Erin Jenne

The Rich Deserve our Compassion and Lovingkindness

2012-02-11T05:59:00.000-08:00

You may think there is little to like or admire about multi-millionaires and billionaires who live their lives like medieval kings while insisting that single mothers working three jobs to shelter, clothe and feed their kids actually have it pretty good. After all, America’s poorest have such luxuries as refrigerators and cell phones, so what do they have to complain about?

The rich also don’t win popularity points for complaining that their corporate income taxes are far too high, and that if taxes are raised on them, they just might move their businesses and families overseas…or hunker down and refuse to invest altogether (presumably because taxes discourage investing, but maybe just to spite you, John Galt-style). Goldman Sachs CEO, Cooperman, stated after having received a massive taxpayer bailout in the form of TARP and low-interest loans from the Fed, sniffed: “You will get more out of me if you treat me with respect.” The message: It’s not enough to shower these guys with dough; you’re gonna have to lick their boots as well.

The rich also seem to think they are made of better moral fiber than the poor. Mitt Romney “refused to apologise for his success” on the campaign trail, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed that he was doing “God’s work,” which may or may not include crashing the global financial system.

Of course, it must be said that not every wealthy person is an insensitive greedy jackass; many are generous and philanthropic and feel strongly that their taxes should be significantly increased (see Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Matt Damon, Birdman, Dr. Dre, etc.). Still, there are enough rich a-holes around (see Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, and many, many more) who think that their unbelievable good fortune comes from hard work and talent, in contrast to poor people who are of course lazy parasites, to give the rich a bad name. As Barry Switzer once famously said, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”

This impression that the super rich are überprivileged jerkwads is cemented by disconcertingly callous comments made by said rich people in the media. Hotel heiress Leona Helsmley once famously said, “We don’t pay taxes, only the little people pay taxes.” (This same woman, by the way, eventually left 12 million dollars in her will to her dog Trouble.) 2012 GOP frontrunner and quarter billionaire Mitt Romney more recently averred that talk of increasing income taxes on the rich was “class warfare” by those who were “envious” of the rich.

Then there is all the conspicuous consumption, which during time of economic hardship, seems beyond just a little tasteless. Such screw-the-poor extravagances include half-million dollar trust funds or life insurance policies for pets, which apparently extend to organic dinners and doggy massages. Also, as for travel, Gulfstream jets are just so 2007. Today’s gold standard are personal jumbo jets (most often Boeing 747s, which service roughly 300 commercial travellers, or Airbus A-380s, which can carry 800), retrofitted to meet the needs of one VIP billionaire; dozens have been sold to the hyper-rich, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, John Travolta, and The Donald.

(Pictured above is the interior of a VIP private Boeing 747.) One might also, as Beyonce and Jay-Z recently did, buy a $600,000 gold-plated rocking horse and a Swarovski crystal-encrusted highchair for one’s spawn.Then there are superyachts, which cost in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. Paul Allen's Superyacht, the Octopus, sported a beauty salon, pools, jet ski docks, two helicopters and two mini-submarines.

That’s right—you can have your own mini-submarine launched from your very own floating resort. Although many of the super rich are entrepreneurs and celebrities who arrived at their wealth honestly, some of this extravagance has been directly underwritten by the American taxpayer: after having blown obscene amounts of cash on hookers and blow during the subprime mortgage-backed securities boom, Wall Street executives managed to reap billions of dollars in fat bonuses courtesy taxpayer bailouts--just months after crashing the global financial system.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that people with ungodly amounts of cash have a tendency to be insensitive jackasses. So why do they deserve our compassion and lovingkindness?

It turns out that this behavior of the super wealthy may be pathological. What people of average means may not understand is that massive wealth goes to a person’s head and they start to resemble entitled asshats; here, it is easy to forget that, like alcoholics, it is the money talking/acting, and not the person. The überwealthy need our love and support to help them recognize and confront their psychological handicaps.

A growing body of research has in fact shown that people of considerable means are on average more anti-social than your average Joe. A recent series of psychological experiments concluded that:

"lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion."

Specifically, experiments were conducted showing that people of upper-class background were significantly less able to accurately read emotions on people’s faces and to read social cues. According to one of the authors,

"Upper-class people, in spite of all their advantages, suffer empathy deficits...And there are enormous consequences.” Among which, high-powered lawyers or chief executives--ill equipped to read the emotions of those they interact with--don’t tend to make for sympathetic bosses.

There may also be something to that image of the rich miser. In fact, studies have long shown that poor people are far more generous with their money than the rich. One study demonstrated that Americans making under 25K a year give on average 4.2 percent of their income to charity, whereas those making over 75K give away 2.7 percent.

What explains these class differences in humanity? Says one of the lead authors of the studies: Whereas lower-class people must rely on one another for help through life, “Upper class” tended to “prioritized their own need.” The upshot is that “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others.”

A casual review of the behavior of rich people in the media provides anecdotal support for this view. Romney, himself richer than God, once joked to a group of laid-off workers on the campaign trail that he, too, was also out of work. Haha…good one, Mitt. Then there was also his attempt to make a casual $10,000 bet with Rick Perry in the middle of one of the GOP debates, and his insistence that he wasn’t worried about the “very poor” because they have a social safety net. Now, Romney himself has a history of generous personal philanthropy, so I’m sure it isn’t true that he cares nothing for the poor. Nonetheless, it is just the sort of sort of jerky thing that would come out of the mouth of an obscenely wealthy person.

Many voters will remember that infamous scene in the midst of the early 1990s recession when President George H.W. Bush, then running for re-election, went to a grocery store and was flummoxed by the electronic checker. Seems that George, an heir of the Bush banking fortune, had been using a personal shopper…or seven. Then there is his son, W., who as president during the Iraq War that he himself started, delivered an unbelievably callous joke on a golf course. Upon glibly declaring war on all terrorists and states that sponsored terrorism around the world, he commanded the reporters in attendance: “Now watch this drive.”

Despite their sociopathic attitudes and their tendency to treat the rest of us like servants, I argue that the super rich are broken human beings who are pathologically out-of-touch with humanity and in need of our love and understanding. In fact, they are not innate a-holes. It turns out that wealth not only turns nice people into raging jerks, the reduction of personal wealth improves a person’s helpfulness, empathy and generosity. In short, it makes you a better person.

Based on the available evidence, the most compassionate help we could give these broken people is to relieve them of their more obscene levels of wealth.

Progressive taxation is chicken soup for the soul.

Merry Saturnalia...I Mean Christmas!

2011-12-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

Christmas is probably my favorite holiday. Sometime around the beginning of December, the world around me is transformed. Everywhere, there are lovely multicolor lights and ornaments, fragrant evergreen trees and boughs, spicy mulled wine, meats and pies and many other sumptuous Christmas goodies. There is incense in the air, and everything shimmers gold and silver and red and green--it is, simply, wonderful. And people everywhere (or most people, anyway) are in a mighty festive mood.

This is why the idiotic “war on Christmas” that Fox News rolls out like a right-wing “best-hits” album year after year is not just tedious and stupid, but also mean and stingy. What they seem to be saying is: if you do not accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, then (sorry) you can’t legitimately celebrate Christmas (no Christmas trees and presents and pudding for you, heathen!). The Fox News trolls are horrified and really OFFENDED if you even try to join in the reindeer games at all, sans baby Jesus lying in a manger. You better put Jesus Christ right back into Christmas, buster, or else!

It’s as if Christians have a patent on the Christmas tree and St. Nick and all of that. But just wait a hot second: Christians actually STOLE the holiday from the pagan festival of Saturnalia, which celebrated the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year—and the Persian sun god of Mithra whose birthday was on December 25, and... okay, maybe we should back up a bit.

For all of the mushy-headed Fox viewers out there who take the comical "war on Christmas" meme seriously enough to get worked up over, it is worth pointing out that what is now celebrated as the birthday of Jesus is actually an amalgam of traditions from a pantheon of pagan winter festivals that predate Christianity—after all, the Bible is silent on the date of Christ’s birth, and most biblical scholars place it in the springtime rather than the dead of winter. Further, early Christians had no tradition of celebrating Christ’s birth—either in winter or the spring.

That Christmas is an incoherent mush should be apparent from the weird collection of icons that are now widely associated with Christmas. What, in fact, connects Santa Claus and his reindeer with Christmas trees and baby Jesus? It’s an odd collection of traditions, you must admit, leading to some hilariously silly Christmas lore. For example, in some parts of Central Europe, Santa Claus and the devil (the terrifying Krampus in Alpine countries) arrive together on December 6 (not Christmas eve) to bring candy for good kids and gold-colored birth branches for bad kids. In some parts of German-speaking Europe, Baby Jesus Himself (the Christkind) brings presents on December 24.

The fact is that our Christmas traditions are a mix of pagan rituals from winter solstice festivals stretching from ancient Scandinavia to pre-Christian Rome, Persia and Greece. Why December 25? Because the ancients--with no understanding of the solar system and frightened about the disappearance of the sun and the death of plants and trees--worshiped sun Gods, believing that they had to appease these Gods in order for springtime and the sun (and the food that brings it) to come again.

For instance, the Norse pagan festival of Yule is likely the source of the Christmas tree. For ancient north Europeans, evergreen trees (maintaining life year-round) appeared to have mystical life-giving properties. So they brought evergreen boughs into their homes, later decorating them with silver and gold ornaments. The Yule log was burned through for 12 days after Christmas. These were later incorporated into the Christian celebration of the birth of their own sun God, Jesus, whose birthday was decreed to be December 25 by Pope Julius I in 350 AD. It is widely acknowledged that this date was chosen to compete with, and undermine the popularity of competing festivals by other sun God cults, including the Persian sun God of Mithra and the Roman God of Saturnalia, both on December 25. Also around this time were celebrations of the Mesopotamian God of Marduk's conquering of the forces of chaos and the Greek God of Zeus' renewed annual battle against the Kronos and the Titans.

The Roman festival of Saturnalia was the immediate progenitor of Christmas. For centuries, the Romans celebrated a weeks-long Bacchanalian festival of food, sex, wine and raucous behavior in honor of Saturn, the Roman God of agriculture. The aim was to appease Saturn in order ensure a good harvest for the coming year. Naked singers went from house to house, thus begetting the tradition of caroling. Meanwhile, the least favored citizens of the empire were forced to bring offerings to the emperor, thus the tradition of gift-giving. The celebration expanded from December 25 to a week, as the people of Rome engaged in wild sex orgies, naked drunkenness and random raping for the duration of the official holiday.

Santa Claus is the clearest example of amalgamated pagan solstice festival traditions (with a touch of 20^th century commercialism). Nicholas was the bishop of the town of Myra in Turkey in the 4^th century CE (and one of the senior conveners of the Council of Nicaea of 325 CE, which determined what would and would not be included in the Roman Bible). A cult emerged around his person as someone who brought gifts to the less fortunate residents of the city. Roman sailors brought the the cult to Italy, and it spread to the north where it was ultimately fused with the feared pagan God of Odin or Wodon—a wizened Norse God who rode his horse in the sky to keep watch on the activities of mortals below. The Catholic Church merged the Christian crusader myth of Nicholas with Wodon to make Christianity appealing to the Germanic pagans.

Thus, the gift-giving, reindeer-riding, North pole-dwelling St. Nicholas was born in the 19^th century. The image of the bright red and white coat came from a 1931 advertising campaign of the Coca Cola company, whose executives insisted on the red and white scheme of Santa, which they hoped would promote the Coca Cola product. Thus, the modern-day image and story of St. Nicholas.

Today, Christmas is literally celebrated around the world. Although the bulk of the celebrations are concentrated in Christian countries, Christmas is celebrated by non-Christians as well.

I took this picture last year during my winter break trip to Southeast Asia. This is a mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in the famous Petronas towers. I had never seen more elaborate Christmas decorations or more dedicated Christmas festivities. Although the country is nominally Muslim, Christmas is actually an official public holiday and celebrated by people everywhere with decorated trees, gift-giving and Santa hats.

If a Muslim (and Hindu and Buddhist and atheist) nation of people celebrates Christmas as a secular holiday, this shows that Christmas truly is, once again, a secular festival. Non-Christians have borrowed Christmas back from the Christians. Just as it should be.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Maybe Women Really Should be Running the World

2011-11-30T16:27:00.001-08:00

By now we’ve all heard the grim statistics suggesting that women are more robust than men. Males are more likely to die than females at every stage of life, including in utero; boys disproportionately suffer from autism and dyslexia and an assortment of behavioral disorders. They also have weaker immune systems, and are far more likely to die of heart disease and cancers that affect both men and women.

We’ve also heard the gloomy statistics testifying that men are falling behind and down vis-à-vis their female counterparts in the workplace. More than half of all college enrollees worldwide are now women; women dominate American colleges and professional schools, with three women for every two men who earn BAs. As of 2010, there are now more women than men in the American workforce, and of the fifteen job categories projected to grow in the 21^st Century, all but two of these are dominated by women.

Such trends suggest that women possess certain advantages in the job market as we move ever further into the post-industrial information age. Increasingly, the unionized blue collar jobs of the industrial sector that favor men have been replaced with white collar or service sector jobs that require multi-tasking, social intelligence, communication skills, diplomacy, teamwork—skill-sets disproportionately possessed by women. The relative advantages that women are coming to enjoy in the labor market grow ever more pronounced with declining gender discrimination and as more progressive family leave legislation give women greater opportunities to compete with men on an even playing field.

Women may also be better at running governments than men.

In repeated studies, women have been shown to have a lower tolerance for corruption: a cross-national statistical study has shown that women pay fewer bribes than men, and that the level of corruption in a country is lower when women have a greater share of parliamentary seats, high-level government positions, and make up a higher portion of the labor force. Another World Bank Report conducted analysis on 150 countries around the world, demonstrating that the higher the percentage of women in government, the less corrupt that government is likely to be.

A few countries (essentially wrecked by men) have tried the experiment of putting women in charge. Michael Lewis’ new book, Boomerang, describes the financialization of Iceland’s economy when the men of the country left their jobs in the fishing industry en masse to take up positions as bankers. As a result of their shenanigans, the country’s financial institutions were leveraged to the hilt, ultimately collapsing the currency and pushing the country into default when the main banks failed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Says Lewis:

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risk-taking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Pétursdóttir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy CEU for Kaupthing in London. ‘The financial culture is very male-dominated,’ she says. ‘The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.’”

Pétursdóttir left well before the meltdown and started a bank of her own “with feminine values.” According to Lewis, this is one of the few profitable financial insitutions remaining in Iceland. The male PM—widely reviled for failing to prevent the crisis, was also ousted—and the country voted in the female-dominated Social Democrats and Iceland’s first openly-gay female prime minister who campaigned on the promise to end the “age of testosterone.”

Elsewhere, women have played key roles in democratic transitions, postwar reconstruction, reintegrating combatants, and promoting ethnic reconciliation. Rwanda offers one of the starkest illustrations of the critical role of women in these processes. When the 1994 genocide wiped out 10 percent of the population, women became 70 percent of the country’s population, catapulting them for the first time into positions of leadership. Today, women are equally represented in the government and have headed up numerous reconstruction initiatives:

Quite simply, [women] are the majority constituency and the most productive segment of the population. Rwandan women play a vital role not only in the physical reconstruction, but also in the crucial task of social healing, reconciliation, and increasingly, governance.

Over the past decade, there have also been salient examples of women whistleblowers in government and business. This is particularly noteworthy given the relatively low percentage of women who occupy high-status positions in either field. The financial collapse of 2008 might have been prevented had Brooksley Born, the head of the Commidity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under the Clinton administration, won her battle against the combined forces of Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers to regulate the enormous financial derivatives market.

There was also FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, who testified before Congress about the agency’s failure to act effectively on intelligence that could have prevented 9/11. Sherron Watkins wrote the famous memo at Enron alerting Ken Lay to the corrupt accounting practices within the firm, and internal auditor Cynthia Cooper blew the whistle on similar shenanigans at Worldcom. Given that women make up a tiny portion of executives at major financial institutions (less than 5 percent), these individuals stand out all the more.

Women may even be better at running businesses than men. According to a recent Business Insider report, female-led companies are more financially sound, less risky, less prone to bankruptcy, and more likely to take care of their staff--laying off fewer employees during the most recent recession. Women also make better investors than men, earning more on average than men in the marketplace because they tend to be more risk-averse and less likely to trade on impulse.

Some have objected that these patterns ignore the possibility that women are shut out of old boys networks and therefore do not have the same opportunities to engage in graft or that women’s roles as caretakers in society have led them to adopt less risk-taking behavior. However, the fact remains that women tend to have a salutary effect on corporate and democratic governance. This suggests that increasing women’s participation in political and economic institutions is very likely to increase their transparency, accountability and efficiency—irrespective of whether the pro-social behaviors associated with women are rooted in social norms or evolutionary biology.

Before I am unfairly smeared as a man-hater, I wish to clarify that I am a big fan of men—some of my best friends are men and most of my role models are men. This is also not to say that all women have a salubrious effect on governance (see Katherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher), nor to overlook the examples of men who have sacrificed their own lives and private interests for the betterment of their societies (Nelson Mandela, Gandhi). It is merely a modest appeal to achieve a greater gender balance in the highest political and economic bodies around the world. Future generations of humans will thank us.

Is Mitt Romney a Christian?

2011-10-15T08:48:00.001-07:00

A question raised almost excluisively by conservative Christians, whether Mormons are also Christians is one that befuddles and even angers members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The question recently made its way into the GOP presidential debates, with Mormonism the faith of two of the current 2012 presidential contenders, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. I would argue that the question is as senseless as it is disingenuous. It is also entirely predictable, given the bigoted tendencies of the current GOP base.

Speaking in support of GOP Presidential Contender Rick Perry, Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress recently declared that

“I think Mitt Romney is a good, moral man...But I think those of us who are born-again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney.

In media follow-ups, GOP contenders Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain ducked the question of whether they thought Romney was a Christian, with Cain saying that “I believe they believe they’re Christians.” That Romney was not a Christian was openly insinuated by 2008 GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee.

The theological case for why Mormons are not Christian mostly boils down to the role of Jesus Christ in the Mormon cosmology. Mormons believe that Jesus is a separate person/God, distinct from God the Father. They also believe that both God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ were once mortal, just as we are today, and that in the afterlife (if we are worthy) we can eventually become Gods with our own worlds, populated with our own children. That is certainly a distinctive take on the New Testament and God’s plan for our salvation. Nevertheless, Mormons still accept the divinity of Jesus Christ and the critical role that his crucifixion played in the redemption of humankind. The Mormon Christ is the Christ of the New Testament, which they revere as sacred scripture.

