those words evoke Pavlovian responses in the glands rather than clear concepts in the mind. Obama is a socialist doesn't make factual claims about anything Barack Obama has ever said or done or believed. It simply says: "You know that Pavlovian response we've trained you to feel when you hear the word socialist? You should attach that feeling to Obama."

No parallel. No symmetry. Liberals are easily flustered by this kind of attack, because we have no experience with it. Attacks on President Bush, for example, usually stayed close to facts and actions: Bush ordered people tortured. He wiretapped Americans without warrants. He misled us about the reasons for invading Iraq.

Those are all statements about what Bush did, not what he is. Is-statements against Bush were usually shorthand that quickly led back to his actions. Charges that Bush is a criminal refer to specific actions that broke specific laws; it isn't just liberals throwing around a bad word. Ditto for liar or torturer. Even people who claimed that Bush was a fascist often produced a definition of fascism in fairly short order, and went about connecting his deeds with its requirements. (Keith Olbermann defined fascism as "the seamless mutuality of government and big business" and used it in response to Bush demanding immunity for law-breaking the telephone companies did on his behalf.)

Three steps. In the same way that Caesar's army spent peaceful intervals sharpening weapons and drilling troops, a modern propaganda machine spends the time between election campaigns sharpening its stereotypes and drilling its audience in their Pavlovian responses.

By now, there is even a three-step attack on Obama. The statement that he is something (anti-American, say), is backed not by references to specific statements or actions, but by generic summaries of the kind of thing he says or does: Obama "apologizes for America" -- a charge that is based on more-or-less nothing. (The WaPo fact-checker awarded four Pinocchios, their lowest rating: "The apology tour never happened." Nonetheless, when Mitt Romney titles his book No Apology, his target audience knows what he's contrasting himself against.)

The more steps you can put between your attack and the facts, the harder it is for anyone else to root it out of the mind of your audience once you get it established. If people believe that Obama is bad because he is anti-American because he apologizes for America, what facts will change their minds? They might have to concede that Obama doesn't apologize for America in this or that particular speech, but what about all the others? The generic summary floats above any particular events, and isn't contradicted when some event turns out not to have been like that.

No arms race. Usually, when an article points out something that conservatives do more effectively than liberals, the proposed solution is that we raise our game to compete. But propaganda is an area where we have to be very careful, because our goals are different than our opponents' goals. Propaganda can serve their goals in ways that it can't serve ours.

In the liberal vision, government is a means for the people to look out for their common and collective interests. We want government to succeed at that mission. In order for that to happen, democracy has to work. The political process needs to be trusted and trustworthy.

Conservatives -- at least the plutocrats who dominate the conservative movement today -- don't need that. They want government not to be trusted, so that billionaires and corporations will be free to do as they please. So anything that raises cynicism about the political process works to their advantage. When the public discourse devolves to our lies against their lies, they win.

Worse, they win when the public polarizes into camps that live in separate realities. Think about global warming. In order to get a cap-and-trade program passed, President Obama had to get a majority in the House and 60 senators to unite around a single plan. His opponents only needed to stop that from happening. Anything that raised fear and distrust worked to their advantage, because they were not trying to pass their own plan. They just needed to prevent the American people from using government to look out for their common interest.

Liberals win when the public lives in one reality, and has a transparent discourse about that reality that reaches some kind of consensus. Our best chance to achieve that is to stay connected to facts. Stephen Colbert noticed the right correlation, but got the causality backwards: Liberals need to have a reality bias.

So when it comes to propaganda, we don't need to raise our game. We need to raise the public's game, so that they are less easily fooled. We need to spend our between-campaigns intervals tearing down stereotypes and educating the public, both about reality and about how propaganda works.

If we wait until the last few weeks before an election to explain that, then we really will be losing.

Already Refuted 97 Years Ago

Several Sifts have led off with quotes from commentator Walter Lippmann, who could turn a phrase better than almost anybody else in the 20th century. Well, this longer quote from Drift and Mastery (1914) explains precisely what's wrong with the Republican Medicare-privatization plan -- and what's wrong with their whole vision of individuals negotiating their own health-care purchases:

In our intricate civilization the purchaser can't pit himself against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair one. By the time goods are ready for the ultimate consumer they have travelled hundreds of miles, passed through any number of wholesalers, jobbers, middlemen and what not. The simple act of buying has become a vast, impersonal thing which the ordinary man is quite incapable of performing without all sorts of organized aid. There are silly anarchists who talk as if such organization were a loss of freedom. They seem to imagine that they can "stand alone," and judge each thing for themselves. They might try it. They would find that the purchase of eggs was such a stupendous task that no time would be left over for the purchase of beer or the pursuit of those higher freedoms for which they are fighting.
The old commercial theorists had some inkling of these difficulties. They knew that the consumer could not possibly make each purchase a deliberate and intelligent act. So they said that if only business men were left to compete they would stumble over each other to supply the consumer with the most satisfactory goods. It is hardly necessary to point out how complete has been the collapse of that romantic theory. There are a hundred ways of competing, to produce the highest quality at the lowest cost proved to be the most troublesome and least rewarding form of competition.

Remember, Lippmann is talking about the "intricate civilization" of 1914. It was already too much for the individual consumer to handle.

Fast forward to 2011, and let's imagine the Republican ideal of individual health-care choice. People like my 89-year-old Dad would be deciding whether or not the cut-rate MRI shop on the edge of town is safe. (Or I'd be deciding for him from a thousand miles away.) If a profit-driven doctor recommends an expensive treatment, Dad would have to look at that suggestion as skeptically as he used to look at mechanics who wanted to replace his car's transmission. And yes, insurance companies would compete for his business -- with clever advertising, deceptive slogans, fast-talking telemarketers who call at all hours, and low-premium plans that seem to cover every illness except the ones you happen to get.

That's market competition as it really exists in America today -- not the Atlas-Shrugged fantasy of high-quality/low-cost competition.

Markets respond well when they have to satisfy well-informed consumers who have the time and ability to "make each purchase a deliberate and intelligent act". That's why I don't need a government inspector to check that McDonalds' french fries are crisp enough; I have all the information I need to make a good decision for myself. But how do I determine for myself whether the Filet-O-Fish sandwich contains mercury that will make me senile 15 years from now?

Unfortunately, a well-informed consumer is a corporation's worst-case scenario. If it can hide the relevant data, distract or confuse the buyer, and sell the sizzle instead of the steak, it will.

And if someday we arrive at their free-market health-care utopia, which side will the Republicans be on? Will they insist on strong consumer-protection regulations that force corporations to collect and reveal the information people need to make wise choices? I'm guessing not.

Wisconsin Update

This week we got another lesson on the consequences of elections: Back in April, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser won a close re-election that played out suspiciously, but apparently honestly. Tuesday he was the deciding vote in a 4-3 decision overturning a lower court's ruling that the legislature violated Wisconsin's open-meetings law when it passed Governor Walker's union-busting bill.

The gist of the ruling, as I understand it, is not that the legislature followed the law, but that it is not up to the judiciary to say whether it did or not. It is a "separation of powers" issue, in which the legislature's "failure to follow such procedural rules amounts to an implied ad hoc repeal of such rules."

The dissenting judges found that the Court itself was engaging in an unusual process. Ordinarily, a court hears a case either originally or as an appeal from some other court, using the factual record established by the original court. In this case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court did something in between: It granted itself original jurisdiction on a case that had already been heard by a lower court, and then made its own findings-of-fact without gathering any new evidence beyond what was in the lower court's record.

Justice Shirley Abrahamson minced no words in her dissent:

The order and Justice Prosser's concurrence are based on errors of fact and law. They inappropriately use this court's original jurisdiction, make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties' arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891.

Other than that, it was all good.

Wisconsin public employee unions are now filing a suit in federal court, but I've got my doubts that it will go anywhere.

The other theater of action in Wisconsin is the recall elections of nine senators -- six Republicans and three Democrats. Here also, the Republicans are engaging in an unusual process: They have filed dummy Democratic challengers to force a Democratic primary and delay the recall elections from July 19 to sometime in mid-August.

FDL comments:

I’m a little surprised a registered Republican and a Republican county official can just run in a Democratic primary, but those are the rules in Wisconsin, apparently.

And there apparently is no concern about good government or right-and-wrong. Whatever you can get away with is what you should do.

Short Notes

ThinkProgress points out that the current ethical controversy around Clarence Thomas -- namely, that he and his wife get expensive favors from a rich guy whose companies sometimes have an interest in cases before the Supreme Court -- is pretty much identical to a scandal that caused LBJ-appointee Justice Abe Fortas to resign in the 1960s.

One of Thomas’ benefactors has even filed briefs in his Court since giving Thomas a $15,000 gift, and Thomas has not recused himself from each of these cases.

No one seriously expects Thomas to resign.

When I graduated from Michigan State in 1978, some congressman gave a commencement speech about farm policy. So how come another Big Ten school, Northwestern, just got Stephen Colbert?

Salon's Steve Kornacki:

If nothing else, Monday's Republican presidential debate made those commentators who have been touting Michele Bachmann as a serious threat to win the GOP presidential nomination look like prophets.

That would be me. Like me, Kornacki is not predicting that Bachmann will get the nomination, just that she'll come a lot closer than the conventional wisdom suggests.

I think even Kornacki underestimates Bachmann, though, by comparing her to past religious-right candidates like Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee. Pat and Mike were religious candidates first, and sometimes gave the impression that they were making up their other positions on the fly. (Huck in particular raised fears among Club-for-Growth types that he might turn into a Sermon-on-the-Mount liberal if he took office.) But Bachmann sounds completely authentic rallying a Tea Party crowd on taxes and spending.

New evidence that life is not fair: Even in his mug shots, John Edwards looks better than I do.

Nicholas Kristof finds at least one American organization that embodies liberal principles like racial diversity, social mobility, single-payer health care, subsidized child care, educational opportunity, and keeping a lid on income inequality: the military.

But as we as a country grope for new directions in a difficult economic environment, the tendency has been to move toward a corporatist model that sees investments in people as woolly-minded sentimentalism or as unaffordable luxuries. That’s not the only model out there. So as the United States armed forces try to pull Iraqi and Afghan societies into the 21st century, maybe they could do the same for America’s.

When it passed its famous anti-immigrant law SB 1070 last year, Arizona made its bid to be America's most racist state. But Alabama is not giving up the crown without a fight.

Salon lists some of the Arabic words that are staples of anti-Muslim rhetoric, how they're used, and what they mean to people who actually know Islam or Arabic.

There's a fine line between making something illegal and putting so many restrictions on it that it becomes impractical. AlterNet's Amanda Marcotte examines 10 States Where Abortion Is Virtually Illegal for Some Women.

Last week I pointed out that the NYT had published an op-ed denouncing clean energy by someone from a Koch front-group. Mike Casey gives more details:

I’m not even expecting that the Times actually demand a factual grounding for the opinion pieces it runs. That seems to have gone out of style awhile ago. … But Bryce got away with something much more preventable: pretending he’s some sort of intellectually honest thinker when his organization has ties to dirty energy money that no one bothered to note.

And then he makes a good suggestion:

Why not have a standard for all opinion pages for papers over a certain basic level of readership requiring opinion page submission finalists to disclose financial conflicts, direct or indirect, on the subject on which they have written? … it might inject just a little bit of honesty into what is now an all-too-frequent stream of enabled propaganda.

Why don't young people vote? I don't know, let's ask one.

The biggest climate-change denier in the Minnesota Senate turns out to have been lying about having any scientific background at all.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Impossible Things

2011-06-13T13:13:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

-- The White Queen, Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)

In this week's Sift:

More Economic Nonsense. Increasingly, the debate between liberal and conservative economists has become irrelevant, as Republicans have divorced themselves from any economic theory whatsoever. Last week it was Boehner. This week it's Pawlenty.
The Sifted Bookshelf: Why Marx Was Right. Terry Eagleton makes Marx understandable, and challenges us to take a second look.
Short Notes. The Germans plan to de-nuke. Business tax credits may kill jobs rather than create them. A Koch sock puppet denounces alternative energy in the NYT. Not only do bad decisions cause poverty, it works the other way too. Comedy: Borowitz on Palin, Colbert on Romney, Stewart on Fox. And a female Daily Show correspondent tells the sad truth about male sexting.
This Week's Challenge. Check out the Sift's twitter feed.

More Economic Nonsense

Reasonable people can argue liberal or conservative economic theories, which mostly differ the relative effectiveness of the private sector versus the public sector, and on regulations versus market incentives. But to an extraordinary extent these days, those legitimate arguments have nothing to do with the debate we're hearing in the mainstream media. Instead, many economic ideas coming from the Right are entirely nonsensical, backed by no legitimate economic theory at all.

Last week I called out John Boehner's claim that spending cuts would grow the economy and create jobs. (The Street Light blog does the simple arithmetic about spending, demand, and growth.) Tuesday, Boehner's view was contradicted by that noted leftist Ben Bernanke -- President Bush's choice to run the Fed. Why? Because whatever else Bernanke might be, he's an economist. He doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of the other economists by spewing nonsense in public.

Tuesday, Tim Pawlenty -- along with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, supposedly the "sensible" Republican presidential candidates -- came out with an utterly delusional economic plan. Its centerpiece is a tax reform that I can only describe as pro-aristocracy: Eliminate all the taxes that rich heirs would have to pay on their family legacy. Not just inheritance taxes, but taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains as well. ("When you deposit a dollar in your bank account, every penny should be forevermore yours and your children’s.") So Muffy inherits from Mom and Dad, lives luxuriously without working a day in her life, and then passes an even larger estate down to the next generation of parasites -- all tax-free.

And in case any rich people are still earning wages, let's cut the top individual tax rate from 35% to 25%, and cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%. And pursue a "strong dollar" policy, which is code for high interest rates. (This will prevent Muffy from losing purchasing power through inflation, and insure that her CDs pay enough to keep the summer house in good repair.)