Given all of this, it is hard to see why Mormons are so beyond the Christian pale, given that there is no unified cosmological view among the various Christian sects. Indeed, that is exactly why there are various Christian sects. Even the Catholic Church, the standard bearer of the Christian faith for millennia, has changed its view of the Trinity (among other things) over the centuries.

I argue that it is no more legitimate to ask whether Mormons are Christians than to ask whether any self-proclaimed Christian sect is Christian (as if there is some objective arbiter of what qualifies as Christian). Mormons are Christian after their fashion (unorthodox), just as any Christian church is Christian after their fashion. Whatever some Christians may believe about the right- or wrong-ness of Mormon doctrine, if a person identifies as a Christian and commits herself to following the teachings of Christ as set out in the Bible, that person has earned the right to call herself Christian. It is faintly outrageous to suggest that such a person isn’t really a Christian merely because the Mormon Christ is not consistent with one's own conception of Christ.

Refusing to acknowledge a person’s religious identity is a hostile act. And since Protestant Christianity is the dominant ethno-religious identity in contemporary American society, denying this label to other self-identified Christians is a way of policing the boundaries between the cultural dominant ethnic core of society and non-dominant ethno-religious groups in order to keep them marginalized. These out-groups and their unfamiliar, alien, and therefore hostile cultures are perceived as threatening to the national core and must be kept at a distance.

Besides being hostile, it is also fairly odd to question whether Mormons are Christians, given that Christ is central to all ceremonies in the Mormon Church and is routinely invoked in fasting and prayer. Every Mormon prayer concludes “…in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen”; baptisms are undertaken in the name of Christ, as is the weekly Sunday sacrament, where Mormons (like Catholics) bless and consume water and bread, which represent the body and blood of Christ. With this in mind, one might reasonably ask what Mormons have to do to prove to others that they are followers of Jesus Christ.

He is even in the Church’s name.

Called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints from its founding in 1830, the term “Mormons” was merely a slur invented by haters that ended up sticking. One would think that the name of the Church alone would serve as a reliable indicator of its orientation. Apparently not. Over the past several decades, the Mormon leadership therefore undertook a concerted effort to mainstream their image as a conservative Christian faith, emphasizing the strong family values in the Mormon Church as well as the centrality of Jesus Christ in their beliefs. They even redesigned the Church logo in order emphasize their Christian identity. Prior to 1995, at every Mormon meeting house, you could find the sign:

Church PR flaks later fiddled with the font to emphasize the Church's Christian identity:

The Church has made other PR overtures as well, for example, to get the media to refer to the entire name of the Church or by its abbreviation LDS rather than the more perjorative Mormon nickname (a futile effort, as it turned out). They renounced the doctrine of plural marriage (polygamy) in 1890 in return for Utah statehood because mainline Protestant activists didn’t like it; in 1978, in response to pressure by Civil Rights groups, the Church opened the priesthood to Mormon males of African descent (whom early Mormon doctrine had had banned from holding the priesthood). By the early 1990s, the Church had also excised the more cultish-seeming portions of the vows taken in temple ceremonies (including the marriage and sealing ceremonies) that had their roots in Masonic rites (Joseph Smith, the designer of these ceremonies, had been an enthusiastic a Free Mason).

Of course, what matters to many conservative Christians is the weirdness that announces Mormons as unbiblical and unsaved, possibly unholy or even Satanic. The Mormon doctrine that God was once a man is, for example, kryptonite to Evangelical Christians, who can barely tolerate such heresies. Secular Americans, on the other hand, mostly don’t give a crap, and that is what is rather funny about the whole thing. Mormons are like that kid in high school who tries to hang out with the popular kids (mainline conservative Christians), who make fun of him but tolerate him because he comes in handy for running errands (lobbying for a conservative agenda). When it comes down to it, though, the kid is unlikely to be chosen as Homecoming Queen or King.

In the end, this argument is not about abstract doctrinal subtleties, but about the fact that the Mormon Jesus does not resemble the Jesus of conservative (mostly Evangelical) Christians, therefore the Mormon Jesus is not Jesus at all, and Mormons are not Christians.

When Evangelicals question the Christian creed of Romney or Huntman, what they are basically saying is that Romney and Huntsman do not belong to the tribe. They may be better than the black Kenyan usurper currently in the White House, but they will always be vaguely suspicious to the Evangelical Christian base.

This is also, in a funny way, justice. For this is how many Mormons have treated Africans, feminists and gays. Many in the Mormon community view members of these groups as just as unfit for leading the country as do mainline conservative Christians, simply because of what they represent. Muslims and atheists are out of the question; their moral compass cannot be trusted, even if they (as individuals) have every appearance of moral rectitude. Since their fellow social conservatives have the same primordial method of selecting political leaders, it would make sense that Mormons (with a polygamous background and strongly differentiated cosmological beliefs) would be cast in the very same category of “Others” by their fellow GOP voters. Competing for the median bigot vote is a dangerous game when you yourself are not exactly a member of the tribe.

How Gay Marriage Hurts Conservative Christianity

2011-09-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

Gay marriage has finally arrived. The growing recognition and acceptance of this fact across all segments of society is evidenced in rapidly changing poll numbers that indicate skyrocketing support for full marriage equality for gays. Since 2001, ten countries have legalized same-sex marriage, including Canada, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Belgium, Iceland, Netherlands, and South Africa. Although same-sex marriage is not yet recognized in the United States at the federal level, six states now permit gay couples to marry (New Hampshire, Iowa, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts); numerous other states recognize the legal rights of gay couples that were married elsewhere. In general, gay rights are on the ascendant in America; attitudes on same-sex marriage are changing faster than any other social issue of our time.

Social liberals are heartened by these developments as a sign of growing societal progressiveness. At the same time, they are often bemused by conservative angst over gay rights, gay adoption, gay marriage—really the entire “gay agenda” that is “pushed” in our schools, government and now even our churches. What is all this Sturm und Drang over such a non-issue, liberals wonder? Even more than civil and women’s rights, legalizing gay marriage would seem to present a classic Pareto-improving solution, in which a new equilibrium (here, a legal norm) exists that would make at least one player (gays) better off while not leaving anyone (heteros) worse-off. After all, how can anyone reasonably argue that John and James’ homosexual marriage hurts Bill and Susan’s heterosexual marriage? And wouldn’t allowing gay people to marry do much to reduce the net amount of extra-marital fornication—something religious conservatives get very exercised over? Why, indeed, does it make any sense to support civil unions for gay people, but not marriage (Obama’s position as well as Romney’s—what actually is the big difference between the two?) If, as they claim, civil unions provide all the same benefits as marriage (they don’t), why not let gay people legally marry?

In sum, what is the big effing deal?

This post is aimed at social progressives rather than conservatives, since this is really only a puzzle for liberals who do not understand opposition to gay marriage. To liberals, blocking same-sex marriage appears to be little more than discrimination against out-groups while imposing traditional values on the rest of us. It is my claim, however, that social (and especially Christian) conservatives stand to lose a great deal if gay marriage becomes the law of the land. Gay marriage poses something like an existential threat to the conservative Christian moral universe and thus the integrity of their temporal and spiritual communities.

Well, they can just adapt, no? Like any other social institution, churches and other religious communities change all the time to reflect ever-changing social values and new scientific discoveries (although it may take a millennium or two to do it—I’m looking at you, Catholic Church).

The problem is that there is probably an upper limit to the adaptive flexibility of some churches and other religious institutions. This is because gay marriage challenges the bedrock principle of the traditional Judeo-Christian family—the basic building block of the wider communities in which conservatives live. There are at least three components to the traditional family structure:

(1) Patriarchal rule over the family

(2) Matriarchal and filial subordination to the patriarch

(3) Reproductive multiplication as the family’s raison d’etre

Of course, it is clear to all (social conservatives more than most) that we are no longer living in the 1950s. Divorce has become normalized, and no longer carries the stigma it once did. Single-parent (usually women) households are no longer stigmatized, even though they deviate from the idealized two-parent norm. Increasingly, childless couples and even gay couples—with or without children—are viewed as families with all the same rights as the Cleavers of TV-land.

To their credit, religious communities have begun to accommodate the changing face of the American family. The willingness and ability to adapt is not uniform, however. Conservative Christians have bucked the trend, fighting against growing societal tolerance and acceptance for unorthodox family structures--even as alternative family forms proliferate within their own communities. Two churches in particular have militated strongly against the movement toward legalized gay marriage--using their considerable resources to defeat state-level ballot measures to legalize gay marriage. These are the Catholic and the Mormon churches.

What do Roman Catholics and Mormons have in common? More than meets the eye, I assure you. Indeed, what sets these two churches apart from every other sizable church in contemporary America is that their leaders (the Catholic pope and the Mormon prophet) exercise absolute authority over their adherents, conveying ongoing instructions from God about how their congregants should navigate their most private affairs—from family planning to achieving a balance between the demands of work and home life. These servants of God are selected in secret by a small number of top church officials (the College of Cardinals and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, respectively). Beneath these leaders sit vast hierarchical structures based on patriarchal rule. The role of women in these ecclesiastical communities is generally confined to charity, education, child-rearing, cultural affairs, and family management. No special powers are conferred upon women to perform these roles.

It will be obvious to readers that both churches are marked not only by strict hierarchy, but patriarchal hegemony. Mormon leaders (bishops, stake presidents, regional authorities, Quorums of Seventy and the Twelve, not to mention the church presidency) and Catholic leaders (the pope, archbishops, cardinals, bishops, and priests) are all men. Without patriarchal rule—not only in the church, but in the family—the legitimacy of these institutions is cast into doubt.

The Patriarchal Family

Patriarchal rule is the core organizational principle of the traditional Judeo-Christian family and, by extension, the communities that are composed of these families. Simply put, patriarchal rule in society is a natural extension of patriarchal rule in the family--the later justifies the former. John Eidsmoe, a conservative Christian author, writes, "the basic unit of authority in human society is the family. The husband is the head of the wife (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23), and children are to obey their parents (Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:2)."

What is a patriarchal family? Nothing less than the executive authority of men over women and children in the household. In the Mormon Church, the link between patriarchal authority in the home and the community is most evident: every adult Mormon male in good standing exercises the “priesthood,” which means that he can anoint his wife and children to heal sickness or provide comfort or even instructions from God as to how to resolve a given problem. Women have no such authority, and their major life decisions are subject to review by men. GOP Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann, an Evangelical Christian, subscribes to this view. In a public address, she explained how it was that she made her choices in life: “But the Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.” Bachmann’s husband instructed her to become a tax attorney, which she did, even though she “never had a desire for it.” In the end, however, she “was going to be faithful to what I felt God was calling me to do through my husband.

So what is the connection with gay marriage? Same-sex unions by definition disallow patriarchal rule. No man can dominate a woman in a gay partnership. Gay spouses are de jure (if not de facto) equal, due to the equal status of the partners' sexes. While it is true that patriarchal rule is also impossible in single-parent households, these do not constitute the same threat to heterosexual marriage as same-sex unions because single-parent households are understood to be incomplete or in transition. They can easily be transformed into patriarchal families with the simple addition of a member of the opposite sex.

Christian conservatives get that same-sex marriage undermines the naturalized link between marriage and patriarchal rule; once this link is broken, patriarchal authority will no longer appear natural or normal to their adherents, threatening the very foundations of conservative Christian churches and communities. Some years back, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future pope and advisor to John Paul II) issued a lengthy letter that railed against the "‘distortions’ and ‘lethal effects’ of feminism, arguing that "the obscuring of the difference . . . of the sexes has enormous consequences," including inspiring ideologies that "call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality."

Equalizing the status of women in the family is also anathema to Mormons, who fear that this would have consequences for patriarchal rule in the Church itself (extending the priesthood to women is inconceivable to the current Mormon leadership).

According to the Washington Post, a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School characterized Ratzinger's letter as follows: "It has some positive things in it, but the political function of the document is the same as the ones before...It's trying to make a theological case, which they're really not able to make, against the full equality of women in the church."

In fact, patriarchal rule is rooted in the very origins of the Church. The second Prophet of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, was very clear on the status of women relative to men. According to Young, “I shall have women and wives by the million…and glory, and riches, and power and dominion” (Journal of Disourses, Vol. 8, page 178).

This is not entirely dated thinking in the Mormon Church. As late as the 1980s, Mormon marriage ceremonies included the vow that brides "keep the law of your husbands, and abide by his counsel in righteousness. Each of you bow your head and say "Yes." In marriage ceremonies still today, the prospective husband grasps his bride in a “patriarchal grip." After marriage, they are then sealed to one another to be joined in the next life. In the process, their “eternal names” (the names they will have in the afterlife) are revealed to each of them. While the husband may not reveal his name to anyone, the wife must disclose her name to her husband, so that when they pass “through the veil,” he can summon her by name if he wishes to live with her in the afterlife; she may not call him. He uses the patriarchal grip to bring her through the veil into heaven.

While contemporary Mormons no longer speak of patriarchal “dominion,” their position on women is not far off: a woman’s primary responsibility is to her husband and her children—all other activities, including paid employment, are secondary in a Mormon woman’s life. Marvin J. Ashton of the Quorum of the Twelve explained, "a woman should feel free to go into the marketplace and into community service on a paid or volunteer basis if she so desires when her home and family circumstances allow her to do so without impairment to them" ("Woman's Role in the Community." In Woman. Salt Lake City, 1979. p. 93). In other words, a woman may have a profession, if she must, so long as the needs of the family have been seen to.

Although the Mormon Church generally eschews active political involvement, it has made exceptions to oppose gay marriage legislation and, some decades earlier, the Equal Rights Amendment. What unites these two issues (gay and women’s rights) is that they are each perceived as a direct assault on patriarchal dominance, which is central to the Mormon faith.

Heterosexuality, Procreation, and the Family

Heterosexuality and procreation are also central to the traditional Judeo-Christian family. The Catholic Catechism states in part, “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (part II, section 2357). Instead of building families, homosexual persons are therefore ‘called to chastity.’

In traditional Christian communities, marriage exists for the main purpose of procreation. According to the Catholic Catechism, “The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family. The conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity. (2363).”

The Judeo-Christian family structure treats procreation as the central purpose of the traditional family--a position that informs the Catholic Church’s long-standing opposition not only to abortion (a position that predates Evangelical Christian opposition to abortion), but also to birth control. Promoting heterosexual procreation and preventing women from achieving reproductive rights both serve to bolster patriarchal authority in the family, and, by extension, their wider communities.

As noted above, the Mormon Church (along with Catholics and other conservatives) have vigorously opposed the ERA; the Mormon Church also opposes abortion (although not so vociferously as the Catholic Church, and their position on birth control is generally liberal—a possible explanation is that the founder of the Church, Joseph Smith, may have used birth control and abortion to eliminate the evidence of his many clandestine “spiritual wives” before the principle of polygamy was revealed to the church membership).

Like birth control and abortion, gay marriage challenges the procreative raison d’etre of the family in the Judeo-Christian culture, as gay marriage unites individuals who cannot procreate with one another.

If homosexual partnerships (which forbid patriarchal rule and traditional procreation) are given the same status in American law as heterosexual partnerships, then the patriarchal ordering principle will become gradually outmoded in American family life, and hence American churches. It is for this reason that the Catholics, Mormons, and other conservative churches view gay marriage as their third rail.

The bottom line is that conservative opposition to gay marriage is less about discriminating against gay couples or shoving conservative values down the throats of secular Americans than the threat that it poses to the givenness of patriarchal authority in their own religious communities and thus to their moral universe. Simply, the health of these communities and the institutions around which they are organized hinges on the knee-jerk acceptance of patriarchal authority by their own membership. How long this retrograde principle will withstand the onslaught of increased secularization and egalitarianism of American society is anyone's guess.

Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship: Just Another GOP Attempt to “Starve the Beast”

2011-08-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

As the debt ceiling fight brought the American economy to the brink of disaster, Beltway pundits increasingly likened the struggle to the classic game of “chicken.” In this game, two players aim their vehicles at one another and drive full speed ahead. The player to chicken out and swerve is the “chicken” and loses. Game theory tells us there are various strategies for winning the contest. One way is to induce the other player to swerve by “credibly committing” to drive straight into the other car, thus forcing the other player to drive off the road. For example, one might rip one’s steering wheel out of its column and chuck it out the window. The other player, seeing this move, has no alternative but to swerve as she knows that the other player cannot “chicken out” and swerve even if he wanted to—he has credibly committed to go for broke.

In the debt ceiling talks, the Democrats were in one car and the GOP leadership (Boehner) in the other, with the Tea Party riding shot-gun. As the two cars sped toward each other, the Tea Party reached over, yanked out Boehner's steering wheel, and hucked it out of the window in plain view of the Democrats in the oncoming car. The Tea Party thus “credibly committed” the GOP to crashing their car straight into the Democrats, leading to a fatal crash of epic proportions if the Democrats failed to do the rational thing and swerve (in this case, back down and concede to 100 percent of GOP demands).

In this way, the GOP leadership effectively used the Tea Party to credibly commit to its position. As a consequence, the Democrats saw no alternative but to swerve (agreeing to trillions in spending cuts) to avert an economic crash of possibly apocalyptic proportions.

Another analog to the debt ceiling crisis is the “madman” strategy of international negotiations. The theory derives from U.S. President Richard Nixon's foreign policy strategy, particularly during the Vietnam War. Nixon wanted to give the North Vietnamese government the impression that he was a madman who, if not appeased through utter capitulation, might go so far as to nuke Vietnam—“he’s just crazy enough to do it.” The idea was to get Ho Chi Minh to capitulate entirely as the only alternative to nuclear annihilation; this was a fairly credible threat given growing doubts about Nixon’s rationality.

Applied to the debt ceiling crisis, Vietnam is the American economy, and the Tea Party the madman who was just crazy enough to nuke our economy unless the North Vietnamese (the Democrats) surrender entirely. Of course, the strategy most familiar with readers is that of good cop/bad cop. Here, Boehner (the good cop) informed the Democrats that they must give in to all the GOP demands or suffer the wrath of the bad cop (Tea Party psychopaths) who couldn’t give a crap about annihilating the American economy (or, even more scarily, are so economically illiterate that they don't believe that the debt ceiling is any big deal).

At question is whether there are any real differences between the GOP “moderates” and the Teapublicans, or whether this is all kabuki theatre aimed at scaring the Democrats. After all, the economic position of the GOP leadership and the Tea Party villagers are broadly aligned—they are following a 30-year-old GOP strategy of “starving the beast” to the letter.

Starving the Beast

According to Wikipedia,"Starving the Beast" is a conservative political strategy “to cut taxes, depriving the government of revenue that enables spending on social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in effort to create a fiscal budget crisis that would force the federal government to reduce spending.”

The underlying logic of this strategy was first given voice by Ronald Reagan in the election campaign of 1980 when he said, "John Anderson [the third party candidate in the race] tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."

In other words, rather than wait to free up revenue to cut taxes, cut taxes first. With decreased tax revenue, law-makers will have little choice but to cut government spending down the road. Readers will note the striking parallels between the “allowance” analogy and present GOP/Tea Party demands that the government tighten its belt, just as responsible American families must now tighten theirs.

In the 30 years since it was first formulated, Starving the Beast has become a core GOP goal: This might not be obvious from GOP rhetoric and policies, which are mostly centered around tax cuts. It would appear that the GOP simply want tax cuts to put money in the pockets of their wealthy donors. However, Democrats also have wealthy donors they would like to please. Moreover, the rich are fairly indifferent to increasing the top income tax rates by a couple percentage points; this is because most of their income is not in wages but in capital gains, which is taxed at a much lower rate--15 percent). No, the main motivation for cutting taxes and keeping them low is to deprive the government of revenue in order (and this is important) to destroy the American welfare state by cutting entitlement programs that support the poor and middle class.

Upon assuming office, Reagan was as good as his word—he began with a massive tax cut to the top income brackets in 1981, in hopes of forcing Congress to institute cuts to social programs to compensate for lower revenues. In this way, Reagan sought to “cut the allowance” of government, which the GOP believed would translate into cuts in entitlement programs. This helps to resolve the apparent contradiction in Reagan’s tax policies: why, as a dyed-in-the-wool tax cutter, would Reagan ever agree to support an increase in payroll taxes? This apparent inconsistency is explicable if one understands that tax cuts themselves were never Reagan's end goal, the end goal was always ending the American welfare state. If we accept this, it is not at all inconsistent for Reagan to cut taxes on the poor while increasing taxes on the poor and middle class.

Grover Norquist, the infamous anti-tax crusader and head of the Americans for Tax Reform, has become a pivotal figure in the debt ceiling negotiations. Although he succeeded in getting a great many GOP representatives to sign his no tax increase pledge—assisting the Tea Party to toss the steering wheel out the window—tax cuts were never his central goal either. Although his public positions suggest that he is all about lowering taxes, Norquist's fundamental goal is “to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist is, you guessed it, a leading advocate of the “Starve the Beast” strategy, having once observed, “you kill taxes, you kill the government.”

It bears repeating: cutting taxes is not the end goal of today’s GOP—it is simply a means to the end of destroying the social assistance programs that serve as the lifeblood of the poor and lower middle class (disproportionately minorities, women, young people, students—Democratic voters). It is no loony left-wing conspiracy that shrinking the welfare state is about destroying the Democratic Party. Here is Norquist again:

And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared--and even the Republicans in that age group.

Here is a leading GOP activist fantasizing about the disappearance of millions of Democratic voters.

There is, however, one major problem with the Starve the Beast strategy from the GOP point of view: it doesn’t work. This is because, like all politicians, Republican representatives need to win elections to stay in power, and that is hard to do if you vote to cut the most popular middle-class programs in America. During Bush’s 2005 tour of fake town hall meetings designed to rally public support for Social Security reform, he discovered to his great disappointment that “reforming” (i.e., cutting) Social Security was a non-starter with the American public. Thus, Social Security reform died an early death; he could not even get his own party united behind it once the American public figured out what they were up to (parallels with the Ryan Plan, anyone?). The GOP (like many Democrats) must also keep their campaign donors happy, which means lavish spending on subsidies and tax breaks to Big Energy, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Health, defense contractors, and so on. These big government programs (entitlement programs and corporate welfare) have to be paid for somehow; in lieu of taxes, we must put it on our national credit card.

This accounts for the massive rise in government deficits beginning in the 1980s with the Reagan administration. If one looks at the record of the past few decades, it is clear that the Republicans like to spend every bit as much as the Democrats, if not more (Dubya’s trillion dollar tax cuts, two wars, and massive prescription drug benefits are excellent cases in point). The principal difference is that Republicans don’t like to pay for their spending binges with higher taxes. This is why recent Republican administrations have run bigger deficits than Democratic administrations—Democrats do a better job of paying for government programs with higher marginal tax rates; Republican administrations simply borrow the difference—calling the lie to their “deficit hawk” posturing. The graph below shows that the last Republican president who balanced the budget was Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

The Shock Doctrine and Debt Ceiling Talks

If tax cuts merely lead to more borrowing, how does the GOP get its desired cuts in entitlement programs? Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine suggests an answer. Klein notes that since the public never supports free market reforms that involve cuts to vital public assistance, Milton Friedmanites must take advantage of crises to institute cuts that people would never accept in non-crisis periods. She gives an example of a Republican politician in Louisiana, who said, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Shocks such as wars, natural disasters, and economic calamities are now the “preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering” (8).

The needed shocks for unpopular reforms can also be manufactured out of whole cloth, as in the 2011 debt ceiling talks. Analysts have noted that the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times in the past 50 years (it was raised 7 times under George W. Bush alone), with never so much as a friendly debate. The debt ceiling crisis was entirely fabricated by the GOP in order to go after entitlement programs directly, to go for the jugular. And they got what they wanted—massive cuts in government programs (and another tranche of cuts later in the year that will be aimed at entitlement programs rather than defense spending, because defense contractors have lobbyists whereas we only have our paltry votes). In return, the GOP will let the economy live.

Once again, the real aim of GOP cuts is not to reduce the deficit. Neither the GOP nor the Teapublicans are true deficit hawks. A true deficit hawk would aim her sights at corporate tax loopholes, corporate subsidies, and bloated military spending; the GOP has instead taken aim at some of the smallest items in the discretionary budget. Since reclaiming the House after the 2010 elections, GOP representatives have proposed cutting food programs for the poor, nutrition for low-income pregnant mothers, student aid programs, education research, the school lunch program, Head Start, public radio and television such as NPR, subsidies for the arts, jobs training programs, women’s community health centers, and others—these proposals are remarkable not only for their heartlessness (coming in the midst of one of the worst economic periods since the 1930s), but also for the fact that they provide critical support to the poor and working Americans, as well as those in the arts and higher education (disproportionately Democratic voters). Together, all non-defense related discretionary spending makes up only 16 percent of the entire U.S. budget; defense spending makes up nearly half of all discretionary spending. For these so-called budget hawks to leave defense spending entirely alone is either irrational behavior or the good old bait-and-switch we’ve come to associate with the GOP.

What “Starve the Beast” Republican fundamentalists (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Bill Kristol, Alan Greenspan, Karl Rove, Jon Kyl, Grover Norquist, Dick Armey and other GOP leaders) are really after is dismantling public entitlements altogether. Rather than allowing them to hide behind the lie of “fiscal conservatism,” we should force them to admit their true aims at every turn.

Slacker Republicans and Wonky Democrats

2011-07-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Over the past decade or so, presidential figures on the Republican side have displayed a gobsmacking degree of know-nothingness. Remarkably, each new incarnation is seemingly more cartoonish and two-dimensional than the last. This is not to say that there are not policy wonks on the Republican side, just that they do not usually win national elections.

Slacker Republicans

Besides his penchant for butchering the English language, President George W. Bush frequently demonstrated a very tenuous grasp of international and national affairs, which had real world consequences. Most strikingly, it was revealed that in the run-up to the Iraq war, GW did not know that the Muslim population of Iraq were divided into Shi’a and Sunni sects—knowledge that might have aided the U.S. in preventing or containing the subsequent civil war and ethnic cleansing.

Throughout his eight years in office, Dubya’s lack of interest in his job meant that his advisors were forced to compile one-page briefs on problems as thorny as the invasion of Iraq or responding to Iran’s nuclear capabilities just to ensure that he would read them. In the final two years of his presidency, Bush disengaged from the prosecution of the Iraqi war and occupation altogether, leaving critical policy decisions to his subordinates.

Christopher Hitchens, an Iraq war supporter and staunch neo-conservative, called Bush "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things."

George Bush’s lack of policy interest and questionable work ethic were entirely predictable—Dubya was a self-declared slacker throughout school and actually bragged of the Cs he’d received as a Yale University undergrad. With below-average college grades, he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School before mysteriously being admitted to the Harvard MBA program (legacy points, anyone?) In the decades that followed, he dabbled in politics and had a couple failed business ventures—spending much of his 30s drinking and partying before cleaning up his act at age 40.

Dubya’s career had notable parallels with other Republican vice presidents and presidential candidates, including Dick Cheney, who barely bothered to go to class and ultimately flunked out of Yale (to which he'd gained admittance through personal connections). Upon returning to Wyoming, he proceeded to rack up two DUIs, while continuing to defer his military service to Vietnam. Then there was John McCain, who, though a son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals, graduated at nearly the bottom of his class at Annapolis (894^th out of 899) and chose a career of politics when it became clear that he would never have a distinguished career in the Navy. More committed to beer-drinking and skirt-chasing, McCain was a dangerously poor pilot and crashed several planes before embarking on his tour of duty in Vietnam.

Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice presidential pick in the 2008 elections, first caught the public eye not for her leadership or student activism, but as a beauty pageant contestant in Alaska. She was mostly known as an athlete in high school and spent six years at four different educational institutions (only two of them universities) before finally graduating with a degree in journalism. She then worked briefly as a sportscaster before settling down to help her husband’s business in commercial fishing. Palin is famously disinterested in policy. As late as the 2008 race, Sarah Palin revealed she had never heard of the Bush doctrine. According to McCain’s campaign staff, she also reportedly thought that Africa was a country and not a continent, could not name the three members of NAFTA, and did not know why there were two Koreas. Despite her stunning ignorance of history and politics, Palin refused to prep for interviews or debates on the campaign trail, choosing to spend her time fretting about her public image and whether she was getting fat.

Seemingly cut from the same cloth, 2012 GOP Frontrunner Michele Bachman went to a Christian college before enrolling in a Bible-based Coburn School of Law founded by televangelist Oral Roberts, now the Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law. Today it is in the bottom tier of law schools, ranked 136^th in the country.

Bachman and Palin have made successive public demonstrations of their clownishness, routinely rolling out inaccurate statements about history and current affairs that are generously dismissed in the media as “gaffes.” Strangest of all, given their passionate identification with the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers, both women have (without the help of the “gotcha media”) revealed their shallow grasp of American history, between them declaring that the Revolutionary War started in Connecticut rather than Massachusetts, that Paul Revere warned the British that the British were coming, and that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly to end slavery.”

…and Wonkish, Overachiever Democrats

What a difference from Democratic presidents and presidential candidates of the previous two decades. According to Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid, Bill Clinton "became known as a 'policy wonk,' a politician who could spout data and statistics nonstop, a man with a quick answer for every question. Members of the national press were amazed at his ability to formulate answers to complicated questions, seemingly without thinking." Throughout his eight years in office, Clinton read voraciously and involved himself in the intricate details of policy planning. He was known for waking his advisors at 4 a.m. to ask them about some detail in a policy brief he was reading. Whatever one thinks of his moral character, Clinton was no intellectual slouch. He rose above an impoverished childhood and an alcoholic stepfather to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, a graduate from Georgetown University and Yale Law, and a constitutional law professor before being elected governor of Arkansas and later president of the United States.

Hillary Clinton more than held her own in that Washington power couple. As an undergrad at Wellesley, she was president of the Young Republicans, but stepped down due to her changing views on civil rights. She worked on McCarthy’s campaign for president, organized anti-war protests, and was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association. She received a law degree from Yale University where she served on the editorial board of the Yale Law Review. Hillary and Bill worked together on McGovern’s presidential campaign, and published a legal article in the Harvard Educational Review. In her tenure as a New York Senator, Hillary gained a reputation for being every bit as smart, ambitious, and wonkish as Bill.

Our current president is made from the same mold. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as the first editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and was selected as the first African-American president of the Review in his second. He worked for twelve years as a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, simultaneously organizing voting drives in his work as a civil rights attorney. A colleague recalled Obama’s focus on detail as a state senator as follows: “He was a real policy wonk, a roll-your-sleeves-up cross-the-t’s and dot-the-i’s legislator. He loved getting stuck into the details and nitty-gritty negotiating solutions to complicated issues like racial profiling.” As president, Obama has proven a hands-on negotiator on legislation ranging from the economic stimulus package to comprehensive health care reform to omnibus budget deals.

Vice President Biden is himself an unsurpassed (some would say needlessly verbose) foreign policy wonk. Former Vice President Al Gore distinguished himself in his years in the Senate as a peerless advocate for climate change legislation--holding the first congressional hearings on global warming before it was widely recognized as a problem; he was an early promoter of high-speed telecommunications and internet technologies in the late 1970s and later championed the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley. Whatever you think about this latest generation of Democratic leaders, they can hardly be labeled slackers.

Liberal Science versus Conservative Common Sense

Conservatives used to rail against liberal educational reforms (see John Dewey) that purportedly led to lowered educational standards, automatic advancement, and high school graduates who lacked rudimentary skills in maths, science, history and English. This attitude is still widely held in the conservative base: while campaigning on the problem of poorly educated youngsters, Teapublican GOP Presidential Contender Rick Santorum recently revealed that he might himself benefit from a remedial course in arithmetic.

The truth is that today’s conservatives have become the thing they most despised—an I’m-okay-you’re-okay politically-correct people that sneers at academic achievement and elite universities, apparently believing that any number of ordinary, patriotic Americans would make terrific U.S. presidents. Some right-wingers have gone so far as to reconfigure educational standards to coincide with their own understanding of intelligence and knowledge. Knowledge must not be the preserve of “liberal elites and scientists” who conspire to indoctrinate their children with secular humanism. In the conservative worldview, the best you can do to fix the economy is to get out of the way of business; all it takes to run the richest, most powerful country in the world is belief in God, common sense, and perhaps some business experience (fealty to corporate America goes without saying).

GOP common sense is really very simple. As Ronald Reagan put it: “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Therefore, sizing down the federal government and reducing taxes should do the trick as regards the economy. Teapublican common sense tells us that if we simply drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), our national waters, and national parks, we will have all the energy we need. It also tells us that we have to fight the bad guys wherever they are in the world so we don't have to fight them at home, that torture is the best way of getting actionable information from terror suspects, and that climate change is a hoax perpetrated on the American people by liberal scientists looking to advance their careers by cooking the books.

Right-wing Populism and Left-wing Technocracy

Because the real brain-center of the GOP has no governing philosophy other than continuing corporate give-aways at the expense of the welfare state, it uses right-wing populism to attract the vote of their target electorate--angry middle and lower-middle class white people who are convinced that minorities, feminists, liberal elites, and immigrants are to blame for their stagnating living standards. Right-wing discourse is America's populist discourse, now at a fevered pitch.

According to Wikipedia, populism ”a type of discourse, i.e., of sociopolitical thought that compares "the people" against "the elite.” It is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as "political ideas and activities that are intended to represent ordinary people's needs and wishes". It is designed to appeal to the masses, to the "people" as such, regardless of class distinctions and political partisanship—"a folksy appeal to the 'average guy' or some allegedly general will."”

The difference between right-wing and left-wing populism turns on their answer to one question: Who is the “average guy” and who is the “elite”?

Left-wing American populism grew out of collective frustrations by farmers and working people against monopolistic price-fixing by the railway magnates and the exploitative policies by bankers at the turn of the twentieth century. The average people were the working class; the elites were the captains of industry. It had no overt racial angle, although class lines coincided significantly with ethnic divisions. The populist movement finally found its patron saint in Teddy Roosevelt (first a Republican president and later the leader of the Progressive Party). While president, Teddy pushed through Progressive policies by introducing regulation of food and drugs; he also famously took on oil and railroad monopolies through trust-busting. These populist impulses found their ultimate expression in FDR’s New Deal policies and, later on, Johnson’s War on Poverty. Until the 1980s, the Democratic base consisted of average working people and immigrants fighting for a decent wage and working conditions as well as a chance for upward mobility.

In right-wing American populist discourse, we are through the looking glass. According to this narrative, the average people are native, white, middle and lower-middle class; the elites are the urban, secular, educated professionals who work as university professors and public school teachers. They are also government bureaucrats, psychologists and social workers, writers, artists, actors, and anyone else involved in vaguely Jewish-sounding professions. Confusingly, minorities are simultaneously privileged (through affirmative action) and also to blame for inner-city poverty, degeneracy, and crime. Gays and lesbians are implicated in the destruction of America’s families by promoting the “homosexual lifestyle” in public schools and defiling the sanctity of traditional marriage. The class wars of left-wing populism have been replaced by the culture wars of right-wing populism--a phenomenon ably described in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Why did right-wing populism replace left-wing populism? Basically because the Democratic Party lost its working class base with deunionization and other economic changes of the mid-twentieth century, making the Party increasingly reliant on an educated, cosmopolitan professional class. The Democratic Party has accordingly transformed itself to reflect its new base using a new language of internationalism and technocracy that could be transplanted with ease anywhere in the world.

The median traits of the two parties’ base are reflected in the preferred candidates for national office. The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, with few exceptions, increasingly mirror their respective median voters—Republican candidates are religious, suspicious of foreigners and intellectuals, they are folksy and speak in patriotic clichés. They are uninterested in policy or any other area of the intellectual elites. They perfectly mirror their constituents—white middle and lower-middle class voters. If their statements in the press defy the Washington consensus or mainstream media mores, then, far from disqualifying them, it can give them a leg-up with the conservative base.

Democratic presidential candidates, by contrast, tend to be policy wonks; they get into the nitty-gritty details of their platforms, they were usually excellent students in school who went on to earn graduate degrees; they are overachievers and mostly hail from (or moved to) urban areas. They are pro-science, pro-technology, and globalist. They mirror the new-ish left-wing constituency—highly educated, socially liberal, cosmopolitan artists and writers, lawyers and teachers and other urban bobos.

Is Right-wing Populism Really New?