What fills Pawlenty's gaping revenue hole? Mostly unspecified spending cuts -- a constitutional amendment to cap spending at 18% of GDP, which is impossible without big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

So far Pawlenty's plan isn't irrational, it's just class warfare. What's irrational is how he fills the rest of the revenue hole: By assuming 5% economic growth for the next decade. He justifies that number like this:

5% growth is not a pie-in-the-sky number. … Between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9%. Between 1996 and 1999, under President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress the economy grew at more than 4.7%. In each case millions of new jobs were created, incomes rose and unemployment fell to historic lows. The same can happen again.

So 5% for a decade is reasonable because if you cherry-pick the best days of the Reagan boom and the Clinton boom, the economy maintained growth not quite that good for less than half that long. And we'll get back there by imitating not Reagan or Clinton, but George W. Bush, whose massive tax cuts gave us the worst growth since the Depression. Plus we'll have growth-killing high interest rates.

He also makes amazing claims like "cutting just 1% of overall federal spending for 6 consecutive years would balance the federal budget by 2017" and unverifiable ones like "federal regulations will cost our economy 1.75 trillion dollars this year alone". Although that one might be right: Imagine how much money the chemical industry saved by dumping their waste in Love Canal instead of dealing with the kind of federal regulations we have today. Or how much Massey Energy saved by ignoring regulations about ventilating their mines. Nuclear power could cost less if no one regulated radiation. Health care and air travel could be cheaper if doctors and pilots didn't have to have licenses or well-maintained equipment. The possible savings are endless.

You know what you won't find in Pawlenty's speech: the name of any economist, economic theory, or econometric model that justifies his projections. That's because there isn't any. It's pure nonsense, undiluted by economic thinking of any type -- liberal, conservative, whatever.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which has covered Pawlenty since his days as goveror, comments:

Pawlenty didn't even try to support his central argument -- that tax cuts and smaller government would spur astounding economic growth of 5 percent annually over 10 years -- with evidence. That's because neither economic research nor reality confirms his promise.

And have his Republican rivals called him out on his nonsense? Not yet. We'll see if they do it in tonight's debate, but I'm not holding my breath. More likely, Romney and Huntsman will have to offer their own nonsense to stay competitive.

While we're talking nonsense, let's not ignore what Republicans are saying about the debt ceiling. The academic cover for this position comes from the Mercatus Center -- a wing of the Koch Empire. The New Republic debunks.

You should be reading: Brad DeLong's economic blog Grasping Reality With Both Hands. He does a daily Virtual Green Room post, giving simple rebuttals to the economic nonsense of the day.

The Sifted Bookshelf: Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

When a thinker has had an impact on history, it's hard to put that out of your mind and read his or her words in their original context. It's hard not to judge Christ by the Christians, or Freud by the Freudians. Nietzsche was done writing before Hitler was born, but it is hard not to equate Nietzsche's supermen with Hitler's master race.

That's what Terry Eagleton is asking us to do for Karl Marx: Put aside the distorting lens of Stalinism, Leninism, and Maoism and read Marx on his own terms -- as a 19th-century critic of capitalism rather than the patron saint of 20th-century communism. The book's main point is that most of what "everybody knows" about Marx is stereotype, not reality. Correctly understood, Marxist ideas about 19th-century capitalism still provide a lot of insight into what's going wrong with 21st-century capitalism.

Eagleton defeats one stereotype immediately: that Marxists are dour and humorless, and that they write in an impenetrable style whose jargon is meaningful only to other Marxists. Chapters of his books begins with plainly stated present-day attacks on Marx. Chapter One, for example:

Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present.

Each chapter is an answer to a particular attack like this, and is written in an engaging style that doesn't make you feel like you missed the prerequisite course. There's no Marxist glossary in the back, and I never felt the need for one.

Capital, property, and oppression. Here's the main definition you need in order to understand Eagleton's version of Marxism: Capital is labor that makes future labor more productive. The purpose of clearing and plowing a field, for example, is not any immediate consumption; the purpose is to make future planting and reaping more productive.

Economic progress happens because capital accumulates, and so labor keeps getting more productive. So I'm more productive as a journalist because I can use computers, which wouldn't be possible if people like Ben Franklin hadn't spent countless hours experimenting with electricity. Franklin's labor -- and the labor of generations of successor scientists and engineers -- is capital for me.

The fundamental mystery of economic progress, then, is: Why do people create capital? They could be laboring to produce something immediately consumable, or they could be resting or playing. Why labor to make future labor more productive?

Marx has two answers: property and oppression. A person will create capital if the surrounding society will recognize it as property. (I'll plant in the spring if my tribe will recognize that the fall crop is mine to reap. Otherwise I probably won't. Or I'll clear the stumps out of a field if people will recognize it as my field, so that it is my future labor that will be more productive.)

A society's level of technology determines what kinds of capital are possible, and that in turn determines what kinds of property the society will recognize. The Native Americans who sold Manhattan to the Dutch, for example, had no notion of what it meant to "own" an island. It would be like someone offering you trinkets in exchange for your share of the Moon. The Moon isn't property to us, but it could be to a space-traveling society.

The other reason people create capital is oppression -- someone forces them. They work, and the capital they create belongs to someone else. (Picture the slaves who dug the irrigation systems of ancient Sumer.)

Property and oppression interact. If I own all the arable land in a region, then people will work for me or they will starve. Naturally, I will set them to raising the food that they will consume. But I will also make them create capital that will belong to me, not them.

Subsistence and abundance. Looking at individuals, Marx saw two important production levels: subsistence, which is enough to keep the person alive, and abundance, the level at which a person will stop working and enjoy leisure. (When a deer is cooking, a tribal hunting band will not keep hunting. They'll gather around the fire and tell stories.)

Looking at societies, Marx saw that any surviving society had to be achieving subsistence. But until his own era, no society had achieved a level of production that could provide abundance for everyone. For that reason, he theorized that every previous society had needed oppression to keep growing its capital. Somehow, large numbers of people had to be kept working for future productivity, even though their present needs were not being satisfied.

So when Marx looked at any historical society, he saw:

a technological level that determined what could be produced,
a definition of property appropriate to that production system,
a ruling class that owned the vast majority of the defined property,
a system of oppression that forced everyone else to labor at creating capital for the ruling class.

He wasn't judgmental about this. It was just the way things had to be if a society was going to grow its capital to a point where it could provide abundance. (How, for example, could ancient peoples have invented writing -- a great capital improvement for the rest of history -- if slaves hadn't supported a class that had the time to think about such things?)

But in his own era, Marx believed that abundance-for-everybody was finally possible, because the highly efficient oppression of capitalism had accumulated enough capital to make labor sufficiently productive. If only the fruits of labor could be properly distributed, everybody could work enough to produce abundance for himself/herself, and then stop and enjoy leisure. To the extent that capital needed to develop further, it could be a kind of play -- like Ben Franklin mucking about with electricity or volunteers creating the Wikipedia.

In Marx's era (and even moreso today) considerable effort went into controlling production, so that overproduction didn't swamp the markets and ruin the capitalists. So you frequently had (and have) fallow fields, idle factories, unemployed workers, un-used raw materials -- and people whose needs go unsatisfied.

This state-of-affairs Marx did get judgmental about, because he believed we could finally be done with systems of oppression. The only thing that prevented this happy development was that society was still organized around the goal of growing capitalists' capital as fast as possible. He believed that a revolution was necessary to re-orient the economy towards producing abundance-for-everybody rather than ever-increasing capital for the ruling class.

So what didn't Marx foresee? Several things. He didn't foresee the European welfare state, which produces something like abundance-for-everybody by taxing capitalism rather than overthrowing it. He also didn't foresee the extent to which technology could create new products and advertising could create dissatisfaction, so that people would keep working for iPhones and HDTVs and designer jeans even after they had achieved a 19th-century level of abundance.

But mainly he didn't foresee that communist revolutions would happen in countries like Russia and China, which hadn't accumulated enough capital yet to provide abundance. So he didn't anticipate Stalinism: communist oppression to build mines, factories, and other productive capital. The kind of revolution Marx expected -- one in a highly developed capitalist economy like England -- has never happened.

Say you want a revolution? To Marx, it goes without saying that the ruling class rules for its own benefit, and preserves the institutions that solidify its power. Everything putters along nicely as long as the interests of the ruling class are in line with the economic possibilities of the era, and its institutions are socially productive.

But sooner or later new possibilities develop, and those possibilities line up with the interests of a new class. Eventually that class achieves enough consciousness to understand its potential, and then you have a tug-of-war until the new class comes out on top. The prime example here was what Europe had recently gone through: the transfer of power from the feudal aristocracy to the businessmen. Unlike the suddens spasms of the French or Russian Revolutions, the feudalism/capitalism revolution played out over centuries.

The symptoms of a revolution, then, are also symptoms of a ruling class being out of joint with its times. The institutions, traditions, concepts, and categories that support the ruling class become baggage rather than assets. Society has to do complicated tricks to keep them functioning, and they seem increasingly artificial rather than natural. (To see how artificial feudal traditions looked in the early capitalist era, read Jane Austen.)

In this context, it's interesting to look back at Martin Ford's The Lights in the Tunnel, which I reviewed two weeks ago. Ford is worrying about how we will provide human jobs in an era of intelligent machines, and so continue to have enough viable consumers to keep a consumer market economy going. He winds up with elaborate systems to pay people for socially productive behaviors that aren't considered "jobs" today.

Whatever you may think of Ford's specific suggestions, they're a symptom. Capitalist-era concepts like jobs and profits are starting to hobble economic thinking rather than facilitate it. Increasingly, the problem isn't how to produce stuff and distribute it; the problem is how to produce stuff at a profit and distribute it by paying people to work jobs.

Now that the 19th-century proletariat is shrinking, I don't have a clue what class Marx would think is achieving consciousness or what re-definitions could make the economy work for them. But it sure looks like this era is getting long in the tooth.

Short Notes

Imagine: The Germans are planning to live without nuclear power by 2022. You couldn't even start that discussion here.

Encouraging new tech: better batteries and solar panels. Even without these developments, solar power has reached the point where it can make sense for homeowners who live in the right place and have sufficient ingenuity. My friend Malacandra blogs about the installation process.

NYT readers might wonder what the point is, though, after reading an op-ed about the hidden costs of solar and wind power written by Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute. The Times does not mention that MI is yet another academic tentacle of the Koch octopus, which (as is so often the case) will profit directly if you accept their propaganda at face value. The Class M blog debunks.

Tax breaks for business investment are supposed to create jobs, as companies expand production and buy tools from American factories. But in a low-demand globalized environment, companies might buy machines overseas to automate jobs in the U.S.

Middle-class people often look at the poor and think, "I'd make better decisions than that." New psychological research indicates that the poor would make better decisions too -- if they didn't have to make so many of them. The kinds of trade-offs that confront the poor turn out to be inherently draining. If you have to make too many such choices, you exhaust your mental stamina and start choosing badly.

Translate that insight to the conservative health-care vision, where we all manage our own care and are constantly seeking the best value. How many vital decisions could you make on iffy information before you just started picking stuff at random?

The funniest reaction to the Anthony Weiner fiasco: the Daily Show's Kristen Schaal telling men the sad truth about penis photos.

Check out Andy Borowitz's parody of Sarah Palin's history tour. At Monticello, Sarah says:

at a time of our history when the American people needed leadership, it was Jefferson who said the immortal words, "We’re movin’ on up."

Stephen Colbert takes apart Mitt Romney's claim to be a private-sector job-creator. Actually, he made his money as a job-destroyer.

More comedy: Texas traded to Mexico in 4-state deal. We get Baha, Yucatan, and a state to be named later.

Watch Glenn Greenwald's speech on corporate-media propaganda to the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting conference.

You'd think this would be obvious: Food service workers need paid sick days.

Vyan speculates that Jon Stewart is inoculating his viewers against Fox News.

If Wisconsin's Walker administration is for the common man, then why is it attacking craft beer brewers and credit unions?

This Week's Challenge

This one isn't very challenging. If you do Twitter, check out the brand new @weeklysift. It's the easy way to get the Link of the Day, and to be notified when a new Sift goes up on the blog.

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Nostalgia

2011-06-06T12:08:00.001-04:00

The men who talk most about reverence for the American Constitution are the last people in the world to welcome a study of its origin. For the conservative is not devoted to a real past. He is devoted to his own comfortable image of it.

-- Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914)

In this week's Sift:

The Constitution as Symbol. Tea Party leaders constantly claim to revere the Constitution and the Founding Fathers who wrote it. So why do they know so little about either? It's simple: To them the Constitution is a nostalgic symbol, not a reality.
Tea Buyer's Remorse. New Tea Party governors have very quickly become unpopular. How they did it.
The Economy: Dip or Dive? Housing down, unemployment up. Was May just a glitch, or is the recovery over already?
Short Notes. Is the Ryan budget "courageous"? Koch's congressman doesn't deny being bought. Two fun inventions and one very important one. The Air Force Academy clears itself of religious discrimination. Ayn Rand and the religious right are strange allies. And Vermont bucks the rightward trend with single-payer health insurance.
This Week's Challenge. As the Right unifies around nostalgia, what can the Left unify around?

The Constitution as Symbol

Tea Party rhetoric is full of references to "the Constitution" as it was written by "our Founding Fathers". But anyone who paid attention in U.S. History class is often bewildered: What are they talking about?

Case in point: Herman Cain. Tuesday, ThinkProgress linked to a Cain radio piece from October, where he lectured his listeners about how the federal government "has no jurisdiction over bankruptcy law". Strange that a Constitutionalist like Cain didn't know Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the powers of Congress:

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

Or who can forget Michele Bachmann's claim that the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more" and that "once you got here, we were all the same" -- as if slavery had not been institutionalized in the Constitution, as if it didn't last until well after all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were dead, and as if many of the Founders were not slave-owners themselves? Or Bachmann's misplacement of The-Shot-Heard-Round-the-World in Concord, NH rather than Concord, MA.

Or Sarah Palin's backwards and self-serving understanding of the First Amendment? (She thinks it protects her from the press, not the other way around.) Or (just this Thursday) her garbling of Paul Revere's ride?