Short answer: no. America’s right-wing populist discourse goes back at least as far as World War Two to the anti-communist, Red Scare baiters, John Birchers, Barry Goldwater supporters, and the like. However, this discourse was once a relatively marginal stream of the conservative movement and only very slowly crept into the mainstream. Today, however, it represents core GOP values. And that is what is new. This populist know-nothingness rejects anything that smacks of urbane slickness or overly pedantic responses to policy questions. Whereas Democrats increasingly opt for the most bland milquetoast technocrat (see Obama, Kerry, Gore) to attract the median Democratic voter (who respect skills, education and policy experience), the ideal Republican candidate must be (or seem to be) an average American—who has a passionate love for country, a lack of reverence for elitist institutions, and ideally a come-to-Jesus moment in their past. That candidate should be just like them, only with better hair.

What does it mean when the ideal-typical representatives of two halves of the country cannot speak to, much less understand, one another? Surely nothing auspicious for the future governance of this country.

Fossil Fools: Digging Our Own Graves

2011-05-29T05:04:00.001-07:00

You would think that in the twenty-first century we would not still be relying on inefficient, ecosystem-destroying, air and water polluting sources of energy that require moving millions of tons of earth, blowing the tops off of mountains, drilling miles into the ocean floor, mucking around in tar sands, and fracturing the upper crust of earth. More than two hundred years after the start of the Industrial Age, we still meet over 86 percent of our energy needs with fossil fuels—the organic remains of ancient plant and animal life buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth. Despite overwhelming evidence that these fuels are literally destroying the planet, the recovery and refining of carbon-based energy continues at an exponential rate.

Catastrophic Climate Change

Annually, the world consumes about 31 billion barrels of oil a year (fully 85 million barrels a day), and 6 billion short tons of coal (the U.S. accounts for one-fifth and 14 percent of these figures, respectively). Collectively, we pump over 31 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. According to a 2000 EPA report, fossil fuels (coal, oil, uranium, natural gas) are responsible for 90 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Largely due to such emissions, the average global temperature rose by 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit over the 20^th century and is likely to rise an additional 2 to 11 degrees in the 21^st century. According to an article in the Journal, Science, the last time the world experienced sustained carbon dioxide levels this high was 15 million years ago when global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees warmer, and the oceans 75 to 120 feet higher. It is also worth noting that the 2 to 11 degree forecast was made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has consistently underestimated the effects of anthropogenic climate change. James Hansen, a former top NASA climate scientist, has been far more accurate in his predictions on global warming. He recently published an assessment that the planet is “perilously close to a tipping point,” where we can no longer readily adapt to the changes in our environment. Even the Pentagon sounded the alarm according to a report by The Observer in 2004:

A secret [Pentagon] report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. 'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis.' Once again, warfare would define human life.'

In point of fact, the effects of climate change are already upon us. The World Health Organization has reported that global climate change since the 1970s has caused in excess of 140,000 deaths annually. The number of natural disasters related to climate change, such as droughts and hurricanes, has tripled since the 1960s. Global warming is projected to increase infections from insect-bearing diseases (particularly malaria and dengue) to billions of people per year by the 2080s; and the scarcity of safe drinking water will ratchet up diarrheal deaths by millions per year. Diminished precipitation in some areas will threaten food supplies in the coming decade—halving them for some poor African countries--leading to far higher rates of malnutrition and starvation.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) developed a program to assist 10 state and local governments in dealing with the specific climate change threats they expect to face, including debilitating disease pandemics, extreme heat, and water scarcity.

Poisoning the Planet

But the effects of our fossil fuel addiction go beyond carbon emissions and their consequences for global warming. Carbon emissions produce smog, which can compromise crop yields by penetrating plant leaves and destroying cell membranes. Massive quantities of toxic substances are also released into the atmosphere, including nitric, sulfuric and carbonic acids, which produces vegetation-destroying and water-polluting acid rain. Thousands of tons of radioactive substances such as uranium and thorium are emitted annually through the burning of coal. Urban pollution causes about 1.2 million deaths each year worldwide.

The process of extracting fossil fuels is also destructive to plant and animal life. In addition to suffering the negative consequences of moutaintop removal and strip mining, residents of coal mining areas suffer far higher rates of heart, lung, and kidney diseases as well as hyper-tension. In fact, hazardous mining conditions has killed hundreds of thousands of workers over the past century due to gas explosions or poisoning, roof collapse, and suffocation (100,000 in the U.S. alone). Stricter workplace regulations have greatly reduced mining accidents in the developed world. However, mining conditions remain extremely hazardous in less developed countries and continue to kill thousands of miners annually. Off-shore oil drilling also destroys aquatic ecosystems--threatening a vital food source for people around the world--and generates major oceanic catastrophes, as in the case of the recent BP oil spill, which poisoned the entire Gulf coast. Nuclear power generation carries serious risks of its own, producing tons of high-level radioactive waste that must be safely processed or disposed of. Scientific studies have shown a robust link between various cancers (such as thyroid and leukemia) and living in proximity (within a 100-mile radius) to a nuclear reactor. Then there are nuclear accidents, which, though rare, have devastating and multi-generational effects. The death toll from the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, for example, has been estimated as high as one million deaths; hundreds of thousands were forced to evacuate their homes. Early assessments of the recent nuclear accident in Japan are not nearly so grim, but the devastation from nuclear accidents are not usually realized for decades. At least one analyst predicted eventual casualties from Fukushima to be as high as 500,000--mostly cancer deaths. Contamination of the sea is already far greater than in Chernobyl.

What the Frack is Fracking?

(Hint: fracking is not fragging--the Vietnam war-era practice of lobbing grenades into the tents of senior officers on the battlefield to protest the war.) A recently award-nominated documentary, Gasland, lays out the horror of hydraulic fracturing in stomach-churning detail: it consists of pumping a carcinogenic mixture of over 750 chemicals compounds (at least 29 known or suspected human carcinogens), sand, and millions of gallons of water into a top layers of earth. First, a well is drilled deep into the gas shale, then this toxic brew is pumped into the well at high pressures, creating fissures in the shale, which releases more gas for extraction. The fissures allow the gas to move freely, potentially contaminating the water table; the chemicals, too, can permeate these stores of water. Unlike oil drilling, which takes place mainly off-shore, the harvesting of gas occurs all across the lower forty-eight, and promises to expand still further. The map below, from the Gasland Project, shows the drilling areas, with more intensive drilling in red.

Nor is fracking confined to the lower 48. As of last year, the energy majors have set their sights on Europe. Although fracking has yet to take off in the Old World (and may encounter too many barriers, including lower permeability of European shale, stronger environmental regulations, and formidable public opposition), Halliburton began fracking on behalf of the state oil and gas company in Poland in August 2010. East European countries are likely to be far more amenable to destructive mining practices than West European countries, due to their weaker environmental movements and their greater acceptance of costs and risks of drilling in order to gain alternatives to Russian gas.

What is the U.S. government’s response to this new and potentially deadly technique of drilling for gas? The Bush/Cheney Energy Bill of 2005 managed to insert exemptions for fracking in the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act—effectively absolving the industry of any liability for contaminating our drinking water. The question should rightly be asked: If the industry is so sure that fracking does not contaminate well water or poison the air (which is a bit like the tobacco companies’ decades-long defense that there is no proven link between smoking and cancer), then why have they fought so hard to get these exemptions? The answer will be obvious to any eighth-grader: the companies are well aware of the harm their industry poses to public health.

Getting Desperate: Tar Sands and Oil Shale

With the global economy growing at an average rate of 2 to 3 percent a year, and China and India continuing to expand at even greater rates, existing oil and gas reserves are stretched ever thinner, and the race is on to find and develop new sources of energy. This is the reason for the development and expansion of fracking, as well as the refinement of dirtier and less-efficient sources of petroleum. As sources of light crude (see Middle East oil), which require less refinement and drilling, become scarcer and scarcer, we have relied increasingly on the dirtiest sources of energy (coal, oil shale, tar sands) to meet a greater share of our energy requirements. As the world approaches peak oil, this reliance will grow further still.

What are tar sands? They are heavier than heavy crude oil—a mix of sand, clay, water, and an extremely dense, viscous petroleum that together produces the appearance of tar. Canada and Venezuela have by far the greatest reserves of tar sands. Under NATO’s Proportionality Clause, Canada is compelled to make 66 percent of its oil production available for export to the U.S., even if Canada is in need of energy itself. This means that Canada is compelled to refine its tar sands, which is an incredibly dirty, polluting process—a process producing two to four times as much greenhouse gases as the refinement of conventional crude oil.

Oil shale, on the other hand, consists of a sedimentary rock that contains kerogen, which can be processed to produce liquid hydrocarbons. The world’s largest reserves of oil shale are in the U.S. Rocky Mountain states (Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah), but there are also reserves in Australia, Estonia, Russia, Sweden, Germany, France, Jordan, China, Brazil, and Mongolia. Like tar sands, the refinement of oil shale produces much higher greenhouse emissions than the refinement of regular crude oil, and, like tar sands, requires a significant amount of water (the production of Alberta tar sands uses twice the water used by the city of Calgary in an entire year). It is also highly inefficient, in that its refinement requires nearly as much energy as it gets in return—which should lead us to ask whether it can hardly be worth it.

That we are even going to the bother of refining tar sands and shale is a poignant testament to the fact that the end of the oil age is in sight.

War…and More War

Political scientists have written extensively on the “resource curse,” which holds that the endowment of valuable primary commodities (such as oil and diamonds) actually hurts rather than helps a country’s developmental prospects. A series of World Bank papers report a strong correlation between armed conflict and the endowment of natural resources, observing that countries whose exports are made up of 25 percent primary commodities have a 33 percent change of experiencing war, against a mere 6 percent chance of conflict for countries whose exports are made up of 5 percent primary commodities. Large mineral wealth is also correlated with lower economic development and political corruption as politicians focus on enriching themselves rather than investing in human capital, a poor record of human rights, and the repression of women.

Indeed, international war has long been animated by struggles over valuable mineral resources. The twentieth century ushered in decades-long resource wars over access to gas, coal and oil fields. The start of World War I had much to do with British efforts to prevent a rising Germany to complete its Berlin-Baghdad railway, which would have given German companies access to rich Iraqi oil fields. Japan’s expansionist drive in the 1930s was in turn driven by a desperate quest by the energy-poor island nation to gain access to rich supplies of fossil fuels in neighboring countries, while Germany once again began a “Drang nach Osten” into Soviet territories to gain access to the oil and coal resources needed to build their 1000-year Reich.

In the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. and Britain together sought to control Iranian oil fields by subverting a democratically-elected government in favor of the Shah--a murderous, tyrannical puppet government. Saddam Hussein was originally supported by the CIA, as the U.S. believed that Saddam would cooperate with western oil interests in the region; Saddam later fell out of favor with the west when he began to get creative with the management of Iraqi oil wealth. Accordingly, the U.S. backed both Iran and Iraq in a vicious eight-year war of attrition over energy-rich territory that ended in millions of lives lost and a virtual stalemate. This was followed by the First Gulf War and more than a decade of sustained bombing by the west, followed by the Second Gulf War in 2003, which was initiated on the pretext of eliminating a brutal dictator that posed a deadly security threat to the west. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, a brutal anti-democratic state that has actively supported terrorist networks throughout the world, is under the direct military protection of the U.S. government; this deal is good so long as the Saudis keep the oil flowing.

Comedian Robert Newman explains western involvement in the Middle East using the metaphor of a Bronx housing project:

In the coming decades, resource wars are likely to be broader and even more fearsome. The U.S. is currently involved in not one, not two, but three wars in Middle Eastern and North African states--whose oil reserves are deemed vital to our economic interests. Recently, the U.S. Treasury authorized the purchase of oil from Libyan rebels under the authority of the “Transitional National Council of Libya,” to help overthrow Qadafi in favor of a more western-friendly Libyan government.

As the years advance, we are actually likely to see more rather than less military involvement and occupations in oil-rich states in the Middle East, North Africa, and even further afield. In a recently-released wikileaks cable, western officials discussed the possibility that the future scramble over arctic oil reserves (now accessible due to melting of the polar icecap) may lead to armed conflict between Russia and NATO.

What Now?

Why can’t we get our collective shit together to address, even marginally, the dual calamities of peak gas/oil and catastrophic climate change? Are we not an innovative, entrepreneurial, ingenuous people? Are we not the nation that put a man on the moon in 196-frickin-9? Well, there a lot of reasons, but the most fundamental may be that we have lost our collective sense of community and social responsibility. Rather than citizens of a great Republic, we have become self-absorbed consumers—obsessively promoting ourselves and our kin in a metaphysical competition for higher social and material status. The American ethos today is a pale shadow of what it once was—it now has far less to do with building up community ties and improving the lot of our society than it does with leveraging our individual market worth at the expense of our neighbors.

Of course, this individualist consumer mentality serves the interests of economic elites—if we are each myopically focused on competing against our peers, noone is caring for the general societal welfare, and corporations can continue to dismantle regulations and public entitlements so they can pollute our country for profit and appropriate ever more public resources. The American creed (and increasingly that of western societies at large) has become: Screw you, I’ve got mine. It is a message that is drummed into our psyches by the media, by celebrity culture, and by the broad political and media class. We are consumers, we should protect the market against government intrusion. Policies that serve public interest sound suspiciously like parasitical European-style socialism and should be opposed at every turn.

What this comes down to is a collapse of public morality, of civil society and social responsibility--of democracy in the big-picture sense. Which is a far more intractable problem than global warming, peak oil, and environmental degradation combined.

How Wall Street Helps Itself and Hurts America

2011-04-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

This post has been long in coming, inspired as it was by my belated viewing of the Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job, which offers a nice breakdown of the subprime debacle on Wall Street. This, together with another Oscar-nominated documentary, Client 9; Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short; and Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on naked short-selling, should be required reading/viewing for every American who is unfamiliar with how the financial crisis really went down.

Not all were equally informative. The Big Short and Matt Taibbi’s article were by far the more educational (for me at least), detailing exactly how collateralized debt obligations, mortgage securities, and credit default swaps were used to execute one of the most despicable financial heists since Enron, and certainty the largest wholesale transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the very rich. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these guys are criminals who deserve a lifetime behind bars.

It bears repeating: it is one thing to vaguely suspect that Wall Street bankers had ridiculous amounts of hubris and wildly miscalculated the risks they were generating for the global financial system. It is something else again to suspect that they built up what amounts to a ponzi scheme and profited hugely when taxpayers were forced to bail them out. The reality is that it was a giant scam, the intricate details of which will take your breath away.

Basically, this is how it worked:

Step 1: Bundle high interest (and thus high yield) mortgage-backed securities and divide them into tranches according to risk of default.

Step 2: Convince the rating agencies (which are paid by the very firms they rate—conflict of interest, anyone?) that the top tranches should receive the highest triple A rating (usually reserved for government bonds and other low risk investments) because a very high percentage of borrowers would have to default before these securities would go bad, something that is statistically very unlikely.

Step 3: Sell the said triple-A rated subprime mortgage-backed securities to sovereign governments, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers and chumps.

Step 4: Take out insurance on said triple-A rated securities in the form of credit default swaps, meaning that if these securities collapse in value, then someone else (AIG, for the most part) will be left holding the bag.

Step 5: When the supply of qualified subprime borrowers (which feeds the system) starts to ebb, encourage lenders to falsify loan applications to draw in borrowers with no chance of paying back their mortgages.

Step 6: Cash out before the inevitable crash; if stuck holding the bag, convince relevant government officials (themselves ex-bankers) that a taxpayer bailout is necessary to avoid a financial Armageddon.

Step 7: Armageddon safely averted, use zero-interest loans from the Feds to pay off TARP; continue investing in risky financial derivatives, paying record bonuses to executives;

Step 8: Where loan documents proving bank ownership cannot be located, forge the paperwork needed to foreclose on delinquent borrowers.

Step 9: If the public complains, get media lackeys to scream about government takeovers and socialization; mobilize right-wing activists (enter Tea Partiers) around the meme that the government is stifling growth and should get out of the way of business.

Step 10: Use massive financial clout to lobby against new financial regulations, ensuring return to business-as-usual.

If ever there was an industry composed of unmitigated, irredeemable sociopaths, Wall Street would be it. If the entire edifice of investment banks in the U.S. disappeared tomorrow, we would probably all be better off. Not one of these con artists is in jail; they knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. And why wouldn’t they? If their wild bets pay off, they are rich; if their bets blow up in their faces, then the taxpayers are forced to bail them out. And of course no one is ever to blame—who could have known that home prices would drop nationwide after creating a massive, ridiculous housing bubble?

Gee…yeah, who could have seen that that party would end? Surely not the rating agencies that specialize in assessing securities risk. Surely not the army of financial analysts on CNBC--the television network that purportedly provides sound investment advice to the public. Not the former fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, the widely-acclaimed financial “maestro,” nor the current fed chairman, whose doctoral dissertation analyzed the causes of the 1929 stock market crash. Not any of the top executives of investment firms and hedge-funds whose financial acumen is supposedly worth hundreds of millions a year on the open market.

There are simply no downsides to Wall Street sociopaths playing us again…and again…and again. The system attracts and cultivates a class of scumbagitude the likes of which rarely thrive outside of organized crime and corrupt dictatorial regimes. Besides, putting the global economy at risk and ripping off countless investors, these guys (and yes, they were nearly all guys) are avid fans of strip joints and high-end escort services; they buy private jets, yachts and vacation homes; they do mountains of blow. They make Michael Milken, the famed 80's junk-bond king, look like a veritable boy scout. In the end, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, the firm with the most toxic assets on its book, made off with 425 million USD before the firm went belly-up. Meanwhile, the CEO of Countrywide, the most egregious of predatory lenders, made 470 million USD as a result of the subprime scam; rather than face criminal prosecution, he was ordered to pay a relatively modest fine, most of which was covered by his firm. Indeed, in the run-up to the financial crisis, the CEOs of major financial firms cashed out their stock options for tens of millions of dollars.

That this army of white collar criminals would emerge relatively unscathed from a catastrophe of their own making will not surprise anyone who understands that the rich nearly always come out on top. In fact, the richest of the rich have done spectacularly well over the past 30 years. Furthermore, the richer you are, the greater your rewards.

This graph shows that from the 1960s to present, the top one percent of America's income-earners has increased its share of national income from 8 percent to over 18 percent. But what is even more striking is the even more massive gains flowing to the top one percent of the top one percent of income earners (about 15,000 families) who today earn 6 percent of the national income or one in every 17 dollars earned in America; it is to these families that the bulk of income gains in America have gone over the past 30 years.