The Onion was spot-on with this parody: Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be. Tea Partiers don't venerate the real Constitution or the real Founders, but a Constitution and a founding generation that exists only in their imaginations.

The Constitution as scripture. The template here comes from fundamentalist religion: The Constitution is like scripture, and the Founders are its prophets. (Tea Party Patriots pushes a curriculum explicitly teaching that the Constitution was divinely inspired.) Like fundamentalist scripture, the Constitution is to be revered, but not thought about too deeply. You read it with your heart, not with your eyes and brain.

Wise as many of the Founders were, the real Constitutional Convention wasn't trying to write scripture. It was trying make a nation out of 13 newly independent states that had as many differences as similarities. So the actual Constitution was full of compromises between high ideals and unfortunate facts-on-the-ground like slavery.

We've been fixing that Constitution ever since: freeing the slaves, giving women the right to vote, disestablishing the state churches and so on. Plus, the Constitution has required regular maintenance: We have to keep reinterpreting time-bound phrases like "the right to bear arms" and "freedom of the press" so that they stay meaningful in an age of atomic warheads and the internet.

But that just gets us back to the original question: If the Tea Partiers aren't talking about the real Constitution, what are they talking about?

Nostalgia. A David Roberts article on the Grist blog (which I'll get back to in the Challenge) lays a foundation for answering that question:

[T]he American right grows ever more homogeneous: ethnically, socioculturally, and ideologically. … Precisely because it is homogeneous, the right is intense. There is no political force more potent than a privileged class in the process of losing its privilege. The right base sees itself as an Us beset on all sides by Thems; cries Michele Bachmann, "are we going to take our country back?"

The emotional engine that powers the Tea Party is nostalgia. But the specifics -- what the base is nostalgic for -- can't be spoken in so many words. Some of it is morally suspect: nostalgia for white, Christian, or male privilege, or for a time when gays were in the closet and non-English-speakers whispered to each other because they were ashamed of their ignorance.

Another part of the nostalgia can't be spoken because the billionaire backers of the Tea Party want it suppressed: nostalgia for a time when employers had to respect the power of workers to unionize and strike, when economic growth was widely shared rather than captured by the rich, when one factory job could support a family.

Nostalgia that can't be spelled out needs to be symbolized. The Constitution -- the fantasy Constitution written by divinely inspired prophets -- is that symbol. If you are part of the conservative base, it symbolizes a time when life was easier for vaguely defined "people like me", when you didn't have to make room for people whose religions and worldviews are different or care whether or not you were insulting them, when you could be treated with respect and be confident about your future.

Some of that is a worthy fantasy and some of it isn't, but it has nothing to do with the real Constitution.

Counter-attack. Understanding this nostalgia can help liberals frame their counter-attack: We need to spell out the parts of the nostalgia that the Koch brothers want to suppress. Corporatism is not nostalgic. Union-busting is an ugly part of our history that working-class Americans do not pine for. Deregulation sounds wonderful when you think of the sod-busters of the frontier, but less wonderful when you think of miners trapped underground. That part of the past is coming back, and it's not pretty.

Liberals have their own nostalgia to promote: the budget surplus of Bill Clinton, FDR's establishment of Social Security, Lyndon Johnson's establishment of Medicare, the unionization that made American factories safe and brought American workers into the middle class. There have been times when working people stood together against the rapacious rich, and made society work for the many rather than the few.

Remember?

Herman Cain himself is a symbol, which is why his candidacy is has been taking off. Being black, he is a symbolic answer to the charge that the Tea Party is racist. (You can see that we're-not-racists sentiment very clearly throughout the nostalgic Herman Cain Train music video. "Eat your words," Cain says to those who charge the Tea Party with racism.)

The racism charge stings because it is 80% true. Its truth makes it hard to dismiss, but the 20% falsehood makes it feel genuinely unfair. Let's sort it out: If racism means a reflexive hatred of black skin, the Tea Party is not racist and Cain proves it. He has black skin and they don't hate him.

But if racism means that blacks come to the plate with two strikes -- as I think it does in today's America -- so far Cain has proved nothing. Let him swing and miss once, and we'll see if he's called out. So far, his rhetoric is down-the-line what billionaires and nostalgic whites want to hear. But if (just once) he wants to go in the "wrong" direction, we'll see if he gets a white candidate's share of the benefit of the doubt.

The Constitution/Bible analogy explains something else: why Republicans keep confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. Herman Cain did it (seconds after scolding "we need to re-read the Constitution"). John Boehner did it (while waving a pocket copy of the Constitution). It happens fairly often.

Why? It's simple: The Declaration is the old testament of the Constitution.

Tea Buyer's Remorse

Since February, PPP has polled eight states that elected Republican governors in 2010: Seven of them would like a do-over. Nevada would vote for Gov. Brian Sandoval over Democrat Rory Reid (Harry's son) again, and by almost the same margin. But John Kasich's 2-point win in Ohio in November would be a 25-point loss today. Rick Scott's 1-point win in Florida is now a 19-point deficit. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker's 6-point advantage has turned into a 7-point hole. Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett went from up-5 to down-9. And so on. Even won't-he-run-for-president Chris Christie in New Jersey has seen his approval fall.

What happened? It's simple. In state after state, Republicans ran vague times-are-tough, we-need-more-jobs, I-share-your-values campaigns. (Check out John Kasich ads like this and this and this.) Immediately after taking office, they implemented radical plans that were remarkably uniform across state lines: bust the unions (Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Michigan), make it harder for people to vote (Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio), cut education (Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, Wisconsin), cut Medicaid (Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) or even privatize it (Florida) -- while continuing to cut taxes for corporations (Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin). Other than the corporate tax cuts, it's hard to find any mention of these specifics in last fall's campaign.

Despite the campaign message that the Tea Party movement was about government spending, not social issues, Tea-Party-supported governors and their legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion. (Rachel Maddow has been doing a great job of covering abortion restrictions in her Really Big Government series.) Collateral damage includes women's health in general: The federal government is challenging the legality of Indiana's defunding of Planned Parenthood (similar to efforts in North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, and Tennessee). The state funds were not used for abortions, but for contraception, cancer screenings, STD testing, and other important services.

Citizens haven't taken all this lying down. The Wisconsin union-busting drama (with its Democratic senators escaping to Illinois, 100,000-person demonstrations, and fly-by-night votes in the legislature that are overturned by the courts) has reached its next milestone: Of the eight Republican senators that were eligible for recall petitions, six will face new elections this summer. (Republicans tried to gin up interest in recalling the eight eligible Democratic senators, but they ended up filing petitions on only three of them. The state has yet to rule on their validity, due to allegations of fraudulent tactics -- like telling people the petition was for something else.)

The Ohio union-busting law is on hold pending a petition drive to put it on the ballot in November. (The law is polling badly). A recall petition is circulating against Michigan's Gov. Snyder, and Wisconsin's Walker is bound to face a recall when he becomes eligible in January. (Wisconsin law won't let voters recall an official who hasn't served a year yet.)

That's a lot of change for seven months. If you want to keep the momentum going in the right direction, consider supporting We Are Wisconsin as it starts campaigning in the recall elections.

Economy: Dip or Dive?

There's no point trying to put a good face on it: The economic news last week was bad. Tuesday, a key housing-market index fell past the low it hit in 2009. Wednesday, bad news about the job market started coming out, culminating in Friday's report from the Labor Department. It showed that the economy added only 54,000 jobs in May -- well below the 100-150K needed to keep up with population growth. Consequently, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1%. The Dow Jones average dropped 2.4% (about 300 points) for the week.

Economic writers spent a lot of time arguing about whether this was (1) the start of another downturn, so recently after the last one; or (2) a hiccup in an already slow stop-and-start recovery. The consensus, as best I could piece it together, was (2), but that the hiccup has moved us into perilous territory where unpredictable bad luck -- a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or surprise corporate bankruptcy -- could trigger (1).

The explanation I found most plausible was from New Deal Democrat on the Bonddad blog. Here are the key features of the problem:

Overall, we have a demand problem. Recoveries are usually pushed along by consumer spending, but most consumers have not seen much from the recovery yet. (Almost all the gains so far have gone to the wealthy.)
If the world is not already at peak oil production, it's close. There's no longer any button the Saudis can push to put more oil on the market.
Given that oil production is more-or-less fixed, any increase in world demand raises the price.
Consequently, economic recovery is self-stifling: Growth raises demand for oil which raises the price of gasoline. Higher gas prices take money away from low-to-middle-income consumers, the people most likely to spend. So demand drops, shutting off growth.

That's why we have a stop-and-start recovery to begin with. Why it's stopping right now, NDD claims, is partly random and partly due to the Japan tsunami, which has screwed up supply chains around the world.

So we should cross our fingers and try not to panic for the next few months. If there's no additional shock to the system, we should get back to bumpy growth soon.

If you feed "jobs report" into Google News, you'll notice something interesting: The unemployed are just tokens on somebody else's gameboard. Articles focus on how the jobs report will affect the stock market or Obama's chances for re-election -- not what it means to people who need jobs.

This reflects something Tom Stites was talking about in 2006: Newspapers target the top 40% of the economic pyramid. Everybody else is invisible until they affect the top 40%.

This was sadly predictable:

Top Republicans on Friday said an increase in the jobless rate underscored the need for President Barack Obama to get personally involved in talks to cut government spending to help stimulate economic growth.

In case you're wondering, no econometric model in the world predicts that cutting government spending will stimulate near-term economic growth or create jobs. And it's not working anywhere that has tried it. But John Boehner can say stuff like this and have it reported seriously in the national media.

Three days before, Naked Capitalism's Philip Pilkington explained how this kind of thing happens: TV talking-head economics has become a morality play, not a social science:

Politicians and economic commentators play into this by acting out various roles. They’re not simply lying – indeed, to an extent they seem to believe in the part they play, even though they know that what they are saying is misleading. But to step outside of the play – to pull a Brechtian manoeuvre and bring the audience in on the truth – would make them appear crazy; nothing, after all, appears quite so crazy as when someone starts telling too much truth. So the commentators and politicians get caught up in a slipstream of misleading nonsense – all the while furthering their careers.

Nicholas Kristof points out where the conservative economic program goes. There already is a country with low taxes, traditional religious values, a strong military, and industry unburdened by environmental or worker-safety regulations: Pakistan.

I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?

LIberal values, on the other hand, are embodied in countries like Germany and Norway. Where would you rather live?

Short Notes

Katrina vanden Heuvel notes the change: Political courage used to mean doing the right thing and suffering the consequences. Now it means "making the hard choices" -- i.e., deciding which powerless people you're going to stick it to. Paul Ryan's budget gives tax cuts to his rich base and sticks it to the old and the poor. There's nothing "courageous" about it.

A really courageous Republican would tell his base this truth: We got here by cutting taxes. After you eliminate everything that could conceivably be called "waste", we're still going to need more revenue.

Congressman Mike Pompeo's district contains the Koch Industries headquarters, and they're his biggest contributor. When National Journal asks whether he's been "influenced" by the Koch brothers, he responds like the Koch PR department:

Koch Industries is an amazing business that has succeeded by building a product that customers love dearly. The folks who run Koch are very clear. They would love to have government just get out of the way and allow companies to compete, whether in their particular sectors or other sectors.

Translation: "Yes, I am bought and paid for. You got a problem with that?"

Geek Power. This guy from Prague has a great idea: If there's no bike lane, make your own. The projector on his bike adds dotted lines and a bicycle symbol to the pavement in front of him.

If TVs in public places annoy you, this woman has a device to turn them off sewn into her jacket.

And this invention will change lives in poor countries: inexpensive glasses you can tune yourself -- no optometrist needed.

I've posted before about the Christianist take-over of the Air Force Academy and other military training programs. Chris Rodda (author of "Liars for Jesus: the Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History") reports the latest: The Air Force Academy has done an investigation and cleared itself. One faculty member commented to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation: "You don't do proper research with a self-selected sample -- unless, of course, you are fishing for the answers you already want."

Meanwhile, the MRFF claims that the Academy still contains a group of at least 100 cadets who fake being fundamentalist Christians so that they'll be left alone.

Uh-oh. Somebody just told the religious right that Ayn Rand was an atheist.

While other states have been taking a sharp turn to the right, Vermont is moving towards single-payer health insurance. The motivation combines Bernie-Sanders-style liberalism with traditional Yankee thrift: Why are we sending all that money to out-of-state insurance companies who don't contribute anything to the healing process?

This Week's Challenge

Grist's David Roberts observes that the Right has a lot of homogeneity -- racially, culturally, religiously. That gives them unity and intensity, even as they shrink demographically. The Left, on the other hand, is "a contentious coalition of Thems". Hence this question:

What vision of America's future is broad enough to inspire and cohere the left's fractious coalition but specific enough to distinguish it from the conservative status quo? What new narrative can turn the gaze of the country's elite away from rosy-tinged nostalgia for frontier libertarianism and white privilege?

Any answers out there?

Give 'em Hell

2011-05-30T11:54:00.001-04:00

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

-- President "Give-'em-Hell-Harry" Truman

In this week's Sift:

Is Medicare a Fair Issue? The corporate-media pundits are telling us how unfair it is for the Democrats to "demagogue" the Medicare issue. But what is really unfair is the way Medicare came under attack to begin with.
The Sifted Bookshelf: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. Millions of people are spending billions of hours in the virtual worlds of online games. What can those games teach us about fixing the "user experience" of the real world?
Short Notes. Cities as software. Sane Republicans need not apply for the 2012 nomination. Sarah still isn't running. Rolling Stone profiles Roger Ailes. A Palestinian view of Obama's Middle East speech. And I've added a Link-of-the-Day to the Weekly Sift Facebook page.
This Week's Challenge. Lots of people had advice for new graduates last week. This week: How do you talk to people who disagree with you?

Is Medicare a Fair Issue?

This week the momentum officially changed. Democrats have been reeling since the debacle of the 2010 election. They've been wondering how far the tidal wave would roll and how many of them it would wash out to sea.

Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special election in a very Republican congressional district. She did it by focusing on her opponent's support for the Paul Ryan budget plan, which would privatize Medicare. 235 Republicans in the House and 40 in the Senate voted for that proposal, so they'll be hearing about the issue too.

Suddenly, it's the Republicans who are feeling the fear.

Almost immediately, the pundit class started wringing its hands -- even in the so-called "liberal" parts of the corporate media. Across the board, the pundits had bought into the following line of thought: Long-term, the federal deficit is insupportable. Something has to be done to rein in entitlement spending. The fastest-growing entitlement is Medicare, so it has to be reined in first. The Ryan plan may have been extreme, but at least it recognized those realities. Now, everyone will be afraid to touch Medicare so nothing will happen. We're all doomed because the Democrats are demagoguing the Medicare issue.

Is that really what's happening?

The frame. Here's one of the most widely applicable tricks of propaganda: If you want to attack a party, a program, an ethnic group or whatever, you start with a problem that affects everybody. Then you take the particular way that the universal problem affects the people you want to attack, and you spin it as if it were a completely unique problem, something that "those people" need to fix right away.

It's easy. Sexual abuse of children by teachers and ministers is a problem, so let's ignore it and define the special problem of sexual abuse by gay teachers and ministers. What's wrong with those gay people? We have to do something about their child-abuse problem right away. You're not condoning gay sexual predators, are you?

Or we could ignore the general crime problem and focus on crime by illegal immigrants. Do they commit more burglaries and murders than comparable citizens? No. Is it worse to be killed by an illegal immigrant than by a citizen? I doubt it. But illegal immigrants have the same criminal tendencies that all humans do, so you can find cases to play up and make into a big deal.

That's what Republicans have done to Medicare. They've never liked Medicare, because it delivers a valuable service and so is like a billboard advertising the good that government can do. Republicans were against passing Medicare to begin with, and they make a serious run at it maybe once a decade.

To attack Medicare, Republicans can use this larger problem: America has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, one whose costs are pulling away from those of any other country -- including countries that consider health care a right, that cover everybody, and that have higher life expectancies than we do.

President Obama's Affordable Care Act began to attack that problem, but it's just a beginning. If we were serious, we'd be studying countries like France, Germany, and Japan to see how they deliver better medical care for 2/3rds (or less) of what we spend per person.

But instead, Republicans have shaped the expensive-American-health-care problem into a bludgeon to use against Medicare: Medicare is too expensive (just like the rest of American health care), and its costs are rising fast (just like the rest of American health care). So Medicare's cost is a completely unique problem that we absolutely have to do something about right now -- even as we try to undo Obama's timid first steps at medical cost control in general.

Paul Ryan claims that his privatization plan will control costs. (The Free Market Fairy will wave her wand.) But according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that's wishful thinking. Actually, the Ryan plan will just shift the cost of medical care from the government to old people. (Ezra Klein takes Ryan's case apart in more detail.)

So fundamentally, the Ryan plan is just a Medicare bludgeon: It ignores the underlying problem to focus on the particular program it wants to destroy.

What can we afford? These days, we're hearing many cries of "we can't afford it" because "we're going broke". But it's important to ask who is going broke and what, exactly, we can't afford.

One answer is: If medical inflation continues its current pace indefinitely, our whole economy will go broke. Eventually, exponential growth would push our medical costs higher than our GDP. In the very long term that's a real problem, and if the Republicans have any plan to deal with it, I'm all ears. So far they haven't offered one.

(I have a plan: single-payer health care. Model it on what the French, Germans, and Japanese are doing. Their costs are lower and are rising more slowly than ours. And they have lower amenable mortality -- fewer deaths from curable conditions.)

Instead, we're talking about particular government programs funded in particular ways, and worrying about the date on which the funding will be inadequate. To solve that, the Ryan plan draws a line in the sand and says, "We'll only fund this much."

That "saves" the Medicare program by giving up on its mission. Ryan just surrenders to the notion that our society can't afford to take care of old people when they get sick. (Imagine applying the same "solution" to defense: We'll cap what the government spends, and if in the distant future that turns out not to be adequate, each of us will be responsible for the cost of defending our own homes against the invaders.)

That's the outcome we should be working hard to avoid, not the one we should be embracing.

And that's the Medicare issue in a nutshell: Democrats remain committed to the idea that America will take care of its old people when they get sick, and Republicans are willing to give that commitment up.

That issue is totally fair. Democrats should use it to give the Republicans hell -- in the Harry Truman way, by telling the truth about them.

To a large extent, Republicans are just starting to reap what they have sown. They won in 2010 by spreading the false idea that government spending was riddled with bridges-to-nowhere that the Democrats weren't willing to cut. Now that they control the House and a lot of state governments, what do they want to cut? Medicare, Medicaid, education, and a bunch of other programs that deliver services people actually need and use.

You can't turn off an idea like government-is-full-of-waste just because it's inconvenient now that you're in office. People know that huge numbers of bridges-to-nowhere have not been cancelled. And they're going to resent giving up services they need while all that (fictitious) waste is still untouched.

The Sifted Bookshelf: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

Unless you're a gamer -- which I'm not (unless Sudoku counts) -- you probably have no idea how much time and effort your fellow citizens are investing in virtual worlds. It's awesome.

In the U.S. alone, there are an estimated 5 million "extreme" gamers, who average 45 hours a week gaming. Other sources say that 10 million Western Europeans and 6 million Chinese put in at least 20 hours a week. And if you picture this as vegging-out time, similar to watching re-runs of Gilligan's Island, you don't get it. We're talking about spending time in a virtual world that in many ways is more challenging than reality.

Know what the largest wiki other than the Wikipedia is? The WoWWiki created and maintained by the 12 million people who play World of Warcraft. The Halo-playing community also has a massive wiki. Think about that. This isn't just time spent playing the game, these are massive community documentation projects, undertaken volunteers who just want to demonstrate and share their knowledge.

Once you understand that, there are a variety of standard reactions. You might deplore the extreme waste of time and effort. Or you could blame someone: Something is wrong with the gamers; they're escaping because they can't hack it in reality. Or something is wrong with the games; they're designed to cause addiction.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Her new book Reality is Broken asks a different question: What is lacking in Reality, that people go into game worlds to find? And what can game worlds teach us about how to improve the user experience of Reality?

These are some of her findings:

Reality is simultaneously too easy and too unrewarding. The optimal human experience is to face a genuine challenge that we know we can overcome if we try hard enough and use all our abilities. Too often what we face in Reality is drudgery that may or may not accomplish anything -- or unemployment.
Games provide clear missions and well-defined success criteria. Reality usually doesn't.
Games emphasize hope over fear. You aspire to reach higher levels. And failure is nothing to be afraid of -- you just start over and try again. But Reality often emphasizes fear over hope.
Real work disconnects us from our social network. Games can keep us in touch with each other.
Reality trivializes our effort. The backstory of a game like Halo puts each individual's effort in an epic context. How often does your real job do that?
Reality is unimaginative and uninspiring. Things are the way they are, and we are seldom challenged to imagine them differently. But a game world can help us envision something radical.

The gaming community -- like the open software community -- demonstrates something we don't know how to think about yet: The 21st-century economy produces large numbers of people who are hungry for the right kind of challenges. Whoever figures out how to provide those challenges in real life will be able to channel vast amounts of effort and creativity.

The most interesting part of the book concerns "happiness hacks" -- simple habits that are clinically proven to make people happier: (Dance. Help a stranger. Get outside. Teach somebody something useful.) The problem isn't that we don't know how to be happy. The problem is that happiness-enhancing habits seems hokey, we have a hard time motivating ourselves to maintain them, and our everyday lives don't provide easy opportunities to practice them.

McGonigal describes a number of games that get around those problems. The most interesting was an experimental iPhone game implemented in Boston: GroundCrew. GroundCrew players submit and grant each other's wishes, which appear on a World-of-Warcraft-like quest board. The example in the book is of a dancer who can't leave rehearsal but really wants a latte. Another player queries the game for "quests" near him, sees the latte wish, and fulfills it -- gaining points in the game that will raise the value of his own wishes. I can imagine a lot of ways this model could go wrong, but the game designers seem to have anticipated them.

Watch McGonigal's 20-minute TED talk.

Do you have trouble motivating yourself and your housemates to keep the place livable? Do you want to settle once and for all that argument about whether you or your spouse does more housework? Do you want the kids to stop whining about every little thing you ask them to do?

You need to play Chore Wars. It's a game based on the quest-for-experience-points model, except the quests are household chores. The "players" design characters for themselves, agree on a set of "quests" and the points each one should be worth, and come up with real-life rewards for the winners. After the game is set up, players log in and claim the points whenever they complete something.

Basic accounts are free, and a one-time charge of $10 upgrades you to a gold account with extra capabilities.

Every day, huge numbers of adults play Lexulous -- online Scrabble -- with their mothers. "Check in on your mother regularly" is one of those good habits people feel guilty about not keeping up. But day-in-day-out, Lexulous players send a move, get a responding move, and maybe add a comment or two about the weather or how the grandkids are doing.

If you think "I'd rather get a call or a visit", you're missing the point. People who touch base every day are more likely to call or visit, and more likely to have something to talk about when they do.

The Quest to Learn school is using the gaming model to define a curriculum. Its web site explains:

Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.

Two sci-fi novels imagine how game worlds can influence Reality: Halting State by Charles Stross and the Daemon/Freedom™ series by Daniel Suarez.

Short Notes

The most paradigm-changing thing I read this week: Cities as Software. An Australian writing in a Dutch magazine points out:

The built environment and geography of a city is its hardware. … [V]irtually every urbanist I know is a hardware person. They come from backgrounds in town planning, engineering, design, architecture or activism around the preservation or possibilities of the built environment.

But cities are also software: sets of rules that define how spaces and buildings are used. And many cities have empty buildings -- idle hardware -- that are nonetheless expensive and/or difficult to access for temporary events. And yet, if you have enough temporary events, one after another, you have lasting change.

He goes on to explain how a shoestring operation, Renew Newcastle, is re-writing the software of an old Australian steel-making city:

In Newcastle in many respects nothing has changed since 2008. The buildings are mostly the same. The hardware is unchanged. Nothing has been built. No government has fallen. No revolution has taken place. Yet, on another level much has changed – dead parts of the city [are] active and vibrant, 60 projects have started, hundreds of new events have been created, and whole new communities are directly engaged in creating whatever it is that the city will become.

Recently, Lonely Planet rated Newcastle #9 on its Cities to Visit list.

When I think about what has made cities near me interesting -- Waterfire in Providence, Steampunk City in Waltham, the Lowell Folk Festival -- it's usually a temporary rewrite of the city software, not new hardware.

Here's what you need to know about the race for the 2012 Republican nomination: Sane people need not apply.This video was created to attack Jon Huntsman as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). But if you showed it to the average Independent, I think they'd vote for him. I was halfway through before I grokked the rhino image and realized it was supposed to be negative.

I'm constantly bewildered by the pundit-class assumption that the Republican establishment will control this process. After Romney implodes, I keep hearing, they'll steer the nomination to Tim Pawlenty, who garners 6% in the latest Gallup poll. Or maybe Huntsman, who (at 2%) is within the margin-of-error of zero. Bachmann, Palin, Santorum, Cain -- they'll all get swept under the rug somehow.

Propagandists are like arsonists: They always think they can control the blaze, and sometimes they're wrong. The Republican establishment stoked craziness they couldn't control in 2010, and wound up with un-electable Senate candidates like Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. They don't control the craziness now, either.

BTW, I'm standing by my prediction that Sarah Palin won't run. Yeah, she's hinting, but I predicted that, too. I was particularly amused by this:

a person familiar with a potential Palin campaign describes a different approach. “What you would likely see [in Iowa] if Palin were to run is an unconventional and modern campaign focusing more on mass communications, internet contact, and mass assemblies as opposed to the more traditional one-on-five coffees,” the insider said.

The "insider" is spinning Palin's biggest weakness: She can't run a traditional Iowa/NH campaign, because she can't answer unscripted questions. The kind of blather she gets away with on stage or on Twitter won't work in somebody's living room.

Rolling Stone: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory. And Media Matters gives a prime example of how it's working out.

The buzz has all been about the Israeli reaction to President Obama's Middle East speech. Rashid Khalidi gives a Palestinian view.

For a while now I've been thinking that the Weekly Sift Facebook page ought to provide something more than just a Monday-afternoon announcement that the Sift is up. This week I've started experimenting with a Link of the Day: A couple lines about something cool that I expect to say more about in the next Sift.

The Link of the Day is in the spirit of being a political blog for people who don't have time for political blogs (one of the slogans I've used to describe the Weekly Sift). It's just one thing. If you're looking for something to read over lunch, check it out.

This Week's Challenge

Last week's challenge -- what advice do you have for new graduates? -- got a lot of interesting responses. Only one person had a direct career suggestion (medical technology -- because it combines technology with people skills and subtle pattern recognition, it should be hard to automate completely). But more general advice (summarized and in no particular order) included:

Live within your means. (Several people offered some version of this advice: Spend less than you earn. Don't go into debt. Live below your means. Don't buy stuff you don't need. Take compound interest very seriously.)
Learn basic skills that will make you less dependent on the money economy. (This is my abstraction from a lot of more specific suggestions: Learn how to grow and preserve food, to repair stuff, to give first aid, to entertain yourself and others, and so on.)
Don't get married before you're 25.You don't want to hear the details. Just don't.
Make time to do what you love. If you can turn it into a career, that's wonderful. But even if you can't, don't lose it.
Bicycles. They're good for your health and the environment at the same time.
Don't let yourself rust. Keep moving, keep learning, keep adapting.
Maintain a social network. You can't count on staying in the same place or keeping the same job, so this won't happen by itself.

This piece of advice popped into my head while I was reading other people's suggestions: Don't wait for permission. If you want to be a journalist, go cover stuff. If you want to make movies, make them. Who's stopping you? Do stuff, throw it out there, and get feedback so that you can improve.