And who are these income-earners? Most are neither celebrities nor heirs of great American fortunes, but rather CEOs, very often in the financial services sector. Some of these individuals, far from job-creators or producers of society, are rewarded with great fortunes even after running their firms into the ground.

As bonuses on Wall Street soared while evidence of malfeasance mounted, were regulators taking notice? Perhaps not surprisingly, the SEC engaged in no serious investigation of major investment firms throughout the entire 2001-7 housing bubble. What happened to those who attempted to regulate the industry or investigate the worst offenders? Eliot Spitzer, the DA of New York, targeted mortgage lenders for predatory lending practices, AIG for fraud, and investment firms for inflating stock prices, among other things. For his troubles, Spitzer was taken down by Republican rat-fuckers who caught him patronizing a call girl service--the very crime that sitting U.S. Senator and diaper-fetishist David Vitter (R, LA) has openly admitted to with zero repercussions. In the late 1990s, Brooksley Born, the head of the nascent Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to introduce regulations for complex financial derivatives and was soundly stomped by Wall Street enablers--Greenspan, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin—and railroaded out of derivatives regulation altogether, with Congress ultimately deeming such regulation an unnecessary and harmful brake on financial "innovation."

To conclude, here are some of the things I have learned (okay, most of this I knew already):

Wall Street fraudsters and Republican operatives paid this skeevy Nixon-era dirty trickster to smear Eliot Spitzer Lewinsky-style for investigating Wall Street elite;
There really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, and right-wing activists openly serve corporate America;
Banks on Wall Street knowingly sold toxic financial derivatives to public pension funds, sovereign governments, and other investors, creating a "mortgage time bomb";
Goldman Sachs sold securities they privately deemed “pieces of crap” to investors, then bet that their pieces-of-crap derivatives would tank—bets that ultimately paid off;
Glen Hubbard (chair of Columbia University business school) is an epic a-hole;
Wall Street bankers believe they are worthier human beings than the rest of us;
Anti-financial regulation economists are, for the most part, corporate shills;
You can bring down an entire company by counterfeiting company shares and shorting them;
The reason Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff went to jail (where he suffered "facial fractures, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung"), while other Wall Street miscreants continued to reap fat bonuses, was that Madoff swindled rich people instead of minorities and the poor;
Wall Street and its denizens are literally above the law, so long as they limit their predation to the politically irrelevant.

This brings me to the lie propagated by evangelical privatizers that if you make long-term investments in a broad base of stocks, as in an S&P 500 index fund, you will have enough to retire on by the time you are 65. With the stock market barely budging over the last 10 years, investment gurus now peddle the myth that picking and choosing the right companies and sectors will give us healthy returns even if the stock market itself remains flat or tanks. When is someone going to point out the obvious: that the system is rigged in favor of the insiders; the rest of us are basically the bottom rung of a giant ponzi scheme and will always be left holding the bag when the system collapses?

The EU has issued a report that warns that the growing number of EU citizens moving to private pensions could find themselves with "inadequate pensions." USA Today has reported that those with public pensions are far better off than those with private pensions on average. Much of this is to do with the fact that private pension schemes are based on individual contributions alone rather than a mix of individual and employer contributions, but also with the fact that defined contribution schemes are only as good as one's investments in the stock market. Moreover, the growing financialization of the global economy means that the global economy is increasingly threatened by the instability of markets, which undermines the stability and health of private pensions. This uncertainly also means that people with private pensions will be less able to plan their retirement.

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: Americans consent to privatizing social security at their peril. By recent estimates, half of retirees in the U.S. rely mostly or entirely on their meager social security checks. Just imagine if this amount were reduced, the retirement age raised, and Americans forced to live on their winnings from the corrupt casino that is Wall Street. No doubt many will invest their contributions wisely (luckily?) and be left with a nice nest-egg at the point of retirement. Most, however, will be left with insufficient earnings and may even lose money. Taxpayers, as usual, will be left holding the bag.

Whither America?

2011-02-24T03:39:00.000-08:00

Economic crises offer important opportunities to examine the true state of our union—to really take a look at where America stands in the global scheme of things. It is not something Americans are good at—taking lessons from other countries or taking a measured view of our own country and the direction in which we are headed. Indeed, to suggest that the United States is anything but the greatest country in the history of the universe approaches heresy in many corners (see Fox News).

America is the bestest, most awesome country in the history of humankind, we are told at an early age, and we grow up repeating such aphorisms without really reflecting on what it is that makes America and its people so great. Pressed to support such claims, an American patriot will tell you that our country has made the world safe for democracy, has fought for human rights around the globe, and that many countries owe their freedoms and prosperity to American generosity. America is also an unparalleled land of opportunity and wealth, where a person can rise from nothing to become a Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Quite simply, anything is possible in this country of ours. It is where people who want a better life for their children seek to immigrate—where a smart, ambitious kid can rise to the top if they only apply a little elbow grease.

This patriotic arms race over who loves and respects America the most—measured not just in statements to this effect but also in flagpins—is familiar territory for right-wingers, but it is not their exclusive province. Many on the Left, accused of insufficient patriotism, have endeavored to compete in the game of Who is the Greatest Patriot with their own talk of God and Country, accompanied by prodigious displays of the Old Glory and heart-warming stories of immigrant success and Horatio Alger-like stories of the poor boy-made-good (see Barack Obama, Bill Clinton).

Others on the Left are guilty of the opposite silliness, contrarily claiming to hate America. In their view, America is a tacky, consumerist, war-mongering country full of fat, ignorant, greedy fools. It is, quite possibly, the worst country in the history of the universe, and humankind and all other species would be better off if it were simply wiped off the planet.

I take a radical middle position—namely, that it is unhelpful to shout over whether America is the “best” or “worst” country in the history of the universe. Such talk is no more elevated than playground squabbles over who has the prettiest/ugliest/sluttiest mother. We are better advised to take a measured inventory of our faults so that we can devise realistic solutions to our problems. This requires a clear-eyed look at where the U.S. stands relative to other countries as well as itself in days gone past.

Perhaps the best, although admittedly crude, indicator of America’s status on the global stage is its relative economic size. Here, there is a noticeable downward trend: the U.S. share of world economy slid from 35 percent in early postwar period to a little over 20 percent today.

Let’s break this down, beginning with the industrial sector. Perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. is still the world’s biggest manufacturer, but America relinquishes this position to China in 2011. The American steel sector has been in decline for decades, and is now a pale shadow of what it once was. The bulk of U.S. textile sector has been outsourced to countries with lower labor costs, and the Big Three carmakers have been losing world market share since the 1980s. We lost some 5.5 million or around one-third of our manufacturing jobs since 2000.

But are these not sectors of the past? After all, job losses in heavy industry are due not only to outsourcing, but also to productivity increases—suggesting that our companies remain profitable and robust, even if they employ fewer people. Perhaps job losses in the old economy are made up for with an increase in the number of high-skilled jobs of the “new” economy of computers and other high-tech goods. Not so, according to former Intel CEU Mark Rooney, who observes that the U.S. has fewer computer manufacturing jobs now than in 1975.

As noted by Financial Analyst Mark Riddix,

“Most of our electronics are developed by foreign companies. Philips (PHG), Toshiba (TOSBF.PK), Sony (SNE), Hitachi (HIT), Samsung (SSNKF.PK) and Sharp (SHCAY.PK) dominate the US market in terms of television sales. Who owns a Zenith anymore? Are Magnavox and RCA American companies? No, they were sold off to foreign companies that use the American brand names. Popular electronics items like the iPod (AAPL) are mostly manufactured overseas and then sold in the US. We are also losing more of the US automobile market. Toyota (TM) just surpassed General Motors GM) to become number 1 in global sales. Even clothing and apparel sales in the US are dominated by foreign countries. Over 90 percent of clothing and shoes sold in the United States are made in foreign countries.”

America’s leading export to China is literally “scrap and trash.”

With its manufacturing sector in sharp decline, the U.S. has shifted to a service-based economy. Now, fully eighty percent of our workforce is employed in services (often low-paid, non-union jobs that are insufficient for supporting a family), while less than ten percent is employed in manufacturing.

So it seems that our economy now depends on the services sector. But competitiveness in the global services sector hinges on state-of-the-art communications infrastructure, and America has notoriously slow internet speeds and spotty penetration. According to 2009 data, the U.S. ranked 28^th in the world in terms of average download speed; South Korea had quadruple the speed of the U.S., and Japan had triple. The supposedly ossified “Old Europe” had on average twice the download speed of the U.S.; we even lag behind the countries of the former East bloc such as Ukraine. To make matters worse, the U.S. had only the 18^th highest broadband penetration worldwide, with 58 percent of households online (trailing South Korea with 97 percent, Singapore 90 percent, and Hong Kong 87).

What of America's relative standard of living?

Here too, the U.S. lags behind. Although the standard of living has risen for several continental European countries over the last few decades, the real median wage in America has barely moved, while the rich have made massive gains. In fact, two-thirds of the growth in earnings over the last decade went to the top one percent of income-earners. A recent article in Mother Jones displays this graphically:

America's growing inequality has been accompanied by a decline in social mobility (exactly the opposite of what Ayn Rand acolytes would expect). No longer is the U.S. the storied land of opportunity; now more than ever, your lifetime earnings are determined by that of your parents. If your parents were rich, chances are that you will be well-off as well; likewise, if your parents were poor, odds are that you will also be poor. Researchers at LSE conducted an analysis of relative social mobility in a number of European and North American countries and concluded that social mobility is actually higher in Canada and continental European countries (due in part to low-cost or free higher education, the principal means of upward mobility). The report observes that “the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced.”

And what of other developmental indicators?

Average height is known to be a rough proxy for a country’s level of socioeconomic development. Whereas European Americans were once the tallest people in the world, they stopped growing in the second half of the twentieth century, whereas northern European nations continued to grow and are now significantly taller than their American counterparts.

Once among the longest-lived, today the American life expectancy is ranked 36^th in the world (with Canada at 11^th), meanwhile, American ranks 33^rd on infant mortality, which is, incidentally, one of the most reliable predictors of state failure.

Our students’ math and reading scores are average among OECD countries, with many Asian and European countries leaving the U.S. in the dust. The U.S. is also losing its edge in basic and applied sciences, with a declining proportion of peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, industrial patents, domestic expenditure on research and development, and full-time researchers in the sciences.

What of America’s highly touted freedoms? In 2010, the U.S. ranked 20^th among surveyed countries for freedom on the press. Meanwhile, in 2005 the U.S. scored 17^th among 58 surveyed countries in terms of gender equity.

It is clear that our position of global leadership and relative socioeconomic development, while still strong, have been eroding over time. Amazingly, our representatives in Congress appear determined to speed the process of American deindustrialization by continuing to give incentives to companies to offshore American jobs, making deep cuts in programs for research and development, slashing student grants and job training programs, and denying critical funding to shore up America’s infrastructure.

Even our Democratic president has gotten into the spirit, promising to cut entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security while extending Bush tax-cuts to the wealthy. Cash-strapped states, meanwhile, are laying off public employees (including police officers, teachers, social workers, and firemen) in droves, cutting funding to education and even reducing the number of schooldays per year. States and counties across America have elected to tear up their asphalt roads to save on maintenance costs.

Is this how we plan to compete in the next century--by turning America into a banana republic with gated communities surrounded by a massive and growing urban and suburban underclass? It is naive to imagine that this will not have major negative repercussions on the future socioeconomic well-being of our nation.

Simply, private investment will not build a high-speed rail system or repair our crumbling infrastructure, it will not provide quality education for millions of low-income children, provide the economic incentives that will give America’s high-tech sector a competitive advantage against Japan, China, India and Brazil. The private sector will not provide health care for poor old and disabled people, nor will it ensure the safety of our food, our cars, our drinking water, or the air that we breathe. It will not prevent unscrupulous insurance companies and lenders from tricking unsophisticated consumers, requiring a taxpayer-funded bailout. Nor will the private sector protect our financial system from financial “weapons of mass destruction” or the Bernie Madoffs of the world.

It is time to change our policy frame from one in which government is an inefficient drain on resources to one in which the government is the guardian of public interest, allowing us to solve collective action problems and provide basic social security for individuals during times of need. If we do not alter the way we view government, America is surely headed for inexorable decline.

Why Americans Don’t Fight (the Wars that Really Matter)

2011-01-13T04:11:00.000-08:00

For a people whose identity was forged through bloody revolution, Americans today are a strikingly apathetic lot. This nation—founded upon revolt against British rule and boasting a rich history of labor activism, protests against corporate abuses, and the like—has not seen meaningful civic engagement for quite some time. This is a significant break from the successive social movements that make up the lifeblood of American history.

In the late 1800s, the People’s Party—with its base in poor white cotton farmers in the south and wheat farmers in the plains states—agitated against railroad barons who charged a high rate for transporting their produce and against bankers to whom many were hopelessly indebted. The nineteenth century also saw strikes by textile and railroad workers against sub-standard wages and poor working conditions as well as a trade union movement and an anti-rent movement against the abuses of landlords. The twentieth century was no less revolutionary; the broad-based Progressive Movement to reform education and labor laws, promote conservationism, and regulate big business was largely rooted in the “muckraking” journalism of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and others who wrote provocative diatribes about corporate malfeasance. There was also the suffrage movement and Equal Rights Amendment struggle for women, the civil rights movement for African Americans, and the fight for indigenous rights. People went to battle in the street to end the Vietnam War, fight segregation in the South, and protest the exploitation of farm laborers. In the late 1960s, “Nader’s raiders” agitated for consumer protections as well as federally mandated clean air and water standards at the FTC; in the 1980s, students and activists protested against U.S. support for murderous military juntas in Latin America and the nuclear arms race.

Over the past 20 years, however, Americans have largely eschewed the street. True, there were protests against the First and Second Gulf Wars. There was the Battle of Seattle in 1999 to raise awareness about the ill-effects of globalization, but there has been precious little else. A hotbed of political activism in the 1960s, today’s university campuses chiefly serve as a means of professional advancement. Beginning in the 1980s, students increasingly set their sights on getting into top business and law schools in hopes of joining the ranks of Masters of the Universe, or at least the upper middle class.

Our counterparts in Europe, by contrast, have lost none of their enthusiasm for the street. Since the most recent global financial crisis and announced austerity packages, national and international media have brought us images of rioting or marching students, workers, and pensioners in Athens, Rome, Dublin, London, Madrid, and Paris. In late November, tens of thousands of Irish citizens protested their government’s decision to bail out Irish banks at the expense of the national treasury; two weeks later, thousands of British students clashed with police in central London to protest increased tuition fees from a nominal amount to the cost of a modest state school in the U.S. To the average European, it is an outrage of epic proportions that average citizens should be asked to bail out wealthy bankers who continue to prosper while ordinary citizens are made to foot the bill. And they have made this abundantly clear.

In America, by contrast, the most vociferous protests have been directed against government efforts to tame Wall Street excesses and the abuses of monopolistic health insurance companies that charge exorbitant fees for uncertain coverage. Rage over government bailouts and fiscal irresponsibility is mainly aimed at the socialist Obama administration that has supposedly taken over the economy and forced taxpayers to bail out irresponsible and greedy (read: poor, minority) homeowners. In this respect, it is revealing that the only significant grass roots protests related to the fiscal crisis have been the (largely corporate-sponsored) Tea Party movement. Although a big-tent movement, what unites Tea Partiers is a determined effort to ensure that Big Health, Big Oil, and Big Finance (aka Wall Street) be allowed to continue business-as-usual without interference from Big Government. The guiding logic is that government hampers business, which is critical to the success and health of the American economy and, by extension, the moral underpinnings of American society.

What explains the differential response to bailouts and cuts in social programs on either side of the Atlantic?

It is common to put such differences down to American values of rugged individualism and our deeply-rooted suspicion of government. But it is worth remembering American hatred of government has not been the historical constant that we imagine. Despite the received wisdom that American social welfare lagged behind that of other western countries, a large swath of American males and their families enjoyed pensions already in the late 19^th Century. In the mid-twentieth century, FDR (widely considered one of America’s greatest presidents) pushed through legislation to establish universal pension benefits, disability insurance, relief for the unemployed, enforcement of collective bargaining rights and the minimum wage, subsidies for farmers, and so on. One of the most popular New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, employed millions of out-of-work young men, giving them three square meals a day and a dollar for each day’s work, most of which they sent home to their families. In return, they built many of our national parks, planted 3 billion trees, constructed highways and roads, and implemented conservation projects. In his 1944 State of the Union Address, FDR unveiled his “second” or “economic” bill of rights, which would guarantee every citizen the right to decent shelter, employment with a living wage, adequate medical benefits, freedom from “unfair competition and monopolies”—the Second Bill of Rights provided inspiration for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although efforts to realize these principles in the States ended with FDR’s death.

Since today’s Americans have far less than Europeans to cushion them from abject poverty, it is reasonable to ask what explains the lack of social protests against cuts in education, social security, and other social programs in the States. Where are the millions upon millions of pensioners who should be protesting the proposals of the “catfood commission” to reduce retirement benefits and raise the retirement age? After all, about 43 percent of working Americans have less than 10,000 USD in savings and will depend almost entirely upon Social Security benefits.

Is it because the standard of living in America is still comparatively better than that of our European counterparts and keeps rising with time—making social programs relatively less important? Clearly this is not the case. Although the net worth of the top one percent of income earners has tripled in the past twenty years, the bottom 90 percent has remained relatively flat. Meanwhile, the costs of education and health care have shot through the roof.

Tuition fees for state schools have increased by over 60 percent in the past decade; private schools are now 30 percent more expensive. This is at a time when student aid programs are facing massive cut-backs, so many are forced to take out massive loans, often with commercial banks, greatly undermining their ability to build up a nest egg in their 20s and 30s. Jobs are no longer plentiful, and a college degree no longer inoculates one from unemployment. Having children is for many Americans a one-way ticket to poverty given the spiraling health insurance premiums, the price of education, and the like. According to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren:

"Our research eventually unearthed one stunning fact. The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. Having a child is now the single best predictor that a household will end up in financial collapse."

There is also less upward mobility in America today than in any other high-income country in the world except Britain, including France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Canada, and Denmark—where the principal means of upward mobility, a higher education, is still free or at least affordable to most.