This week: Do you stay close to people whose worldviews/philosophies/politics are opposed to your own? Can you talk to them? How do you do it?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Where to turn?

2011-05-23T12:04:00.001-04:00

If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

-- GIIP Report: "Upper Big Branch"

In this week's Sift:

Jobs of the Future. Two consecutive jobless recoveries raise a question: Does the economy work differently now? And is concentration of wealth the culprit or technology?
Why I Hate Vouchers. Private-sector competitors to public programs achieve their "efficiency" by skimming off the easy-to-serve. That begins a vicious cycle of erosion, which continues until the public program serves only a small group of very needy, very powerless people -- who can then be ignored. If we had the stomach for it, we could achieve the same savings by ignoring the needy without going through the voucher charade.
Short Notes. An independent report lays it on the line: Massey Energy's calculated neglect killed 29 miners. What can we learn from the Rapture? Obama offers substance -- and is mostly ignored. Now that we have a Democratic president and a Republican Senate minority, judicial filibusters are back. The Catholic Church's Woodstock defense. I refuse to care about Arnold. The Onion outs the Facebook-CIA connection. It's OK to be Takei. And more.
This Week's Challenge. If not "plastics", then what should we tell this year's graduates?

Jobs of the Future

We've now had two jobless recoveries in a row. The 2001 recession technically ended in November, 2001 (see Wikipedia's list of recessions), but the total number of American jobs didn't return to its pre-recession level until October, 2003. And while the 2007-2009 recession ended in June, 2009, we're still nearly 7 million jobs short of the March, 2007 peak.

So recessions end, but jobs return slowly. Worse, the new jobs aren't as good as the old ones. Laid-off welders don't get rehired at Chrysler, they become shelf-stockers at WalMart.

As different as they seem otherwise, both Bush and Obama followed the widely accepted get-the-jobs-back formula: run deficits and cut interest rates. Interest rates plunged near zero. Bush got his deficit mostly by cutting taxes; Obama mostly by increasing spending. Both fought wars. But neither got a clean bounce in jobs.

What's up with that?

Some economists blame the workers: They don't have the right training for the new jobs. (Structural unemployment, it's called.) But if that were the whole explanation, some industry would be begging for workers, and some credential would be a magic ticket. What is it? If you were remaking The Graduate today, what word could plausibly replace "plastics"?

What if it's not the workers? What if the economy has changed in some sinister way?

Wealth and demand. Regular Sift readers have been down this road before. In November, I explained the argument Robert Reich makes in Aftershock: Concentration of wealth is the underlying problem. A mass-production economy requires a massive number of people with disposable income. If wealth gets too concentrated, demand lags, and then no one wants to invest in new production -- because who's going to buy the new products? So instead of productive investment, capital gets sucked into speculative bubbles like the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000 or the housing bubble that popped in 2007-2008.

Reich's theory solves the jobless-recovery mystery like this: Ordinary recessions start because investment and production get ahead of demand -- builders overbuild, factories over-produce, stores over-order. Then everybody puts the brakes on at once, and times are tough. But after six months or so, the over-stocked inventories run out, new merchandise gets ordered, factories start up again, and workers get re-hired.

By contrast, the expansion phase of a bubble isn't just over-optimistic, it's delusional. (The high-flying start-ups of the dot-com bubble had no business models. No amount of economic growth would have made them profitable.) When the bubble pops, the fantasy is exposed and there's no going back. So it takes longer for the unemployed to find jobs again, because so many of them will have to do something genuinely new.

Reich's diagnosis and prescription focus on politics: Since Ronald Reagan, tax cuts and de-regulation have tilted the playing field to over-favor the rich, leading to an over-concentration of wealth and a bubble economy. Undo that, and you return to the broadly shared prosperity of 1950-1980.

But what if it's not that simple? What if something other than politics has its thumb on the scale?

Technology and the neo-Luddites. Martin Ford's recent book The Lights in the Tunnel argues that concentration of wealth is itself an effect of something else: technology.

His argument is a refinement of the one Luddites made 200 years ago and that was made most entertainingly in the 1951 Alec Guinness film The Man in the White Suit: Eventually, automation and technology will eliminate the need for workers.

200 years ago, it didn't work out that way. Instead, demand expanded to match the increased productivity, which is how the average American or European now lives at a level of luxury that was unimaginable then.

Why won't that keep happening? Most economists are confident it will, but Ford makes two counter-arguments: First, we are approaching a game-changing point where machines become autonomous. The wages of machine-operators won't keep pace because there won't be any machine-operators. Second, the acceleration of technology may reach a point where economic forces can't keep up. In theory new markets would continue to be created, but those too would automate faster than human workers could be trained to fill the new jobs.

Low-demand dystopia. In either case, an unregulated market leads to a low-demand dystopia, where production depends entirely on capital, labor is irrelevant, and so only people with capital are economically viable. In short, income depends entirely on owning things, not doing things. So production shrinks to accommodate the needs of owners, and the unemployed masses subsist on welfare and charity.

If this seems incredible, Ford gives one very good historic example: the slave-holding South. Economically, slaves are capital, not labor. (The are bought and maintained like robots, not hired and incentivized like workers.) So the South was a society in which virtually all production came from capital. The result was a stagnant economy that worked well for the small owning class, but in which an ambitious young person without money had few opportunities. And the South only worked as well as it did because of exports -- external demand. An entire world based on such a model would be a low-demand dystopia.

Marx addressed a similar dystopian vision by having the government own the means of production. In practice, that didn't work out so well -- whether government takes over business (communism) or business takes over government (fascism), the combination becomes totalitarian because it's too powerful to control.

Instead, Ford proposes a complex system in which taxes shift away from wages to focus on capital and production, funding a complicated set of incentives for citizens to live in society-enhancing ways -- thus keeping income widely distributed and maintaining the mass market. I'm not sure this is any more workable than communism, but it does have the virtue that it can be implemented within our current economy, with the incentives supplementing wages rather than immediately replacing them.

Future jobs vs. futuristic jobs. Personally, I believe that Ford's vision is worth keeping in mind as a thought experiment that shows what's wrong with conservative economic policies. But I believe his dystopia is further off than he thinks, because economic forces have quite a bit of resiliency left if we stop sabotaging them by favoring capital over labor.

A short post by Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point: Most "jobs of the future" will not be futuristic. It has never been the case that new industries created the mass of new jobs needed. We're fooled by looking at the huge factories of the 19th and 20th centuries. They employed a lot of people individually, but collectively they didn't come close to absorbing the jobs lost when agriculture automated. (You can see the same phenomenon in China today. Even with a massive export market, Chinese factories are barely keeping up with the flow of peasants into the cities.)

Technology creates jobs through economic growth, not through new industries. For example, one of the growth professions of the 19th century was teaching. Teachers had been around forever, but until the 19th century only rich children had them. The growth industries of the late 20th century weren't rocketry or nuclear power, but health care and food preparation -- because prosperity let people live longer and eat out more.

Rich families today employ lots of trainers, coaches, therapists, decorators, and advice-givers of all sorts. If many more people suddenly became "rich" by today's standards, the economy would need a lot more such advisors -- and not a lot more nano-technologists.

I know it seems crazy to imagine an economy full of people advising each other -- who will make stuff? But it was just as crazy in 1800 to imagine an economy where hardly anybody farmed.

Why I Hate Vouchers

In an LA Times story running down the Milwaukee teachers' union, we get one small fact that sums up why I hate voucher programs.

Low-income parents can use vouchers to send their children to private and parochial schools, a decades-long experiment that [Governor Scott] Walker proposes expanding. That has left the [Milwaukee public school] district with a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities — 19%. In voucher schools, which can return students to the Milwaukee district if they don't behave, the figure is 1% to 8.6%.

I'll bet it now costs the Milwaukee public schools more to educate their "average" student than the private schools spend. And no doubt voucher supporters are wielding such statistics to prove that private schools are more "efficient". But the underlying phenomenon isn't government inefficiency. It's that vouchers encourage the easy-to-teach students to leave while the hard-to-teach students stay.

That's how vouchers work -- not just in education, but in general. Government programs are based on the idea that we are a community, so we're all in this together. Voucher programs are based on the idea that we are all individuals, so if you can get a better individual deal, you should go for it.

The result is always the same: Fortunate people who are easy to serve can take their vouchers into the private sector and get a better deal. The pool that is left behind in the public program is harder to serve, so average costs go up, making the private-sector voucher a good deal for even more people, in a vicious cycle.

The Walker education-voucher program is eroding Milwaukee's public schools this way. The Ryan healthcare-voucher program will do the same to Medicare and Medicaid.

In the long run, there is only one way that vouchers will save taxpayers money: Eventually the public-program pool gets so small and so needy that it has no political power. Then we can lock them away in some cheap hellhole institution that doesn't serve their needs at all, and what are they going to do about it? Cha-ching!

Of course, we could get the same savings without involving the private sector: Just let public programs throw hard-to-serve people out on the street to fend for themselves. But that would be horrible and heartless, wouldn't it? The rest of us will sleep better if we achieve the same result by sleight-of-hand.

The same shell game is happening in states that privatize their prisons. Do private prisons save money? No. Even though (like private schools and private health insurance programs) they "steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates", they cost more.

Back in the 90s, Newt Gingrich owned up to the erosion strategy, saying that he favored letting Medicare "wither on the vine" rather than attacking the popular program directly. Afterwards, pundits agreed that it was scare-mongering to quote Newt accurately on this subject.

Now he wants to declare another mulligan: He retracted his criticism of Paul Ryan's Medicare-slashing voucher proposal after a firestorm of protest from the Right. So he says that it's unfair if Democrats use the tape: "Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate."

Democrats, as we all know, get to retract any gaffe they make, and no one ever mentions it again. Just ask Howard Dean and John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

Short Notes

The Governor's Independent Investigation Panel has issued its report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 miners a little over a year ago. Let's skip to the conclusions on page 108:

Ultimately, the responsibility for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine lies with the management of Massey Energy. … The April 5, 2010 explosion was … a completely predictable result for a company that ignored basic safety standards.

Massey didn't ventilate the mine properly, let coal dust build up, and eventually the inevitable spark came that it all set off. Massey was warned, battled federal safety regulators tooth and nail, paid some wrist-slap fines, and did things its own way until 29 miners died. How could that happen? Easy.

Many politicians were afraid to challenge Massey’s supremacy because of the company’s superb ongoing public relations campaign and because CEO Don Blankenship was willing to spend vast amounts of money to influence elections. … If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

And that's a lesson for all of us. Corporations are sociopaths. If they can make money by killing people, they will. And if elections depend on corporate money, governments will let them.

The failed Rapture prediction triggered two Interesting articles: When Prophecy Fails in Slate and Rapture-Ready: the Science of Self-Delusion in Mother Jones.

Summary: Rationalization has great power to resolve contradictions of all sorts, and religious people aren't the only ones who use it.

While the media has been focused on the antics of Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, President Obama has given substantive and informative speeches on immigration reform and the Middle East and education.

Out of this, only one line drew national attention: "We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps." The furor over this -- MIke Huckabee said "The President of United States betrayed Israel" and many other Republicans expressed similar feelings -- is a little mysterious. When has a U.S. president said anything significantly different?

In the spirit of Emma Goldman ("If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution"), here are the biting-but-entertaining political videos of the week: John LIthgow performs a Newt Gingrich press release, a hippyish chorus on a hillside reminds us that the issue with the Koch brothers is "the evil thing", and George (Sulu) Takei offering his name to counter Tennessee's new don't-say-gay law. Also, WhoWhatWhy recalls the classic George Carlin "I'm a Modern Man" routine.

The Onion News Network reveals that Facebook is actually a very efficient CIA program.

BTW, the don't-say-gay bill got watered down before it passed. Now it's only prepared materials that can't mention homosexuality; teachers can still answer questions about it. [Full -- and proud -- disclosure: My nephew Mike Stephens interned for State Senator Andy Berke, who is quoted criticizing the bill.]

Media Matters totals up the partisan split of Meet the Press guests, going back to the Clinton years. Conclusion: When Democrats control the White House, MTP splits its guests almost evenly between the two parties. Under Republican administrations, Republicans get a 60/40 advantage.

Ask yourself: Which failed presidential candidate have you seen more often on national networks: John Kerry or John McCain?

I just shook my head sadly during the John Edwards debacle, so I'm going to similarly restrain my reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We'll have plenty of time to discuss their sex scandals if either of them runs for office again. And if they don't, I don't care.

On his NYT blog, college professor Stanley Fish comments on the deals Florida State has made with the Koch brothers and BB&T, which I wrote about last week.

Is the [Koch] foundation funding the study of free-market economics — a perfectly respectable academic subject — or is it mandating that free-market economics be promoted in the classroom? Is it a gift intended to stimulate research the conclusions of which can not be known in advance, or is it a gift intended to amplify a conclusion — free-market economics is good; regulation is bad — the philanthropists have already reached and want to broadcast using Florida State University as a megaphone?
… If, in the judgment of an instructor, “Atlas Shrugged” will contribute to a student’s understanding of a course’s subject, there is every reason to assign it. But if assigning “Atlas Shrugged” is the price for the receiving of monies and the university pays that price, it has indeed sold its soul.

It was fun to watch Jon Stewart debate Bill O'Reilly about the Fox-promoted, scary-black-guy controversy over the rapper Common (seen here with his monstrous friend Elmo). But I wonder if Stewart lost just by showing up, because his appearance helped Fox keep the story hot.

Remember 2005, when the Democratic minority had just enough Senate votes to filibuster judges nominated by a Republican president? The Republicans threatened the "nuclear option" -- eliminating the filibuster -- until a bipartisan "Gang of 14" rode to the rescue with a compromise under which only "extraordinary circumstances" would justify a judicial-nomination filibuster.

As a result, centrist Democrats did not support a filibuster of the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, who turned out to be the deciding vote in Citizens United. (Justice O'Connor, the Reagan-appointed judge Alito replaced, has said that she still supports the decision that CU overturned.)