The average American household carries almost 85,000 USD in personal debt, including about 10,000 USD in credit card debt. The average college graduate leaves owing nearly 20,000 USD; today, over 40 percent of American households spend more than they earn.

There is no question that the American middle class is under full frontal assault by market forces—a situation made all the more dire because our political class no longer protects the basic welfare of the poor and middle class. But the question remains: why have Americans failed to mobilized? Why have the riots and protests we see in Europe not been replicated on this side of the Atlantic?

One explanation is that Americans have decided that protests are anyway a lost cause because Congress and the Presidency have shown blatant disregard for popular preferences. The vast majority of Americans wanted out of Iraq already 5 years ago; former Vice President Dick Cheney famously said “who cares?” in response to an interviewer’s observation that a majority of Americans opposed the war. This pattern remains under the new administration, as a majority opposed Obama’s accelerated troop deployments to Afghanistan two years ago. In the course of health care reform, polls showed that over two-thirds of the public felt that the government must ensure universal health care. More recently, Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts were extended to the very wealthy—in the face of strong popular support for ending or phasing out tax cuts for the rich.

A second reason for inaction may be that the pressures facing the American middle class are far more diffuse than they are in Europe. With the cost of health care and education largely unregulated, the hike in costs of these two major items has occurred non-transparently, with universities and health insurance companies increasing their fees in an apparently uncoordinated manner. With no central decision-maker responsible for the hike in costs (such as the British government tripling university tuition fees), there are no obvious targets that can serve as mobilizational rallying points.

Third, the American media have long underplayed public opposition to the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, and bank bailouts; scattered protests in America against planned cuts in education received better coverage in the international press than in American media. It may appear that we are more apathetic than we actually are because protests against health insurance companies, banks, and cuts in social services are largely ignored by the American media. Seeing this, would-be protesters may understandably conclude that their time is better spent elsewhere.

But there is another, more insidious reason for popular inaction as Congress enacts the agendas set out by corporations, and that is America’s unique blind-spot concerning class.

Americans and continental Europeans tend to have very different understandings of wealth disparities. For Europeans, it is universally understood that the class into which one was born is a very powerful predictor of one’s success in life; in America, the very notion of class borders on heresy. Even thinking about class is understood as un-American and likely to lead us down the road to fascism/Marxism/Leninism/socialism/Maoism (pick your favorite boogieman).

In America, the class into which one is born is viewed as irrelevant, or, at most, ephemeral. Those who face crippling debt and spiraling health and education costs have not planned well or must simply suck it up because that is the cost of good medicine and education. Rather than investigate corporate malfeasance, today’s American media are content to regurgitate corporate press releases—embedded in the meme that it can still be “morning in America” so long as government keeps out of the way of business. Rich people are given to be somehow better or more virtuous than the rest of us—after all, they would not be wealthy had they not worked damn hard for their money. One clownish pundit has even crusaded for erecting a huge “bronze and granite” statue in Washington in honor of all that the wealthy have done for this country.

A comment posted on the said pundit’s website says it all:

“I just read Bernard's column on building a statue honoring the rich in the USA. All I can say is, "AMEN". I do not consider myself "rich", but I do have a good-paying job and I pay my fair share of taxes. For many years I mistakenly thought that the richest Americans should pay a lot more in taxes and ease the burden on the middle class. For that, I apologize. I've been reading Mitt Romney's book, "No Apology", and have had my eyes opened to the stark realities of economics in the US and in the world, to which I had no clue. The things Governor Romney talks about in his book are the very things that Bernard touched on in this column about honoring and thanking the rich in America.

“Thank you, rich people. I'll contribute to that monument if someone designs it. And Mr. Goldberg, thanks for the reminder. Merry Christmas!”

America’s blind spot regarding class is likely to persist for as long as being a patriotic American is equated with the belief that in America one can succeed, indeed become wealthy, so long as one works really hard—the belief that one’s fortune (or lack thereof) is a direct reflection of the value of one’s labor. After all, what is America if not the fabled land of opportunity, of milk and honey, and Horatio Alger successes—where bright and motivated immigrants can come to the country with nothing and create a bright future for themselves and their kids and grandkids?

The contrast with continental Europe could not be starker. In most, if not all, of these countries, the rich are expected to give back to society since their prosperity is viewed as the collective product thereof; it is well understood that their fortunes would not be possible without public assistance and the support and hard work of their fellow citizens. Moreover, it is axiomatic that richer members of society have a moral obligation to pay more in taxes than the poor and middle class; great disparities of wealth are frowned upon and seen as a societal ill; in the States, such disparities are seen as a healthful motivation for people to work harder and thereby grow the economy.

In few countries outside the States, in fact, is one likely to see the poor and middle class willing to accept cuts their meager social benefits so that the rich will be encouraged to invest more in the economy. It is a convenient myth perpetrated by the monied class that the public must do its utmost to feed the market beast by levying minimal taxes and treating corporations as gently as possible. If we demand corporate rectitude and a greater share of their outsized profits, we are engaging in class warfare and will be duly punished by a drop in the Dow and the accelerated offshoring of American jobs. The poor and middle class will never win at this game.

The first and best means of breaking this cycle of abuse is to acknowledge that (1) corporations and the rich have their own best interests at heart and these are rarely aligned with the interests of the vast majority of Americans, (2) the profit motive does not by itself result in a more prosperous and functional society for all, and (3) the government is not our enemy, but our best and (presently) only means of protecting the public interest against market vagaries and corporate exploitation. Once the rich are no longer worshipped as economic rainmakers and the surest route to prosperity, then we have effectively toppled them from their “bronze and granite” pedestal. We will be more likely to demand that they pay their fair share in taxes and that the government check the abuses of those who have gamed the system. Our ultimate goal should be something along the lines of FDR’s economic bill of rights, which would be infinitely more valuable than vague promises of a sumptuous life that is increasingly out of reach of the vast majority of Americans.

Why the (Long-run) Outlook for Progressivism may be Better than We Think

2010-11-27T07:36:00.000-08:00

It is all too easy to feel discouraged if not downright pessimistic in the wake of the 2010 midterm elections. One can hardly believe that Obama's weak sauce health and financial reforms would drive the American people back into the arms of the party of culture, class, and foreign wars; recessionary economics; and epic fiscal deficits.

First the bad:

As expected, the GOP won control of the House, having nabbed over 80 seats from the Democrats. They also gained six seats in the Senate and came very close to snatching power there as well. At the state level, too, the GOP won 7 governorships. On the up side, most of these losses came not from the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but from the (fairly useless) Blue Dog wing. It’s also good to bear in mind that the president’s party routinely loses seats in the midterm elections. Viewed in historical perspective, the Democratic losses are not so unusual, particularly given a terrible economy with nearly 10 percent official (and 22 percent “actual”) unemployment.

Still, this is undoubtedly a set-back to the Progressive agenda, as the Left suffered important losses. These include the fire-breathing champion of working-class Americans, Representative Alan Grayson (D), and the incorruptible reformer, Senator Russ Feingold (D), who co-sponsored historic campaign finance reform and has been an outspoken advocate for immigration reform, conservationism and environmental protection, fair trade, banking reforms, and eliminating the death penalty. Moreover, while the Blue Dog Democrats are beloved by no one, the Republicans who turned them out of office are mostly mean, Shi’ite Republicans you would not want to meet in a dark alley (at least not if you are an illegal alien). Many of these so-called “Tea-publicans” (such as their de facto leader, Rand Paul, who has been linked to white Supremacists) make George W. Bush look like a paragon of multicultural tolerance.

How damaging is this unhappy turn of events? I will argue that there is at least one short-term and several long-term reasons why, in spite of this latest disappointment, there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of progressivism.

(1) Calm down: we are not teetering on the precipice of fascism.

For one thing, the newly-elected Tea Partiers are almost certainly too incompetent to fundamentally transform our government, even if they had the numbers on their side. Moreover, the total elimination of women’s reproductive rights, deportation of illegal aliens, and militarization of the southern border are not big priorities for their corporate sponsors and may even be downright bad for business. After all, these Tea-publicans were brought to you by corporate America, and in this sense are really no different from the corrupted and corruptible Republican class of freshmen that took control of Congress in 1994. True, there will almost certainly be at least one government shutdown (not to mention impeachment hearings), and Obama's limited reforms are in serious danger of being scaled back. The GOP takeover may also delay an economic recovery and exacerbate unemployment. However, illegal immigrants are in no danger of mass deportations, and we are not about to witness the emergence of an American theocracy presided over by Palin. These right-wingers are simply not inclined to do the kind of work it would take to affect regime change.

It may sound Pollyannaish, but really, it could be so much worse... Happily, there are also significant structural changes that promise to improve the body politic (over the long run, at least):

(2) America is becoming truly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural.

In the aggregate, that is. The graph below shows that the proportion of self-reported European or “white” Americans has dropped decade by decade. In the 1950s, the country was 80 percent white. By the middle of this century, however, folks of European extraction are projected to have dipped below 50 percent of the population. This is mostly an outgrowth of immigration from non-European countries, but partly also differences in birth rates. The U.S. Department of Education shows the decline of white America in the chart below.

Why is this a good thing for progressivism? Because minorities are traditionally left-wing voters. Jewish and African Americans have historically trended strongly Democratic, while Asian Americans and Hispanics have been more likely to split their vote. However, in the decades since civil rights legislation was passed, the Republican party has sought to mobilize angry and alienated lower middle-class white folks who virulently oppose anything that challenges, as Bill O'Reilly once put it, the “white Christian male power structure”: affirmative action, immigration, feminism and social welfare programs.

Electorally, the picture is even starker. The charts below show the percentage of whites that voted Republican in the last three presidential elections. Using data from CNN exit polls, L. David Roper shows that in 2000 George Bush did poorly in almost every major demographic except for whites and church-goers. Still, Bush was able to eke out victories (or at least a tie) in 2000 and 2004.

This last chart shows that McCain--who attracted about the same proportion of white voters as Bush did in 2000 or 2004--suffered a decisive defeat in 2008. The reason: white voters are no longer a commanding electoral demographic.

The racial divide in the 2010 midterm elections was even starker--the vast majority of whites voted Republican, while Blacks and Latinos voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

As the GOP tacks yet further right and white, the party is, as GOP Strategist David Frum put it, in danger of becoming a “rural white rump.” Such a party will need to secure ever increasing proportions of the white vote to offset the declining proportion of whites in the voting population. At some point, this will no longer be sustainable, and the GOP will have to abandon the tried-and-true “Southern Strategy” that it has relied upon to win elections since the Nixon administration. Such a development is bound to change the political discourse in America for the better.

(3) We are losing our religion.

Over the past couple decades, it has become increasingly acceptable to declare oneself a non-believer. Indeed, the percentage of secular Americans or "nones" (those who identify as atheists, agnostics, and simply non-religious) has increased significantly since the 1990s, particularly among younger respondents.

The emergence of more and more secular Americans promises a positive paradigm shift in national politics. This is because secularism generally goes together with progressivism and support for evidence-based policy-making. It is worth noting in this respect that non-religious people are far more likely than their religious counterparts to accept the science behind global warming. They also support gay marriage, and are far more likely to believe that evolution provides the best account of the origins of the universe.

A generational shift in religiosity is sure to hurt the Republican party. This is because the GOP has depended for decades on the support of highly religious Christian voters:

Major caveat: Americans will probably always be more religious than Europeans, who declare themselves Catholics or Protestants but rarely go to church. In America, religion seems to be in the country’s DNA, and an overwhelming majority of Americans still declare themselves to be God-fearing and predominantly Christian.

Still, there is no question that we have become more secular over the past twenty years, with every birth cohort less religious than the one before. This may eventually lead to a retrenchment of religion from national politics, which would be a healthy development for believers and non-believers alike. The sooner that national politicians stop debating non-issues such as whether gays should be allowed in the military or to marry one another, the sooner we can focus our collective attention on policies that are properly decided in the political sphere (taxation, regulation of commerce, finance and international trade; consumer protection; issues of security and peace; conservation and environmental protection; and the like). Marriage, sex, reproductive rights, recreational drug use, and assisted suicide, in contrast, are basically private issues that require some degree of regulation, but are best kept out of the daily business of politicking.

(4) Younger voters tend to be more progressive.

According to surveys, younger people today reveal themselves to be less homophobic, less racist, and more supportive of civil rights and social welfare programs than older people. Overall, younger people are also better traveled than their elders, sometimes living for extended periods in other countries. As a consequence, they have a tendency to be less nativist and more aware of how the actions of the U.S. affect people in other parts of the world. We can hope that this openness will promote not only other-oriented thinking and behavior, but also humility about the extent to which America ought to be teaching to, rather than learning from, other societies.

What is relevant for party politics is that younger people are less likely to identify with (and consequently vote for) the Republican Party. The graph below by Gallup shows that Democrats have a huge advantage over the Republicans among the youngest voting demographic (18-29). According to another survey by Pew, the average age of Republicans increased by three years from 1987 to 2009, whereas the average age of Democrats remained constant. The survey also notes that "For the first time in at least two decades, Republicans are older than Democrats on average." This surely cannot be good for the long-term prospects of the GOP, suggesting that the GOP may have to change much of its character to appeal to younger generations as time goes on.

(5) Rural America is disappearing

The right-wing base is shrinking not only because it is predominantly white, religious, and older, but because its voters are disproportionately rural. According to one analysis, fully two-thirds of the GOP wins in the 2010 elections were in rural districts, which make up a fraction of all electoral districts in the U.S.

Political Scientist Seth Mckee has researched the regional and urban-rural divides in America, finding that the traditional north-south political cleavage has in some ways been eclipsed by the rural-urban divide: "the growing divide between rural and urban voters has widened because the North-South sectional cleavage among rural voters has narrowed," meaning that rural voters in the north and south have largely fused to become today's GOP base. He concludes, "it now appears that future Republican presidential success may be heavily reliant on rural support--turning the traditional southern rural-urban cleavage on its head."

The trouble with this as a long-term Republican strategy should be obvious. Like practically everywhere else in the world, rural Americans are migrating to urban areas for jobs and upward mobility. McKee cites ANES data indicating that rural voters as a proportion of the overall electorate dropped from 37.9 percent in 1952 to 31 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2004. Sarah Palin's "real America" is a pale shadow of its former self. This is shown graphically by the following chart from the US Global Change Research Program:

Of course none of this precludes the emergence of a new cultural divide at the national level, nor does it mean the end of political tribalism. What it does mean is that in a two-party system, it will be impossible for one party to rise to power by appealing solely or even mainly to white nationalism. It means that the GOP will be forced to broaden its electoral appeal in order to win national elections, which will almost certainly improve the quality of political discourse in our country.

The Morality of Taxes

2010-10-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

A core conservative tenet is that raising taxes is bad economic policy. Two reasons are usually given for this. First, it punishes success by confiscating the wealth of our most industrious citizens, a punishment that creates disincentives to work. Second, it punishes the very people (the rich) on whom we rely to create jobs that fuel the economy. If taxes are raised on the wealthy and businesses, job creation will suffer because there will be no incentives to grow and because labor costs will be too high.

It must be said that conservatives are not dead-set against raising taxes in general—just those that target large corporations and wealthy individuals. These include increasing the federal income tax and corporate taxes (progressive, redistributive taxes), closing tax loopholes and taxing capital gains (ditto), and increasing the estate tax (which only affects the wealthiest one percent of income-earners).

However, conservatives do not oppose all taxes. After all, someone’s got to pay for America’s vast global empire. To generate government revenue, conservatives recommend instituting a regressive flat tax (disproportionately shouldered by the poor and middle class). They also do not object to increasing payroll and sales taxes (ditto).

In contrast to the received wisdom at Fox News, mainstream economists agree that investing in the poor is probably the best means of stimulating the economy. In fact, the biggest multiplier effect of federal investment is provided by food stamps, where each additional dollar invested in food stamps is estimated to put 1.73 USD back into the economy. The same goes for earned income tax credits. The investment that gives us the least bang for the buck is…wait for it…tax cuts to the wealthy. Every additional dollar in tax cuts to the wealthy (making the Bush tax cuts permanent) puts a mere 29 cents back into the economy. Which means that, rather than stimulating the economy, extending tax cuts to the wealthy would give us a negative return on our investment. The difference is due to the fact that, unlike the wealthy, poor people have to spend everything they have, so nearly all the additional investment in food stamps and earned income tax credits goes back into the economy.

But this post is not about the utility of taxes. It is about the morality of taxes.

British blowhard Stuart Varney recently had a guest on his program who advocated progressive taxation. He asked her whether she thought it was “moral” to tax the rich at a higher rate to give money to the indolent (presumably, the lower 98 percent of American income-earners).

This represents a new, and rather brazen, line of attack by the “haves” for whom the increase of a couple percentage points in the top marginal tax rate is akin to grand larceny. The argument goes something like this:

(1) Resources should not be transferred from the rich to the poor, because this only encourages laziness and an entitlement mentality among the poor;

(2) The richest (and therefore most deserving) members of society should not be asked to pay a greater share of their money to the commonwealth than the working and middle classes;

(3) It is an abuse of government power to confiscate people’s hard-earned money in redistributive transfers.

Since most American conservatives agree that the last word on morality is contained within the Bible (and particularly the New Testament), I have consulted this text by way of answering Varney’s question as to whether progressive taxation is moral.

Jesus Valued the Poor over the Rich

Jesus promised the poor that, although they suffer now, they will be rewarded in Heaven. He tells his disciples in Luke 6:20: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Far from viewing the poor as bums, lay-abouts or welfare cheats (the predominant view on Fox News), Jesus preached that the poor were actually worthier than the rich. Whereas the poor would inherit the keys to God’s Kingdom, Christ famously made the opposite promise to the rich:

"it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"(Matthew 19:24).

Was Jesus saying that the rich would not get into Heaven? Sounds that way to me. Additional clarification on the matter from the Son of God:

James 5:1-6: “ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire…Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in the day of slaughter."

1 Timothy 6:9-10: "But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."

Jesus Advocated Social and Economic Justice

Although Christ’s views on the rich are fairly clear, there are many in the Christian Right who apparently believe he was kidding. The proponents of “prosperity gospel” make the ludicrous claim that Jesus was actually a rich man, and that living the gospel brings riches here on earth.

Unless I completely missed the point of my Bible seminary classes, Christ’s entire ministry was about taking care of the neediest of society—helping the poor, feeding the hungry, comforting the widowed and orphaned, and healing the sick and disabled. He taught his followers to do likewise:

Corinthians 12: 25: “That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.”