Well, now the Republicans have a Senate minority and a Democratic president is nominating judges, so of course that agreement is toast. Dahlia Lithwick assembles all the that-was-then-this-is-now hypocrisy.

A church-funded study of sexual abuse by Catholic priests attributes the scandal to the social turmoil of the 60s and 70s. The NYT refers to this as the "blame Woodstock" theory.

I agree with Matt Yglesias: It's fine if you want to make the case that a government program isn't working or costs too much. But once you have an arbitrary spending cap, what ends up mattering is the political clout of the beneficiaries, not the effectiveness of the programs.

This is why I get a chill in my bones any time I hear discussion of “caps” on federal spending. … Capping things is code for “let’s keep all the spending that lobbyists love and make up the difference by slashing the incomes of poor people.”

Evidence: Even at a time when the deficit is supposedly Public Enemy #1 and Exxon's profits are at an all-time high, the Senate can't muster the votes to eliminate tax subsidies for the oil companies. Let's take the money out of Medicaid instead, or cut more Pell grants.

Lawrence O'Donnell relates the history of "starve the beast".

This Week's Challenge

Several high school and college students are regular Sift readers. What advice would you give them about preparing for the future economy?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Schoolroom Philosophy

2011-05-16T06:03:00.001-04:00

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

-- Abraham Lincoln

In this week's Sift:

Turning Marketshare into Mindshare. If no one trusts Lex Luthor but everyone trusts the University of Metropolis, there's an obvious deal to be made -- if U-Met is willing. Small wonder that in the real world, as the states stop funding their universities, special interests are stepping up to fill part of the gap -- in return for the opportunity to cloak their message in academic prestige and propagandize American students.
The Republican Field Takes Shape. Paul and Gingrich in, Huckabee out. And Romney can't escape the healthcare trap.
Short Notes. Florida outlaws sex. An FCC commissioner gets her legal payoff. Jon Stewart's un-Common takedown of Fox. Shakespeare or Batman? And more.
This Week's Challenge. Know any quotes that would look good at the top of a Sift?

Turning Marketshare into Mindshare

As states continue to slash their budgets, the headlines focus on cuts to K-12 education. And that makes sense, both because that's where the big money is and because just about everyone cares about some child who might be immediately affected by K-12 cuts. But budgets are also being slashed at the state universities, and in the long run that might just as important.

The trend. The new budget from Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, for example, cuts Penn State's money in half, reducing state funding to 8% of the university's budget. And this represents a long-term trend, not just a reaction to the current economic situation. In 1970, Penn State got 37% of its budget from the state.

Other states have seen similar trends. The University of California was tuition-free until 1971. But under Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget, student fees in the U of C system will surpass state funding for the first time ever.

The student perspective. Federal aid to students trying to pay these fees is also being cut. President Obama's budget proposal cuts Pell grants, and Rep. Ryan's Republican alternative cuts them even more.

As a result, the days when a young person could "work his way through college" -- making enough to live on while paying minimal fees at a state university -- are over. To go to college today, you need either well-to-do parents or the willingness to take on massive debt.

And while taking on debt may be a reasonable financial move if you're getting a high-market-value credential like an MBA or an MD, it's hard to imagine degrees in special education or social work ever paying off, no matter how valuable such careers might be to society. A law degree may still be a profitable investment if you're going to Wall Street or becoming a lobbyist. But if you're planning to fight for social justice, it isn't.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a talented young minority student from a bad neighborhood. College already seems like a huge risk; few people you know have attended and perhaps no one has graduated. Cynical voices tell you that the powers-that-be don't want to hire people like you anyway. Are you willing to saddle yourself with, say, $100K of debt on the off-chance you'll be the exception?

The social perspective. Raising the costs and risks of college hardens the boundaries between economic classes. Even as we maintain the appearance of a meritocracy, the well-to-do children get the training they need to "merit" professional-class careers, while less privileged children don't.

Devil's bargains. Universities see this problem too, and it motivates them to chase after money that doesn't come from students or governments. So they press their alumni harder for gifts and manage their endowment portfolios more aggressively -- sometimes taking risks they shouldn't.

They also work harder to commercialize their research, which undermines their mission. The whole point of universities was to replace the guild system of the Middle Ages, where all technical knowledge was a trade secret, with a Republic of Letters, which distributes knowledge freely.

But in order to profit from something you have to put up toll gates, because people who can access your knowledge freely won't pay you for it.

Trust for sale. The most insidiously tempting way to raise money is to quietly sell off the university's greatest assets: trust and intellectual respect. Lots of willing buyers have lots of money. If no one trusts Lex Luthor but everyone trusts the University of Metropolis, then the solution is obvious: LexCorp needs to pay U-Met to distribute its message.

That's happening. This week, two Florida State professors drew attention to a deal FSU made with the Koch Foundation -- with the conservative Koch brothers, in other words -- to fund two professorships in economics. In exchange for their money, the Kochs get veto power on hiring for the two positions. Naturally, Paul Krugman's students need not apply.

Florida State has also made a deal with BB&T, an ultra-conservative bank holding company, to fund a course on ethics and economics. That sounds innocuous, but by "ethics in economics" BB&T means teaching that free-market capitalism is moral and socialism is immoral. So the deal specifies that Atlas Shrugged be covered, whether the course's professor finds it worthy or not. BB&T has made similar deals with James Mason University and Guilford College. Meredith College rejected $420K of BB&T money to protect their academic freedom.

BB&T also funds professorships at Clemson's Institute for the Study of Capitalism. Among its other activities, CISC runs an undergraduate summer conference on Atlas Shrugged. From its web site, I see no sign that CISC's "studies of capitalism" include, say, Karl Marx. (My nephew graduated from Clemson Friday. He had to read Atlas Shrugged, and endured a class from a global-warming-denying professor. Fortunately, his liberal antibodies were up to the challenge.)

For $30 million donated to George Mason University, the Kochs got the Mercatus Center, which specializes in giving academic cover to politicians who want to gut government regulation.

What's new? Billionaires have a long history of funding American higher education. That's why universities bear names like Carnegie-Mellon, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. The University of Chicago -- where I got my Ph.D. -- is a Rockefeller project that he didn't bother to name after himself.

But something is different now. In the Gilded Age, the robber barons were buying their way into high society with their good works. Where a British financier might marry a cash-poor countess or otherwise induce the crown to give him a title, an American industrialist would build a library or save the local opera company from a financial crisis.

The best ticket into high society was a project with high name recognition, but none of the taints of filthy lucre. Hence the robber-baron universities have high academic standards and a great deal of independence.

Today those forces are reversed; money is prestige. So billionaires like the Kochs have no interest in high society, and they use their foundations to gain hidden influence rather than to build their names.

Propaganda U. Imagine being an impressionable young student at University of Alabama/Huntsville, and wandering into this talk at the College of Business. It's a Koch-funded professor from CISC and the Mercatus Center speaking in a Koch-funded lecture series. Are you being educated or indoctrinated? It's one thing to run into a politically motivated professor, but it is quite another to have professors who were hired by special interests to promote views beneficial to those interests.

As public funds for higher education dry up, that is going to become more and more typical. Right-wing political indoctrination will be the price students pay to get an affordable college education, in the same way that they sit through McDonalds ads to watch television.

Worse in the long run is that society is losing a platform for disinterested research, and a source of expertise that can challenge the "experts" manufactured by corporate PR departments. Decades ago, when doctors from the Tobacco Institute told us that the smoking-cancer connection was unproven, we knew what was going on. But how many people today realize they are getting energy-industry propaganda when a talking head from "the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" appears on their TV? And how many Mercatus Centers does it take to discredit all academic voices?

Democracy only works when the electorate has access to high-quality information, and has some way to verify the trustworthiness of the experts it listens to. Otherwise it's garbage-in/garbage-out. David Mindich put it best: "Government supported by an uninformed citizenry is not a democracy; it is a sham."

If you're wondering what "ethics in economics" Atlas Shrugged promotes, it's a lot like what Rand Paul was saying Wednesday:

With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.

Atlas Shrugged is filled with speeches like that. Yeah, doctors in socialized-medicine countries like Canada are just like field slaves in the antebellum South. It's exactly the same thing, morally speaking.

I don't need to take Paul's statement apart, because Lawrence O'Donnell already did.

A California school board has ordered that high-school science classes be "politically balanced" when they tackle issues like global warming. In other words: the science has to be balanced with oil-company propaganda.

Wonder what those upbeat Exxon ads are about? Hydrofracking.

A global-warming-denying think tank recently announced that 900 peer-reviewed papers shared their skepticism. Are those 900 independent looks at the topic? Not exactly.

The Carbon Brief blog took a closer look: Ten authors account for 186 of those papers. Nine of the ten "have links to organisations funded by Exxon-Mobil, and the tenth has co-authored several papers with Exxon-funded contributors."

For example, 67 of the papers were authored or co-authored by one person: Sherwood Idso, president the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which receives support from Exxon-Mobil and has even closer ties to the Western Fuels Association.

The Republican Field Takes Shape

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are in. Mike Huckabee is out. Mitt Romney still has no solution to the health-care problem that will kill him in the primaries. The Trump balloon is whizzing around erratically as it loses air.

By the time we reach the Iowa caucuses, we'll see a fading Romney candidacy, one other governor or ex-governor (Daniels, Pawlenty, or Huntsman) trying to pick up Romney's "reasonable conservative" mantle, Gingrich, a religious right candidate (I think Bachmann), and Paul.

President Obama should be sighing with relief.

Huckabee. Huckabee was the only Republican I could imagine both getting nominated and winning in November. His views are as nutty as Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, but he looks and sounds much more reasonable when he talks about them.

Huckabee's announcement was a little strange. He denied all the practical reasons for not running: He could raise money, get support outside the South, his family was OK with running, and so on. "All the factors say go," he said, "but my heart says no." Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I can't help thinking there's something we don't know: a health problem, a family problem, a skeleton that might escape the closet -- something.

The interesting question is where the religious right goes now. I still think Palin won't run and they'll wind up with Bachmann.

Paul. Ron Paul is 75, would legalize heroin, and still thinks it was a bad idea to force bars and restaurants to serve blacks back in the Sixties. About 10% of the country thinks he's wonderful, but probably not that many more would vote for him in a general election after a campaign made his views clear. His support will seem formidable as long as the primary vote is split many ways, but (as in 2008) he will not pick up supporters from the candidates who drop out.

Romney. The health-care speech Mitt Romney gave in Michigan Thursday -- in which he tried once again to explain how his Massachusetts health-care plan can be good while Obama's nearly identical national plan is bad -- exemplifies why I expect the wheels to come off his candidacy.

The only convincing case for Mitt becoming president builds on the "compassionate conservative" theme Bush ran on in 2000: Romney can work with reasonable Democrats to achieve compassionate goals through market-oriented mechanisms that don't scuttle conservative principles.

The Massachusetts' health-care plan is what makes that case. Romney could build on that success with other market-oriented solutions to real problems, like a cap-and-trade system to control global warming.

But now you see his dilemma: Because Obama has occupied the lane that Romney would naturally run in, Republicans now consider Romney's natural message to be radical Marxism. Without that message and record, Mitt is just a well-financed guy who looks presidential and has high name recognition. That will get you good poll numbers when the election is far away, but it won't win anything.

BTW, Romney's health-care speech was pathetic. Unable to make his best case -- that RomneyCare is such a great idea Obama had to steal it -- he is stuck repeating boilerplate Republican health-care proposals: limit malpractice awards, allow interstate insurance competition, give individuals the same health-insurance tax incentives that businesses have, and so on.

That all does zilch to cover the 50 million uninsured Americans. The CBO ran the numbers when congressional Republicans proposed a similar plan in 2009. It concluded that after 10 years, the Republican plan would cover a whopping 3 million of the uninsured, but due to factors like population growth the total number of uninsured would not change.

Gingrich. Digby says Newt "puts disparate pieces of new age futurism in service of wingnut goals." He should use that as a slogan.

And she puts the "liberal media" on notice:

I'll be expecting the NY Times to treat his sex life with the same interest they treated Hillary Clinton's when she ran in 2008. Do he and his wife sleep together in the same bed? Are there any rumors about him cheating? (After all, it wouldn't be the first time.) The Times felt it was newsworthy for Clinton, it should certainly be newsworthy for Newt.

The Nation assembles The Eleven Craziest things New Gingrich Has Ever Said. #1 is Newt's dystopian vision of a future in which a "secular atheist" America is "dominated by radical Islamists". Whenever I meet a radical-Islamist-secular-atheist, I shiver in horror.

Short Notes

The Southern Fried Science blog points out the hazards of electing no-nothings to represent you. Because Florida legislators don't realize that humans are part of the animal kingdom, their anti-bestiality law accidentally bans sex in general.

Here's how our system works: In January, FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker was on the winning end of the 4-1 vote that OK'd the Comcast/NBC Universal merger. Wednesday, she took a job as "senior vice president for government affairs" -- top lobbyist, in other words -- for the NBC Universal division of Comcast.

Under the administration's get-tough rules against such revolving-door deals, she will not be able to lobby the FCC itself for two years. I'm sure that diminishes her future value to Comcast, but future value is not what the public should be concerned about. Her diminished future value makes it all the more obvious that she's being rewarded for her past value to Comcast, for the work she did as an FCC commissioner. But as long as there's no smoking-gun evidence of such a deal -- no signed contract, no taped conversation -- it's all completely legal.

It is not even a month since President Bush's FCC chair, Michael Powell (Colin's son), became the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, an industry lobbying group. Multichannel News described Powell as "a deregulatory chairman who focused on marketplace mechanisms to spread broadband via cable, telephone and even power lines." Translation: Even back then he was a friend of the people who pay him the big bucks now.

The Troubadour uses Gerald Stern's poem "Behaving Like a Jew" to explaining why, as a Jew, he feels compelled to support the rights of Palestinians.

Presbyterians are the most recent Protestant denomination to approve ordaining gay and lesbian ministers. The United Church of Christ, the largest synod of Lutherans, and the Episcopalians already do. The Methodists are still fighting about it. (My church -- the Unitarian Universalists -- has been doing it so long it's not even controversial any more. I've co-taught classes with both gay and lesbian ministers.)

The reason this fight is so bitter and intractable is that it depends on what you think the heart of Christianity is. If the heart of Christianity is tradition, gay ministers are anathema. If it's scripture, the issue is murkier. (Christians typically ignore Old Testament rules that aren't repeated in the New Testament, and the handful of supposedly anti-gay New Testament texts only make that point after a considerable amount of interpretation.) If it's a set of values, the highest of which is compassion, then you look at a long-persecuted group of people and ask why. Finding no reason beyond "we've always done it this way", you end the discrimination.

The staunchest anti-gay Christians are the ones who believe Christianity is a text interpreted by a tradition. They are almost never convinced to change their minds, but denominations change as the old guard dies off.

Did Shakespeare say that, or Batman? I'm proud of myself for getting 26 out of 30.

David Morris charts Ten Depressing Ways America is Exceptional.

Not sure how it took me 5 years to run across this: Al Franken's "Gospel of Supply Side Jesus".

John McCain may have reversed himself on a lot of other issues, but torture is where he gets stubborn. He's not letting the Bushies get away with claiming that torture led to Bin Laden.

The only reason to pay attention to Fox News' latest scary-black-guy story, the trumped-up controversy over the poet/rapper Common, is so that you can appreciate Jon Stewart's take-down of their deception and hypocrisy. Jon is pioneering an attitude we should all try: "This isn't even fun any more. I barely even get angry about this. I just feel sorry for you guys now."

This Week's Challenge

Do you think it's easy to come up with a new Sift quote every week? Help me out. Send a quote that would work well at the top of a Sift.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Surviving the Enemy

2011-05-09T12:58:00.001-04:00

There are those in our own country too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made. In the life of every nation, at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat, then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival on what is expedient, to look the other way. Only ... the answer to that is: Survival as what?

-- Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood,
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

In this week's Sift:

The Death of the Bogeyman. If you want to know how I feel about killing Osama bin Laden, you'll have to specify whether we're talking about the Saudi billionaire's son or the mythic Master of Evil.
The View From Peru. Hernando de Soto has long been the Right's favorite third-world economist. But I wonder how long that can last, now that he has started applying his theories to us instead of them.
Short Notes. Exporting democracy has caused a shortage. Maddow's amazing interview. The Daily Show's royal wedding coverage. A congressional candidate's entire web site gets spoofed. And more.
This Week's Challenge. Want to get a letter to the editor published? Here's how I do it.

The Death of the Bogeyman

Every now and then, a real person becomes a fictional character. It happens. A nice-looking girl named Norma Jean turns into the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe. Four guys from Liverpool become the greatest rock stars ever.

Some people say mythic or legendary instead of fictional, but it comes down to the same thing: Your real life gets swamped under the stories about you.

I'm told such people continue to be real, even after they turn fictional. But I can't say for sure. I assume you could have sat around the pool with Marilyn and worked on your tans together. It might still be possible to have Paul or Ringo over to play some Beatles Rock Band. But personally, the only rock stars or Hollywood goddesses I have ever known were fictional.

The only Osama bin Laden I ever knew was fictional too. Once, I'm told, he was just a rich kid from Saudi Arabia. But I never met that guy. Long ago he became the fictional Master of Evil, the God of Terror who stalked my country, the Bogeyman.

Now he's dead.

If you want to know how I feel about that, you'll have to specify whether we're talking about the Saudi rich kid or the Bogeyman. The real Saudi guy … well, I believe in human rights, and I suspect his DNA tests as human. So I would rather we had put him on trial, because that's the American way.

But like everybody else, I'm glad the Bogeyman is dead. How could I not be? Some of my friends found it unseemly to celebrate Bin Laden's death, but I didn't. The Death of the Bogeyman is one of the great old holidays. It doesn't get celebrated every year, like the Birth of the Savior does, but that's all the more reason to do it up right.

Just remember, though: The Bogeyman always reincarnates. I mean, Hitler died. So did Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot. Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam Hussein. Evil just kept right on rolling. President Bush pledged to "rid the world of evil-doers", but (short of annihilating the human race) that's not going to happen. The Bogeyman will reincarnate. Soon, probably.

Consequences. Eliminating the Bogeyman always has unexpected effects. Saddam's capture made the war harder for America, not easier. Until then, Iraqis worried that Saddam would come back if the U. S. failed. But with Saddam out of the picture, Iraqis could focus on a new question: Why is my country full of foreign infidels? The U.S. lost 486 soldiers in 2003, the year that ended in Saddam's capture. But we lost more than 800 soldiers every year from 2004 to 2007.

Many people are predicting a similarly perverse effect of bin Laden's death: Support for the Afghanistan War will dry up. So although President Obama has seen a medium-sized jump in his popularity this week, the pendulum could swing against him if he doesn't start extricating us from Afghanistan, especially if his 2012 opponent can promote a vague Nixon-like peace-with-honor plan.

Alternet's Adele Stan speculates that Bin Laden's killing in Abbottabad might further destabilize Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons.

The operational consequences for Al Qaeda are probably small. Communicating only by monthly courier, Bin Laden couldn't have been a hands-on leader. So his significance to Al Qaeda must also have been largely as a fictional character -- the Man America Can't Catch, maybe because Allah hides him. His death will mostly just hurt their recruitment and morale.

New Era? Personally, I hope Bin Laden's death marks the end of the nasty and dismal era that began with 9-11. I think we all feel the change, but no one knows quite what it means yet. We'll be arguing about it at least through the 2012 elections.

We have an opportunity now to re-open a lot of conversations: Guantanamo, torture, warrantless wiretaps, and the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. If we play our cards right, those things could join the Fugitive Slave Act, the Japanese internment, and mutually assured destruction as relics of the bad old days, when we were all crazy.

It can be a new era for the Muslim world as well. The revolutions of the last few months had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and Bin Laden posters were nowhere to be seen during the Cairo demonstrations. Bin Laden's big idea was that the dictatorships of the Middle East could not be toppled one-by-one as long as America stood behind them. His strategy was to go after America first, making us yank our hands out of the backs of our pseudo-Muslim puppets. That view seems irrelevant now.

No one can say exactly how things are going to play out in Egypt or Tunisia or Yemen or even Syria. But none of those stories fit into the Bush vs. Bin Laden narrative of the last decade. I never liked that narrative, so I have hopes for the new one.

I took this opportunity to review Terrorist Strategy 101: a Quiz, which was one of my first blog posts to get any attention. (It was on the front page of Daily Kos shortly after the 2004 elections.) While a few of the predictions are off-base, I think the logic holds up pretty well.

One of the stranger ideas to float around in right-wing circles is that we should have desecrated Bin Laden's body.

On the other side, some claim burial at sea is not in accordance with sharia, though others note various exceptions that might apply to Bin Laden.

BTW, I notice that Muslims say "sharia" or "Islamic law" while anti-Muslims say "sharia law". I don't know whether "sharia law' is one of those intentionally offensive phrases like "Democrat Party" or just a clueless redundancy like "Rio Grande River". If you know, comment on the blog or send me email.

A possible replacement Bogeyman is running into trouble. The Guardian reports:

Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

Witch trials -- it looks like the modernization of Iran has reached the 17th century.

Disinformation watch. Did torture produce the information that found Bin Laden? Nope, and nope, and again nope. Did the Dalai Lama really say that killing Bin Laden was OK? No, he didn't. Was Rush Limbaugh serious when he said, "Thank God for President Obama"? No, he wasn't.

On the Fox Business channel, waterboarding is a big joke.

Abbottabad turns out to fit perfectly into the Muppet Show theme song.

Jon Stewart's reaction: "Abbottabad sounds like the name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Bin Laden had been captured rather than killed, we'd be hearing about how wimpy Obama is. But now John Yoo says killing Bin Laden was wimpy -- Obama should have tortured him for intelligence.

I think Osama fantasized for a decade about staying true to Allah while being tortured for intelligence. For him, it would have been better than 72 virgins.

Some of the same people who thought Bush's mission-accomplished stunt was brilliant also think that Obama has "pounded his chest too much" about Bin Laden. Like gorillas do, I guess.

You'd think Obama would know: Black heroes are supposed to be humble like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, not uppity like Jack Johnson and Muhammed Ali.

The View From Peru

Once in a while, it helps to go outside the polarized American system of Left/Right, Republican/Democrat, and get a view from somebody who on occasion will either please or annoy either side -- like the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.

De Soto's book The Mystery of Capital is an icon among conservatives, because it outlines a capitalistic path for third-world development, one that focuses on establishing the rule of law and the transparency of markets. If you've ever said, "They don't need our money, they need to follow our example", then you're likely to be a de Soto fan. That's why he won prizes named after Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

But de Soto has one decided drawback as a right-wing hero: He really means it. De Soto-ism is not just a compassionate veneer to slap onto a policy of plutocratic class warfare. He really wants a legal/economic system that is lawful and transparent. What's more, he believes that the first world would do well to practice what it preaches to the third world.

So de Soto's view of the 2008 economic collapse is not likely to win him another Friedman award.

One basic idea runs through all de Soto's writings: Markets work well when everybody knows what they're buying and selling, but they work badly when doubts creep in. (Maybe what you're buying doesn't really exist, maybe the guy selling it to you doesn't really own it, maybe owning the thing entails drawbacks and restrictions you don't know about, and so on.) When there is no trustworthy way to dispel such doubts, even an honest seller can't get what his property is worth. And sometimes doubt gets so extreme that the market just breaks down, the way credit markets broke down in 2008.

When he looks at third-world poverty through this lens (in The Mystery of Capital), de Soto sees that a lot of the urban poor are not destitute, but everything they own or control is either off the books or otherwise ambiguous. They can use it, but they can't take it to a bank and get a loan. So they can't start family businesses or send their kids to college, or do any of the other things that people with recognized property do. De Soto wants to get poor people's unofficial property into a lawful transparent system, so that they can use it as capital.

But when he turns that lens to the 2008 financial collapse, de Soto sees that the first world had the kind of system he wants for Latin American, until we threw it away by de-regulating.

It is the business of government, de Soto argues, to create and enforce standards that allow people to know what they're buying. The great achievement of the West was the creation of "public memory systems" that standardized and kept track of who owned what, who owed what, and who was responsible for what risks. These systems replaced informal relationships and handshake commitments with publicly verifiable facts.

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. … The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for "trust") continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted.

… When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the "troubled assets" held by the world's financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived. Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.

De Soto understands that there is no "free" market, if by free we mean unregulated. Markets are created by regulation.

Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government's role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind's greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.

To avoid another 2008 collapse, he argues, we need to re-regulate finance. Governments should standardize and keep records on all the new financial instruments, and insist on accounting standards that make corporate risks transparent again. Otherwise, how can investors know whether they are buying a piece of the next AIG?

And if they can't know, why will they invest at all?

Short Notes

April's best satire. Exporting Democracy Has Led to Shortages of it in U.S., Expert Say.

a new study commissioned by the University of Minnesota ... predicts that if the U.S. continues to export democracy at its current pace it may completely run out of it at home by the year 2015.

House Speaker Boehner recommends we deal with the shortage by exploring "alternative forms of government, such as oligarchy or plutocracy."

Friday Rachel Maddow did one of the most powerful TV interviews I've ever seen: As the NRA convention was happening downtown, she got a driving tour of PIttsburgh's gun-infested Homewood neighborhood from its councilman, Rev. Ricky Burgess.

Earlier on the same show, she used quotes from the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina to make an important point that no one else is making so clearly: The party's libertarian small-government rhetoric doesn't match its meddling big-government social policies -- exemplified by a new Florida law about how low students can wear their pants.

Tuesday she was on Jon Stewart's show.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, Tuesday's show also had his royal wedding coverage. The royal family banned satire and comedy shows from using the news footage -- which they can do in the UK. Jon decided not to take that lying down.

In 2007, the possible presidential candidates who were making appearances in early primary states went ahead to run, while the ones who weren't, didn't. Using that criterion, Nate Silver says:

the 2012 Republican field is far more defined than most people think, with Mr. Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Mr. Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Mr. Romney as likely’s and Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Trump and Mr. Paul as maybe’s.

According to Frank Lunz's focus group, the big winner of Thursday's debate was Godfather's Pizza founder Herman Cain -- despite the fact that he doesn't have an Afghanistan policy and doesn't expect to have one until he takes office.

The first rule of political web design has to be: Get control of all the URLs for your candidate's name. Republican congressional candidate Jane Corwin must have missed that class. Her web site is JaneCorwin.com, and a devastating parody (with all the same photos -- you have to see it) is now at JaneCorwin.org.

She says: "Together we can build a bright future that is lit with prosperity and opportunity." The parody says: "Together we can make delicious soup from the bones of the poor."

Can't decide which baseball team to root for? Follow this flow chart.

This Week's Challenge

If you ever think about writing a letter to the editor, try it this week. If you send one in, feel free to leave the text as a comment at the Sift. If you get published, leave another comment with the link.

Thursday, I published this letter in my local paper, the Nashua Telegraph. Over the last 30 years, I've published a lot of letters, in everything from the NYT and Time to one of those free papers for shoppers.

Here are my tips for getting a letter published.

Don't ramble. Pick one point and make it.
Shorter is better. The more prestigious the newspaper, the shorter letters need to be (unless you're famous). My letter to the Telegraph would have been way too long for a major big-city paper.
Personalize. How does your experience give you unique insight? In my letter, I take advantage of the fact that I would be one of the last people to qualify for Medicare under the Paul Ryan plan. So I wonder: What if someday I'm the last Medicare recipient alive? Will they keep the program running just for me? Probably not.
Localize. Newspapers want their letters column to be a back-and-forth forum for their readers, not a megaphone for outsiders making nationalized arguments. So, for example, my letter blames the Medicare privatization plan on New Hampshire's two representatives, who voted for it, rather than Wisconsin's Ryan, who wrote it.
Be topical. In a major newspaper, you just about have to be responding to a specific article published in the last few days. (Name it!) In a lesser paper, you can get away with a topic that is "up" in a more general way. If you're stuck for a topic, try relating tax cuts for the rich to program cuts for the needy. Some recent article is bound to be relevant.
Don't be ashamed to aim low. When you've got your letter sharpened as far as it will go, you've got a judgment to make. Remember: Getting printed by a free weekly with 100 readers is better than not getting printed by the Wall Street Journal. (Telegraph circulation: around 27,000 -- a lot more than the zero NYT readers who would have seen my letter.)
Follow instructions. Every paper tells you what it wants to see on its letters. (Daytime phone number so they can call to verify that you wrote it?) Give it to them.