Christ is saying here that we should not simply help the poor, but strive to reduce the disparities between the rich and poor. We not only have a moral duty to help the poor, but to eliminate poverty altogether. There are those in the Christian Right, most notably Glenn Beck, who reject this notion as an implicit condemnation of the capitalist system of government and society: one should give to the poor, no doubt, but one need not make a big political thing about poverty. Beck went so far as to urge his viewers to leave any church that preached “social” or “economic justice” as purveyors of Godless Marxism.

Following Beck’s logic, God was himself a Godless Marxist, for he defended and advocated on behalf of the poor against an unjust world:

Psalms 140:12: “I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and the right of the poor.”

Isaiah 25:4: “For You have been a defense for the helpless, a defense for the needy in his distress.”

Psalms 10:14: “The unfortunate commits himself to You; You have been the helper of the orphan... O Lord, You have heard the desire of the humble; You will strengthen their heart, You will incline Your ear to vindicate the orphan and the oppressed.”

It might be countered that social justice is the purview of God alone; it is He who ensures justice for the afflicted—it is not up to us to play this role.

Be that as it may, Jesus was clear about what we are responsible for during our time on Earth, and that is to rectify gross inequalities in society. He commanded the rich to liquidate their wealth and give everything to the poor; if they fail to do so, they face damnation. An oft-quoted New Testament story is as follows:

A rich man approached Jesus and asked him how he might secure eternal life. Although the man followed all of God’s commandments, Jesus told him: "there is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven" (Luke 18:22).

If Christ is to be taken at his word, and Bible literalists are fairly clear on this point, then there is no such thing as an obedient Christian who is also very wealthy. Christ commanded his followers not to give a portion of their resources to the poor and needy, but to give ALL their worldly riches to the needy.

Jesus Says “Pay Your Taxes”

Conservative Christians concede that Christ taught that we should give generously to the poor (although the part about giving all one's riches to the poor was obviously an allegory), but these disbursements should be voluntary and certainly not through taxation by a secular, Godless government.

In point of fact, the Jews of the first century were faced with a similar dilemma because they opposed paying taxes to a secular, hostile Roman government. At the same time, not paying taxes would expose them to persecution by the authorities. Hoping to score points by forcing him to take a position on the matter, Jewish Pharisees came to Jesus and asked him whether it was moral to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus replied:

“You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?" "Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." (Matthew 22: 15-22).

Indeed, paying one’s taxes is not only the right thing to do, but also commanded by God. Apostle Paul tells us that sovereign authorities are established by God and are therefore His intermediaries here on Earth:

Romans 13:1-7: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God…Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”

We now return to the central question: Do sovereign authorities have the right to use taxes to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor?

Let’s reason this through. If God wants us to care for one another and for the rich to give their possessions to the poor, and if the sovereign authorities on Earth are God’s intermediaries to which we are obliged to pay taxes, then it stands to reason that a progressive federal income tax (itself a very mild form of wealth redistribution) is not only legitimate, but in fact highly moral.

In fact, the Bible suggests that the government has not only the right, but the duty to tax the wealthy for the benefit of all:

1 Timothy 6:17: “Charge them that are rich in this world, that they may not be highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.”

In light of all of this, the better question might be whether not taxing the rich is moral.

Operation Chaos: Corporate America Goes for Broke

2010-09-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

To listen to beltway pundits, you would think that the GOP had shot itself in the foot—overplayed its hand, if you will—in its effort to regain popular momentum in the wake of a humiliating electoral defeat. Across the country, Tea Party activists have challenged, many times successfully, incumbent Republicans in primary contests. In this view, the GOP plot to rev up the Tea Partiers with an eye toward coopting them in the fall midterms backfired spectacularly. They instead midwifed a movement that threatens to destroy the GOP itself.

A related narrative (not inconsistent with the first) is that there is a civil war underway between old guard „establishment Republicans” and hardcore GOP extremists. The metaphor here is that of Republican standard bearers struggling with radical secessionists in a contest over who are the biggest psychopaths. The result of this „outbidding” war is that the GOP is moved even further to the right—right off a cliff.

Either way, pundits agree, the Tea Party movement has seriously undermined the GOP’s electability this fall. It is possible that Democrats will screw up what amounts to an unexpected and undeserved gift and are sure to lose seats in any case due to the principle of divided government, but there is little doubt that the GOP has played an extremely poor hand.

I contend, however, that this conclusion depends on the heroic assumption that either the GOP or the secessionist agitators are in the driver’s seat.

But what if the GOP were not in charge of this movement—indeed were never in charge? And what if this were less a civil war over the „soul of the GOP” than a scheme by economic elites and corporations to throw everything they’ve got at Obama and his liberal allies with the aim of derailing even the most modest Democratic reforms?

The game is Operation Chaos. The goal? Not revitalizing the Republican Party or even introducing an alternative plan of governance. The goal instead is destruction, pure and simple, let the chips fall where they may. It is, as Senator Russ Feingold put it, a „systematic, conscious” effort to „destroy” Obama and his presidency.

Who is playing the game? Those who have the most to lose if Obama and his liberal allies win: a select group of corporations and very very rich individuals.

After all, just because the GOP carries water for the wealthy does not mean that the wealthy look after the GOP. If the GOP can’t deliver, moneyed interests will find someone who can—whether or not this hurts the GOP, its leadership, or its institutions. Since Democrats became friendlier to business in the early 1990s, corporations have become ever more willing to split their campaign contributions between the two parties.

Indeed, the past three years actually saw the Democratic party rake in more corporate money than the Republicans. Particular now, corporate dollars tend to follow whomever looks likeliest to win office—the winners (democrat or republican) are then beholden (to a greater or lesser extent) to those who bankrolled their campaigns.

Heads I win, tails you lose. Nice to have money...

The consequences of increased corporate backing is all to obvious to those who remember when Democrats pushed for truly liberal reforms. The last two Democratic administrations have been extra friendly to Wall Street interests in particular. The Clinton administration dismantled crucial Depression-era banking regulations, opening the door to the Wall Street shenanigans that brought us the global financial meltdown of 2008. The very same Clinton-era de-regulators—Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner—became top economic advisors for the Obama administration, ensuring that the much-touted financial reforms would be very weak indeed. Corporate Dems are also largely to blame for our weak health care reforms, as well as continued lax environmental regulation held over from the Bush administration, making possible—among other things—the horrific mining accidents by the criminally negligent Massey Energy company and, most famously, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf.

Amazingly, the corporations and individuals who made out like bandits during the Bush years are not inclined to lie low as America reels from their most recent sucker punch—even in the wake of the financial meltdown and subsequent taxpayer bailout, the wholesale destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, and the spiralling health insurance premiums that are directly responsible for thousands of deaths every year. Even with a looming economic depression, they are not willing to compromise. They view the slightest tax increases and the most modest constraints on profit-seeking behavior as their own personal Alamo:

Truly, Ben Stein is a greedy, loathsome troll. While most corporate miscreants are not quite as cartoonish as Stein is here, he nicely illustrates their whiney „why me” attitude toward a government preparing to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting started.

However, corporate flaks well understand that the woes of uber-wealthy Steins of the world are unlikely to resonate on Main Street.

Enter the Tea Partiers...

I noted in an earlier post that although there is a strong grassroots impetus for the Tea Party movement—largely fueled by amorphous rage over economic dislocation and the racial anxieties of a white majority gradually losing ground—the Tea Party movement would have had very little impact without the organizational muscle of seasoned PR flaks.

Corporate front groups such as Koch Industries-funded FreedomWorks have trained activists, organized protests, liaised with the media, and transported protesters to Tea Party events. Without their backing, the Tea Party movement would surely remain incoherent and fragmented--the most successful Tea Party candidates would have gone down in history as obscure also-ran candidates.

The principal organization behind a number of the ascendant Tea Party candidates is the Tea Party Express, established by the same veteran GOP operative—Sal Russo—who created the Our Country Deserves Better PAC in 2008 to defeat then-candidate Obama. Russo’s California-based GOP political consultancy is the principal financial beneficiary of both organizations and is known by some as the man behind the curtain. But who is footing the bill?

CSMonitor notes that “the problem for those trying to ferret out where the money comes from…is that it's getting harder to do so." Citing the New York Times: "Federal campaign spending by groups other than candidates and parties this election cycle has far outpaced similar spending from the last midterm election and could rival the 2008 presidential campaign. But with recent decisions by the Supreme Court and the Federal Elections Commission, it has become harder to know whose dollars they are."”

Even without hard figures, it does not take a sleuth to identify the special interests behind the movement. According to SourceWatch, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) was “initially organized by FreedomWorks” and in 2009, an affiliated off-shoot, the Tea Party Express (TPE) helped organize a public relations bus tour across the country. TPE events were co-sponsored by the „American Grassroots Coalition,” which includes organizations either established or funded by Koch Industries. One thing is clear: a grassroots organization the TPE is not. Mark Mekler, spokesperson for the rival Tea Party Patriots, said that the Tea Party Express is run by “old-school, top-down, political operatives who are using the Tea Party movement for their own purposes.” That is, GOP strategists.

The surprising twist—given that the Tea Party movement is largely organized and funded by veteran GOP operatives—is that the insurgency is taking aim at the Republican Party itself. But again, the impetus for the insurgency comes not from within the GOP itself, but from their corporate backers.

In fact, the mainstream GOP looks more and more like the dowdy wife who was thrown over for her younger, sexier Tea Party rival. Corporations supporting right-wing candidates in this election cycle have largely eschewed Michael Steele’s Republican National Committee, which is widely viewed as irrelevant and is in fact broke. They have instead bestowed their largesse on 527 organizations like FreedomWorks and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, which support hard right Republican candidates, including the Tea Partiers and other Tea Party favorites. American Crossroads receives much of its funding from companies controlled by Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons—the man behind the ads linking domestic terrorist Bill Ayres to Barack Obama. The corporate advocacy group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is also a major contributor and supporter of Tea Party insurgents.

It cannot be stressed enough that the name of the game is not helping the Republican Party—it is destroying Obama’s presidency, and with it, his momentum (however halting) toward reining in corporate power. Moneyed interests back Tea Party candidates against more qualified GOP contenders because Tea Party positions dovetail perfectly with the interests of the richest people in America: cutting taxes for the wealthy, slashing social programs, reducing unemployment benefits, repealing health care reform, opposing cap and trade legislation, blocking environmental and financial regulation, privatizing and/or drastically cutting Medicare and Social Security, and opposing immigration reform. The Tea Party candidates are a corporate wet dream.

These are just some of the highlights:

Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle won the GOP primary in Nevada and will challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for his seat in the fall. She has attracted attention for her extremist and/or batty positions, such as outlawing abortions even in cases of rape and incest, promoting Scientology-inspired "sweatboxes" for prison inmates, advocating a ban on alcohol, and pulling the U.S. out of the UN. More recently, she warned that if the Tea Partiers did not achieve their aims through the electoral process, they may need to explore „second Amendment remedies.” Second civil war, anyone? What fun.

Although Angle is obviously certifiable, her economic positions perfectly align with the interests of the wealthy—more tax cuts for the rich, less business regulation, less government spending, and lower capital gains and property taxes. She has gone on record as saying that the unemployed are „spoiled” and shouldn’t be coddled. She has also called for the repeal of Obama’s health care legislation and the elimination of the IRS, EPA and the Departments of Education and Energy. Since many of these positions belie her populist credentials, she is now madly backpedaling on social security while employing the tried and true GOP technique of fear-mongering to appeal to Nevada voters.

Angle would certainly have gone down in history as an obscure also-ran candidate were it not for the support of conservative pundits Mark Levin and Phyllis Schafly, the anti-tax Club for Growth, and the TPE. Due to a massive last-minute infusion of cash from the TPE, Angle was able to outspend the more moderate (and favored) Republican rival, catapaulting her into the lead. Said one analyst, „The turnaround for Angle has been remarkable. She netted just 5 percent in a Review-Journal poll in early April, a week before the Tea Party Express' endorsement; Lowden [the moderate rival] led that survey at 45 percent.”

In Alaska, meanwhile, Tea Party upstart Joe Miller beat out more moderate incumbent GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was seen as insufficiently aligned with business interests on climate change legislation. In addition to opposing cap and trade, Miller favors extending tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Social Security, and massively cutting Medicare (creating significant business for Wall Street and health insurers, respectively). He also questions whether unemployment does not actually prolong unemployment because unemployment is nothing if not one long stress-free vacation from life.

Miller, a virtual unknown, would have certainly lost to Murkowski were it not for the intervention of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express, which pumped $600,000 into the campaign—permitting him to eke out a victory. Spending such an amount to sway the Alaskan electorate, said one pollster, is equivalent to pumping 10 million dollars into a primary contest in California.

The most recent Tea Party upset is that of Christine O’Donnell, who won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware over more the moderate GOP politician, Mike Castle. It was during the race that O'Donnell's bizarre statements against masturbation came to light. More oddly, she apparently „dabbled in witchcraft, but never joined a coven” in high school, and thinks evolution is a „myth.” It is easy to let these amusing details distract from her hard-right economic agenda, which is deadly serious. She opposes cap and trade legislation, favors repealing health care reform, wants to raise the retirement age on social security benefits, opposes any and all tax increases on the wealthy, and wants to eliminate all earmarks and balance the federal budget through spending cuts. Disaster.

Early in the race, O'Donnell was dismissed as a far-right religious zealot with little to no job experience, poor life management skills, and questionable ethics (she was behind on her mortgage payments, failed to graduate college because of unpaid tuition fees, and was under FEC investigation due to improper use of campaign funds from her earlier runs for office). She had little hope of winning the primary challenge against Castle until the TPE blanketed the state with 350,000 USD of ads, and Sarah Palin and Mark Levin actively lobbied on her behalf. In the end, O'Donnell won the election, and the skeptical GOP standard-bearers were forced to back her candidacy.

By supporting extremist GOP candidates against merely right-wing GOP candidates, moneyed interests send the message that those who go against the wishes of tax corporations and rich people—even a little bit—will face humiliating primary defeats.

But what if Tea Party candidates flame out in the general elections because they are simply to extreme for American voters, leading to more Democratic victories? GOP strategists concede this possibility, but once again, helping the GOP was never the aim of their corporate backers. Changing the political discourse and destroying Obama’s agenda is the name of the game. Says Tea Party Express architect Sal Russo:

“What’s success for the Tea Party Express? I would say we’ve already achieved it,” Mr. Russo said. “Because today you can’t find a candidate running anywhere in America — Republican or Democrat — that doesn’t sound like they belong to the Tea Party movement."

The Tea Party Movement: Grass Roots Phenomenon or Corporate Fifth Column?

2010-09-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

American economic elites have a long and storied history of recruiting suckers and mercenaries to do their dirty work. In a practice known as “astroturfing,” an interested party (often a corporation) clandestinely organizes an apparently grass roots movement to give the appearance that their agenda is shared by millions of ordinary people. That the rich find a need to engage in such tactics in a democratic society is understandable—there is no natural mass constituency for economic conservatism, which basically serves the interests of the richest 1-5 percent of the country. They must therefore trick ordinary Americans to lobby for their interests and elect movement leaders (generally Republicans and conservative Democrats).

Why do I say that economic conservatism has no natural mass constituency? Because it is so obviously geared toward the rich and against the working and middle classes. In a recent article, Media Matters listed 13 progressive reforms that conservatives have long fought against, including eliminating or drastically scaling back Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (60 percent of America’s seniors get three-quarters of their income from Social Security, and 20 percent rely solely on Social Security); reducing or eliminating the progressive federal income tax in favor of a flat tax (which places the burden of taxation disproportionately on the poor); eliminating the Americans with Disabilities Act, the right to unionize, worker’s compensation, and other workplace regulations that empower employees; scaling back unemployment benefits and the minimum wage (which would force many workers to accept low-paid jobs); and loosening environmental regulations (allowing industries to pollute freely and forcing taxpayers to clean up the mess). Talk about class warfare.

In fact, America has a rich history of corporate astroturfing aimed at killing progressive legislation. In a set piece of historical irony, the original Boston Tea Party of 1773 was itself astroturfed. What the Sons of Liberty were protesting when they dressed up as Native Americans to pour tea into the Boston Harbor was not a hike in British tea taxes, but rather the opposite. Britain had recently eliminated the tax on British tea in the colonies, thereby undercutting the lucrative business in smuggled tea from Holland that many colonial merchants depended upon; these same colonial merchants backed or took part in what became known as Boston Tea Party. Thus, the tea party was not a protest against taxation without representation, but against cheap imported British tea that threatened to put American tea merchants out of business.

Skipping ahead to the twentieth century, in the 1930s, the uber-rich du Ponts mobilized an apparently grassroots American Liberty League to bury New Deal Social Security program, child labor prohibition, and the Security and Exchange Commission. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society helped Barry Goldwater to mount an attack on the “socialist” Medicare program. The 1990s saw Richard Mellon Scaife (the billionaire heir of the Mellon oil and banking fortune) contribute heavily to bringing down the Clinton administration. And in the 2000s, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch teamed up to astroturf TeaParty protests against the “socialist Obama regime.”

One can only surmise that “freedom” for these economic elites is freedom from living in an advanced society, which is all very well for those who can afford to live in gated communities. But what about the rest of us? Would these conservatives object to the return of debtors’ prisons, child labor, workhouses for the poor, and a life of begging for the aged, sick, poor, orphaned or infirm? I doubt it, seeing as how they have a track record of fighting against legislation that ameliorated these problems. I am sure that many conservatives believe these are the costs of living in a meritocratic capitalistic society, which rewards the industrious and punishes the lazy. And for those who cannot compete—the mentally and physically disabled, the orphaned, the sick—well, there are always charities, churches and prisons. It is the kind of social Darwinism favored by Wall Street tycoons and other economic elites who worship at the alter of Ayn Rand.

Conservative astroturfing has come into its own since the inauguration of the Obama administration. The town hall protests of summer 2009 that took aim at heath care reform was a top-down coordinated effort by GOP strategists and corporate funders, as revealed by a strategy memo leaked by a volunteer for FreedomWorks. Some protesters were even reportedly bused in to disrupt the town hall meetings of mainly democratic representatives.