If your letter doesn't get printed, don't get discouraged -- it still gets counted. Sheer numbers will push a paper to print more letters on a topic. So if you see another letter making a point similar to yours, you may have helped get that one printed.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

Justified By Other Factors

2011-05-02T14:03:00.001-04:00

Due to prevailing norms of equality, most Whites attempt to avoid appearing biased in their evaluations of Blacks. … As a consequence, White prejudice is more likely to be expressed in discriminatory responses when these actions can be justified by other factors.

-- quoted in The USA Today
from "Evaluations of presidential performance: Race, prejudice, and perceptions of Americanism"
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

In this week's Sift:

Born in the USA. With the release of his long-form birth certificate, President Obama proved once again something that no one had any reason to doubt in the first place. The interesting question is: Why did he have to?
The Transformation of John Yoo. At precisely the moment when the White House passed from Bush to Obama, John Yoo discovered that the Constitution limits presidential power.
Short Notes. Bin Laden. Guantanamo. Atlas Shrugged tanks. Keith is coming back. The facts defeat a climate-denier. The WalMart business model creates a bad climate for WalMart. And more.
This Week's Challenge. Tell me what I should be reading.

Born in the USA

Every story about President Obama releasing his birth certificate should start with this: There was never any reason to be suspicious about Barack Obama's birth in the first place.

Now that it is out, the President's long-form birth certificate agrees in every particular with the shorter certificate that he put on the internet during the campaign, and with every claim Obama has made about his birth. There was never any reason to suspect it wouldn't.

Why not sooner? If you don't start there, then you quickly fall into the next trap: Why didn't Obama release his long-form birth certificate a long time ago? As the DumpTheDemocrats blog put it:

Perhaps the long delay in providing the longform certificate was to propagate and keep these folks in the foreground by allowing for just enough honest doubt to keep the thing going.

See? It's his fault. Obama wanted Republicans to spread vicious rumors and make stupid accusations against him so that they would look vicious and stupid. (Karl Rove opined: "The president himself has hoped Republicans would continue to talk about it, thereby damaging their own credibility.") He made them do it by only releasing one document to refute their baseless claims and holding back another one. See?

But everything looks different after you recognize that there was no "honest doubt", because there was no honest question to begin with.

By law and tradition, candidates for public office are expected provide certain information. Beyond that, and absent any legitimately incriminating evidence, their privacy needs to be protected from fishing expeditions. Consider this analogy: If your prints are on the murder weapon, it looks suspicious if you have no alibi. But if you have no connection to the case at all, no one should even ask you.

The McCain comparison. An interesting borderline example was that of John McCain's medical records. Typically, a healthy-looking candidate is presumed to be healthy; a simple thumbs-up from a doctor is sufficient. But McCain would have been older than any first-term president ever. Plus, he was a cancer survivor, and being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton probably didn't do his longevity any good either. Nastier rumors raised questions about psychological scars.

In response, McCain did not post his complete medical file on the internet. Instead, he released a 5-page report from his doctors (not discussing psychological issues), and allowed "select members of the media" to examine the larger file for three hours, without making any copies.

Subsequently, McCain's medical records did not become an issue in the fall campaign, and he didn't reveal any more detail. So we still don't know whether, say, McCain was ever treated for the clap when he was a young Navy pilot. We shouldn't know. It's not our business.

But given that there was much less reason (zero reason, to be exact) to wonder about the circumstances of Obama's birth, why was he held to a higher standard?

What's he hiding? The if-you-have-nothing-to-hide argument says that an innocent public figure would release everything anyone might ask for. The problem is that everyone has something to hide. That's what privacy means.

Even if you have never broken the law, committed adultery, or burned ants with a magnifying glass, there is bound to be something you hope never enters the public record. For example, it is neither illegal nor shameful for married people to have sex with each other. But most of us don't want a complete record of where, when, and how to appear in the newspaper.

If you are obliged to deny false reports, then your non-denial confirms true reports. So I am not going to publish a list of the drugs I have not taken, the diseases I have not had, or the people I have not slept with. You shouldn't either, and neither should Barack Obama.

But if Obama has to publish his birth certificate in response to baseless speculation, then why not his student records? (Trump is already asking.) Don't we have a right to know whether he was ever caught smoking in the boy's room or making out behind the bleachers? How often did he skip class? And if he balks at releasing those files, doesn't that prove they contain something embarrassing? What's he hiding?

The comparable case here is George W. Bush and cocaine. He never denied the rumors, and yet his non-denial never festered the way the birth-certificate issue has. Why not?

Why Obama? Politico offers a benign explanation for the unprecedented aspects of the birther issue: We're in "a new era of innuendo" in which there is "no referee — and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy."

Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama’s most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.

… It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

Politico blames "the decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms" -- and not anything personal about Obama. He's just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If that's true, then the next white Republican president will suffer even worse. Anonymous Democrats will make up some baseless story about, say, President Romney. (Maybe he has a bigamous second family somewhere. Mormons do that, right?) They'll flog it in viral emails, elected Democrats will wink-and-nod about Romney having only one family "as far as I know" while wondering "why he doesn't resolve all this" (with, say, a paternity test). When about a quarter of the population starts to credit the story, Romney will finally give an independent laboratory a lock of his hair.

Does anybody really expect that? I think it's absurd.

In 1999, some predicted that President Clinton's troubles represented a new era of impeachment. The next Republican president would really have to be on his toes, because Democrats would be out for blood.

Instead, Clinton's ordeal protected Bush. ("We don't want to go through all that again, do we?") Bush has confessed to ordering warrantless wiretaps and the torture of prisoners, either of which should have been impeachable (and are indictable now). But nothing happened.

No new era.

Double standards. As I see it, two things are going on: First, conservatives have -- and liberals lack -- both the will and the media machinery to create scandals out of nothing. (The closest conservative-victim parallel I can find is the Sarah-isn't-Trig's-mom theory, which even people as liberal as I am think is weird. No wink. No nod. It's just weird.)

Second, the submerged racism of the American public makes it easy to raise baseless suspicions about blacks. When the two come together, you get ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, Van Jones, the attempted smear of Shirley Sherrod, and birtherism.

Republicans bristle at the charge that race plays any role in their thinking, but how else can the pattern be explained? An NYT editorial stated the obvious:

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

The University of Delaware's Eric Hehman constructed a study (quoted at the top) to see if implicit racial prejudice (which can be measured like this) was related to suspicion of President Obama's "Americanism". To rule out simple political bias, attitudes towards Obama were compared to attitudes toward a closely related white politician: Vice President Biden. Conclusion:

higher prejudice predicted Whites seeing Obama as less American, which, in turn, predicted lower evaluations of his performance.

No evidence was required to start the snowball of suspicion rolling, because to many white Americans, blacks are inherently suspect.

The whole episode reminds Goldie Taylor of how her grandfather spent 21 days in a St. Louis jail for being black without carrying ID.

Tom Tomorrow has it nailed.

Slate gives a timeline of the birther conspiracy theory.

Stephen Colbert: "I'm just glad we can finally put to rest the crazy, fringe idea that this will end the controversy."

The Transformation of John Yoo

Of all the extraordinary things that happened the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, surely none was more remarkable than this: At precisely noon, Republicans by the thousands and tens of thousands discovered that America has a Constitution limiting presidential power.

And of all those instantaneous conversions, surely none was more wondrous than that of John Yoo. Someday I expect Yoo's Inauguration Day vision of the Constitution to be memorialized in great art, like St. Paul seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus, or the cross of Christ appearing in the sky above the Emperor Constantine.

Pre-inauguration, Yoo's writings (mostly memos for the powerful Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department) did not hint at any limits on the president's prerogatives. President Bush, according to Yoo, could imprison people indefinitely on his own say-so. He could order them tortured, and if that violated the Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, no problem -- the president could implicitly abrogate a treaty just by disobeying it, without notifying either the other countries that signed the treaty or the Senate that ratified it.

Questioners tried in vain to get Yoo to identify anything the president could not do. Not only could the president torture a suspected terrorist, he could crush the testicles of the suspect's child. When asked whether the president could order a suspect to be buried alive, Yoo replied only that an American president wouldn't "feel it necessary to order that".

Since Inauguration Day, though, Yoo has been a changed man. He may not have publicly repented or recanted any of the positions he took during the Bush years, but Yoo has frequently challenged President Obama for overstepping his constitutional powers.

Yoo's latest broadside came in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, and denounced this dictatorial outrage: Obama wants to require government contractors to reveal their political contributions.

Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, corporations have been able to spend unlimited amounts of money advertising for or against elected officials. They can even hide their contributions by funneling them through front organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity. The Supreme Court's ruling mentioned the possibility of requiring disclosure by law, but a Republican filibuster blocked such a law in the Senate. Now, by executive order, Obama wants to impose a similar requirement at least on companies that do business with the federal government.

So suppose Congressman Smith earmarks money to build a road, and then Americans for Safe Transportation spends massively to smear Smith's opponent. Obama's order might allow the people of Smith's district to learn (in case they're interested) that the money for the smear ultimately came from the contractors who built the road.

Not so fast, Tyrant. John Yoo won't let you ignore the rights of oppressed corporations and their victimized CEOs.

If Obama's order were carried out, people might start taking economic revenge on corporations they disagree with. If, say, you knew that Target was spending money to take away your rights, you might not shop there. And that would inhibit Target's right to speak freely under Yoo's newly-discovered Constitution -- which requires that corporate political speech not only be as free and as loud as possible, but that it should have no adverse consequences to the corporation.

By contrast, Obama's executive order threatens to move us out of the ranks of normal child-testicle-crushing countries and make us like Nazi Germany or something.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Yoo didn't really change at all. You suspect he still believes in the power of Republican presidents to do the kinds of things Republicans want to do. Yoo's Constitution only restricts Democratic presidents from doing the kinds of things Democrats want to do.

That's a pretty cynical view, and I don't blame Yoo for refusing to address it. What's more, I don't think there's any way to make him address it -- short of maybe having him buried alive or something. And to his credit, President Obama hasn't felt it necessary to order that.

I confess to a small bit of poetic license: Yoo's conversion actually happened sometime between the election and the inauguration. Two weeks prior to Obama's inauguration, Yoo was already marking the proper limits of his power.

If you're a TV talking head and find yourself onscreen with Yoo, try this line: "John, why don't we continue this conversation in The Hague?"

Short Notes

Unless you live under a rock, you already know that Osama bin Laden is dead, killed in Pakistan by a Navy Seal attack on what an administration spokesman described as "a secured compound in an affluent suburb of Islamabad".

At first I wondered why the Navy so quickly buried him at sea, but Time explains: In accordance with Islamic practice, the body was disposed of within 24 hours. No country had stepped up to claim Bin Laden, and the US did not want anyone turning his burial site into a shrine.

Of all the reactions, this one is my favorite.

WikiLeaks strikes again with Guantanamo-related documents. I'll say more about this next week. Meanwhile, the best analysis is by Marcy Wheeler, starting here.

Keith Olbermann is returning to TV. His hour-long "Countdown" show will begin on Current TV on June 20.

The NYT editorializes on Republican-sponsored bills that make it harder to vote:

Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.

Overwhelmingly, the people who will now have to bring their birth certificates to government offices belong to groups that tend to vote Democratic: the young, the poor, the disabled, the non-white.

If you live in Texas and don't have your birth certificate handy, don't worry; your gun license will do. But your University of Texas ID won't.

The free market has rejected the Atlas Shrugged movie.

Defenders of California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 want Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling against the law vacated because Judge Walker is gay:

Prop. 8 supporters are specifically arguing that Walker's acknowledged long-term relationship with a doctor should have been disclosed before the January 2010 trial because it would suggest he may have a personal interest in the right to marry.

Follow the logic through: If Prop 8 really does defend opposite-sex marriage, as its backers claim, then doesn't a heterosexual judge also have a personal interest? Perhaps this case should be referred to a special judiciary of eunuchs.

Dahlia Lithwick stands on principle: Even a bigoted piece of crap like the Defense of Marriage Act deserves a good defense. King & Spalding may not be Atticus Finch, but nobody should have pressured them to give up the case.

Get out your crying towels: WalMart has had 7 straight quarters of declining sales. CEO Mike Duke complains that his shoppers are "running out of money".

BuzzLightyear235 explains why: Too many companies have adopted the WalMart business model, in which you pay Americans low wages to sell stuff made (for even lower wages) in China. When one company does that, it prospers. But when they all do it, who are they going to sell to?

Oklahoma's House just overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to ban affirmative action. The measure will now go to the voters.

You don't have to be racist to oppose affirmative action, but it helps.

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

"We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them."

Kern later apologized, sort of. She "misspoke" and was taken "out of context". (The context she provides does her no credit.) And while she explicitly walked back her statement that women don't work as hard as men (by saying "women are some of the hardest workers in the world") she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge that blacks work hard too. Instead, she used her membership in an inner-city church as evidence that she and her husband "love all people". Even the lazy, shiftless ones.

If more Americans read novels, they'd know how perfect this metaphor is: The Snow Crashing of America.

A former climate-change denier admits that he has been "defeated by the facts".

This Week's Challenge

The main thing I do on the Sift is read stuff the average person doesn't have time for, and call it to your attention if it's particularly good or important. Help me do that: Tell me what blogs or web sites I don't seem to know about, but should.

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