In a recent article entitled “Covert Operations” in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer delves into the history of the two biggest funders of right-wing causes in America: Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries (primarily an oil enterprise), whose combined personal wealth is exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. According to David Koch, their business is the “biggest company you have never heard of.” Their father—who ironically accumulated his vast fortune through oil deals with Joseph Stalin in the 1930s—would later become a rabid anti-communist. He co-founded the fringe John Birch Society, whose leadership viewed fluoridating the water as a communist plot and was convinced that President Eisenhower was a secret Soviet agent.

The Koch brothers, Charles and David, largely shared their fathers’ positions and endeavored to fight progressive policies at every turn (a commitment that Mayer notes has dovetailed nicely with their financial self-interests). However, after a failed run for president on the libertarian ticket in 1980, the brothers decided to take their fight underground, by funding right-wing institutes and think tanks. Mayer quotes Media Matters: “the Kochs’ effort is unusual, in its marshalling of corporate and personal funds: ‘Their role, in terms of financial commitments, is staggering.’”

Besides founding the CATO institute, Mercatus, Citizens for a Sound Economy (which later morphed into FreedomWorks), and Americans for Progress, the Koch brothers also have provided funding to a range of right-wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute. On issue-specific matters, they have given clandestine funding to front organizations that promote climate change denialism and work to defeat emissions regulations, while backing astroturfed popular rallies against health care reform and “cap and trade” legislation that would have the overall effect of forcing energy companies like Koch Industries to pay for their pollution.

What is the connection between the Koch brothers and the modern Tea Party movement? Defenders of Tea Partiers insist that the movement is as organic as they come. In exchange for a $100,000 speaking fee, Sarah Palin addressed the first Tea Party Convention in 2010, calling it is a “beautiful movement” comprised of Americans from all walks of life who want their country returned to its founding principles.

The evidence usually provided for the movement’s grass roots origins is that there are countless apparently unrelated Tea Party websites and organizations with no clear movement leader, besides which few activists claim to have benefited from corporate largesse. An obvious fallacy of this logic is that the movement of today bears very little relation to the movement in its infancy. The really pertinent question is: what was the genesis the movement? Who midwifed it or did it come into its own spontaneously?

Fortunately, the development of the movement can be traced on the internets. Tea Party nomenclature appears to date back to a Ron Paul event in 2007; however, this attracted little media attention at the time. According to ThinkProgress, the first Tea Party protests appeared in early 2009 (soon after Obama’s inauguration) and received critical organizational and financial assistance from former Republican House Speaker Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which is backed by corporations that benefit materially from derailing Obama’s legislative agenda.

Indeed, corporate front groups were there “from the very start,” admits Mary Rakovich,a laid-off electrical engineer and volunteer for the McCain campaign who is credited with holding the first Tea Party-like event in protest of an Obama appearance in Fort Myers, Florida, on February 10. She had recently finished a training session by FreedomWorks where she was given specific instructions on how to attract protesters and was counseled that she should focus on policy and not on Obama. According to Rakovich, she was strongly encouraged by the Florida director of FreedomWorks to hold a protest at this particular event.

According to a Tea Party timeline provided by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake, less than one week later, a conservative activist in Seattle organized the first “porkulus protest” (a term coined by Rush Limbaugh) in protest of Obama’s stimulus bill. The rally received support from the Young Americans Foundation (CPAC), conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, and the Young Republicans and was promoted by the local Fox News station. Another “porkulus” rally was then held in Colorado, organized by the Koch Americans for Prosperity and Coors’ Independence Institute, with wingnuts Tom Tancredo and Michelle Malkin in attendance. Yet another “porkulus” rally took place that week in Arizona with the backing of right-wing media conglomerate Clear Channel. However, it was not until CNBC Rick Santelli’s famous “rant” on the Chicago Exchange floor where he called for a Chicago Tea Party that the Tea Party movement as we know it emerged (with significant behind-the-scenes support):

According to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at The Exiled: "Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg…ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today.”

In late February, the first “Nationwide Chicago Tea Party” was held in 40 cities across America—organized and coordinated by Freedom Works and Americans for Progress. This was followed by Tax Day Protests on April 15, which took place in hundreds of American cities--a coordinated effort assisted in great part by Fox News.

The next big anti-tax rally took place in September 2009 and was again heavily promoted by Fox News, particularly Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. The rally was enthusiastically covered by a Fox News reporter, as Fox News producers attempted to work up the crowd off-camera.

Fox news personalities thus played a central role in organizing Tea Party events across the country in mid-2009. Meanwhile, Freedom Works and Americans for Progress designed deliberately amateurish websites and organized local chapters of Tea Parties in order to create the illusion of a grass roots movement. These organizations also took the lead in organizing central clearinghouses of information that would direct visitors to local Tea Party events, writing press releases for the news media, contacting activists and coordinating conference calls, and helping them connect up with other organizations on the local level.

There is little doubt popular anger on the right due to Obama’s electoral victory provided the fuel for what would become the Tea Party movement.

However, it was not until FreedomWorks and Americans for Progress (both creatures of the Koch brothers) and Coors Company got involved, and Fox News began to heavily promote them, that the Tea Party events really gained popular momentum.

Today, the movement is made up of numerous factions, including The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, the Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, the National Tea Party Federation. Although this apparently chaotic make-up is suggestive of a grass roots movement (reflecting the designers’ original intent), there is a strong case to be made that the Tea Party movement was, is, and will continue to be, a corporate fifth column: every position promulgated by the movement is a CEO’s wet dream, as they are even more corporate-friendly than the water-carriers-for-giant-corporate-interests GOP. Tea partiers stand for eliminating cap and trade, eliminating capital gains and inheritance tax, instituting a flat tax, capping federal spending programs, repealing the health care reform, granting energy companies permission to conduct oil and gas exploration on federal lands, loosening or eliminating business regulations, and so on. How any of these reforms can be expected to improve the lives of even a tiny minority of Tea Party membership is a puzzle indeed.

Tea Partiers who continue to insist that their movement emerged organically because it was “long in coming,” “a product of growing popular frustration at excesses of government,” “motivated out of concern for out-of-control spending,” etc., must explain the suspicious timing of the movement. It should not be forgotten that the Tea Parties did not get off the ground until AFTER the inauguration of a new democratic president. The bank bailout worth trillions of dollars that they supposedly opposed was put in place by the outgoing Bush administration (and Obama’s stimulus bill cost a fraction of the bailout). Bush’s two wars and two rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy cost the nation trillions of dollars, and counting.

Most damningly for the "fiscally conservative" Tea Partiers (most of whom strongly supported President George W. Bush during his two terms in office), the Bush administration turned a 200-odd billion surplus left by the Clinton administration into a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit by the time Bush left office. These discrepancies make hash of the Tea Party claim that the movement has nothing to do with party politics and strongly suggests that the Murdoch-Koch machine that kicked into overdrive in 2009 deserves considerable credit for their existence.

Glenn Beck and the White Civil Rights Movement

2010-08-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

It is safe to say that Glenn Beck is one sick, confused puppy. As Washington pundits debate the meaning of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of MLK's historic "I have a dream" speech, the opinion in the reality-based community is pretty well divided on whether he is a garden variety huckster, a delusional demagogue, or an epic whack job. I think there is a case to be made that he is all three.

But this post isn't about Glenn Beck. It is about the cooptation of MLK in the service of a budding white civil rights movement--which may or may not develop into something more than a bunch of fat middle-aged white dudes in three-cornered hats pumping Obama = Hitler signs and shouting about socialism.

White civil rights, I hear you scoff? Isn't it a bit like men complaining of sexism or rich people complaining of classism? Yeah, it is. Which is exactly why it works.

Everyone needs to feel special, to feel a part of something. No one wants to be unnoticed or left behind with no destiny or narrative arc. Women have the feminist movement. Blacks have the civil rights movement, gay people have gay pride...what do ordinary white people have? America, that's what. With the American middle class falling further and further behind in hard economic times, and a sense that they are no longer the commanding demographic majority they once were, a civil rights movement for white people is terribly appealing. It promises not only heroes to champion their cause, but a full restoration of white folks to the core of American history. After all, the most common Tea Party refrain is, "I want my country back." This can be interpreted a lot of different ways, but at its core it is a plaintive childish cry: "I want a place in the sun, I want America to be about me and my family and my white Christian brothers and sisters--we want our American Dream back."

Mind you, I don't think any of this is happening on a conscious level. I definitely don't think that Tea Partiers believe they are racist; they think their movement has nothing to do with race and in fact transcends race, class and gender. They are anxious to show the rest of America that their movement includes people of color, and they therefore go out of their way to recruit and promote minority speakers at their rallies.

In truth, Tea Partiers wish that you would finally shut up about race because it's not about race anyway; besides: talking about race only divides people. They have no problem at all with black people, they just prefer that black people not draw attention to their "otherness," because they don't sees race. They gladly welcome black people into their fold, so long that they accept the traditional (white) Christian history of America conveyed in the schoolbooks of the 1950s and 60s.

The Tea Party/white nationalist movement is identity politics through and through. Denying this basic fact makes for amusing encounters when Tea Partiers attempt to explain to outsiders what their movement is about besides their white Christian identity. Because there is very little else that defines the movement. Policy-wise, Tea Partiers are basically Republicans, only more so--apart from promoting stock Republican positions on government (make it smaller), taxes (lower), health care and pensions (privatized), business (free from regulation), the movement features generalized anger, resentment, and dark predictions that the country will collapse into anarchy and civil war if they don't get that socialist Maoist Marxist Leninist Muslim (black) president out of the White House and "take their country back."

They are, as Howard Beale put in it Network,"Mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore." Mad that they have been promised a feast and ended up with crumbs. What happened to the American Dream? Some dark elements must have wrecked it. Like Muslims or Mexicans or liberals or feminists or gays or atheists or any number of subversive groups that hate America and are bent on destroying it.

A white civil rights movement answers each of these needs. It validates the worth of every white person in America, acknowledges that they are falling behind while other groups seem to be getting ahead. It also "restores" white Christian people to the center of American identity and history. To this end, multi-volume revisionist American history books have been published that laud our (white) forefathers and "black patriots" and place the Christian God at the center of each and every key turning point in American history.

To build a white civil rights movement, you need a white civil rights hero (Glenn Beck?), an "I have a dream" moment to inspire them (Beck's speech on the anniversary of MLK's speech?), and guidelines for action that provide direction for the movement (thus Beck's "action steps" in his forthcoming book, The Plan). Beck gave some hints what this was about on his website:

I'm coming to you next year with a plan, and it's multilayered. The first is ‑‑ and I started working on this in August. A 100‑year plan for America. This country was destroyed, and it began 100 years ago with the progressive movement... So how do we get it back?....I'm going to teach you how to be a community organizer next year, oh, because two can play at that game. I'm going to teach you how to be self‑reliant next year. We've divided the country up into seven regions.... Day‑long education seminars... where we're going to teach you everything you need to know. .. And then on August 28th... I ask you to meet me. Take your family. We move ‑‑ we had something planned.... By that time I hope to have enough things out there that you will at least have some teeth to the ‑‑ so the politicians will see you and hear you and fear you!... little by little I'm developing this plan, and I will explain more to you a little later.

A white civil rights movement also calls for historical context, a heroic narrative for conservatives in American history. Conservatives must be cast as civil rights heroes and liberals/progressives to the segrationists/oppressors. Naturally, this entails a wholesale rewriting of America's civil rights history. Beck is, as ever, up to the challenge, and in the week leading up to the MLK memorial rally on Saturday, he aired a four-part "documentary" on the 400-year "history of segregation" in the U.S. How are liberals/progressives implicated in segregation? Simple: “segregation came out of progressivism." Meanwhile, civil rights were something "we did" (conservatives, that is)... Say what?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, slavery does not figure very prominently in Beck's history. He kind of skims over the whole whites-owning-blacks part, focusing in particular on indentured servants and a black man who owned a black slave in colonial America (suggesting that anyone could have slaves-- it was all about economics, religion, etc., so the white-black thing was no big deal). We then literally skip over about 200+ years of slavery in the U.S.--primarily in the south. Also unmentioned is the fact that blacks were immediately re-enslaved after the civil war by southern law-makers who passed legislation permitting them to imprison and/or fine anyone who was unemployed and therefore illegally "loitering.” Since it was difficult for freed slaves to find paid work, and since few white men would vouch for their employment anyway, former slaves were often arrested, levied huge fines, and when they couldn’t pay, law enforcement sold them as forced labor to mines, the U.S. Steel Company, white plantation farmers, etc. In this way, freed slaves became re-enslaved. This system of neo-slavery continued until the mid-1940s.

We also hear nothing about poll taxes, literacy tests and the countless other tricks and intimidation used by the white political establishment to keep black voters disenfranchised. Nor is there anything about Jim Crow laws used to keep the races separate and (very) unequal. Nothing on the rise of the Ku Klus Klan and the systematic lynchings and burning of crosses. Nothing on Nat Turner, Booker T. Washington, Sojournor Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois. Nothing on Malcolm X or the role played by MLK in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Nothing on landmark cases in civil rights history such as the Dred Scott decision or Plessy v. Ferguson, and a very twisted interpretation of Brown v. Board of Education.

So...how does segregation come out of progressivism? How does Beck pull the rabbit out of the hat? The trick comes with his gross distortions of twentieth century history. According to Beck, Woodrow ("I hate that SOB") Wilson chose to sell out his black constituents by re-segregating government agencies. Beck points out that government agencies had been integrated, until Wilson segregated them. Wilson was a progressive democrat, ergo, segregation came out of progressivism. (No mention of the fact that Wilson reluctantly signed this order because of intense pressure from powerful Southern Democratic law-makers who wanted the races kept apart in the government.) FDR gets thrown under the bus as well, as he did not go as far in de-segregating society as he had promised. Both (progressive, democratic) presidents had detained German and Japanese Americans during WWI and WWII. Meanwhile, Eisenhower (a Republican president) appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court, which in turn handed down the Brown v Brown of Education decision desegregating schools; Lincoln (also a Republican) had freed the slaves. Ergo, Democrat=Progressive=Nazi/segregationist; conservatives=civil rights supporters.

Q.E.D.

The truth, of course, is that conservatives fought against the abolition of slavery and segregationism tool and nail. It is universally known that conservatives have been aligned with segregationism since the late 19th century. Segregation came out of slavery, which morphed into neo-slavery, which became the Jim Crow laws (all courtesy southern democrats—today’s conservatives/Republicans). It took the forceful intervention of federal troops to enforce the Supreme Court decision to integrate schools in Mississippi and in Alabama, where segregationist Governor George Wallace gained hero-like status among conservatives by physically blocking black students from entering the whites-only University of Alabama.

Indeed today's conservatives are still enamored of segregationism or at least are not repulsed by it. In fact, leading conservative intellectuals Rush Limbaugh has spoken in favor of segregationism, and Ann Coulter defended a group of white supremacist segregationists against charges that they are racist. As late as the early 1990s, Christian conservatives strongly supported the white-dominated Apartheid regime in South Africa, which was not all that long ago. The late Jerry Falwell, a leading Christian conservative televangelist, railed against de-segregation. The fundamentalist Christian conservative Bob Jones University only ended its ban on interracial dating in 2000; they did not even admit blacks until 1971. And let's not forget the conservative Mormon Church (of which Glenn Beck is a member), which did not grant priesthood to African-Americans until 1978!

Nor has segregation been "solved"; in the twenty-first century, racial segregation may actually be on the rise. In the spring of this year, a federal judge ordered a county in Mississippi to stop racially segregating students into separate schools. And just last week, a story broke that administrators of a middle school in Mississippi mandated racially segregated elections of student body officers.

In fact, Beck himself has gone so far as to defend slavery, claiming it was not a big problem until it started to be "politicized" in the run-up to the civil war. This is not altogether surprising, for one of Beck's heroes, far-right Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdooney, famously argued for "Biblical" slavery, claiming that "some people were by nature slaves" and that southern slavery was "benevolent."

If these seem like inconvenient facts, they clearly do not trouble Beck. Nor are they a problem for his followers as they mobilize at this historic moment against the injustice perpetrated by the fascistic Marxist Muslim oppressor in the White House.

Let freedom ring!

Republican Blow-up Dolls

2010-08-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

When did female television reporters start wearing cocktail dresses? And when did they start making Maxim's Top 100 List of hottest women?

I might be wrong about this, but the trend may have been started (like so many other wonderful things) by Fox News. I am far from the first to remark on the interchangeable blond bimbettes that grace the FN news "team" (see John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, among many others). A short list includes Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Ainsley Earhardt, Martha Maccallum, Jill Dobson, Chris Fernandez, Juliet Huddy, Courtney Friel, Carolyn Shively, Dana Blanton, Heather Nauert, Jenna Lee, I could go on...

Is it just me or is that a whole lot of T&A for a "news channel"? Of course, CNN and MSNBC have their share of news "hotties" (see Bartiromo "money honey," among others). But FN takes the presentation of news to a whole new level, IMHO.

Don't misunderstand, I love low-cut dresses and mini-skirts as much as the next person (okay, maybe a little more ;) But you would have to be in serious denial to miss the pattern here. You also have to wonder if the women reporters are contractually obligated to display at least a little T and/or A every other appearance (if they wore stripper outfits every day, it might tip their viewers off that this is not exactly a legitimate news organization).

Even more remarkably, a study of current reporters at MSNBC, CNN and FN showed that FN has substantially higher proportion of blond reporters than the other networks. In fact, fully 65 percent of the Fox reporters were blond against 44 percent for MSNBC and 39 percent for CNN. What this means is not entirely clear, but it is a far higher percentage than the U.S. population. And I would bet dollars to donuts that there is a strong correlation between sex and hair color at FN. .

Seriously, what IS that? Only one or two of them looks distinctive enough that I would be able to pick them out in a line-up of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. If I had to guess, I would say that the FN marketing dept. ascertained that, all things equal, hot blond anchors/reporters get higher ratings than hot brunette anchors/reporters.

But this is not the whole story. The conservative movement is known for rallying around hot women who sound a bit like Hitler. Okay, maybe not Hitler exactly...like someone who is pay a high salary for sounding like a complete ahole while looking like a blow-up doll. To wit:

Ann Coulter was a pioneer in marrying sex appeal with a psycho a-hole personality (sex appeal, that is, if you ignore her Adam's apple). And yes, that is her posing on the steps of the Capitol Building in a latex dress. Klassy.

Pam Gellar is a particularly loathsome conservative blogger who is a new-ish additional to the pantheon of Republican blow-up dolls. She has a blog called "Atlas Shrugged" where she regularly calls the president a "terrorist" and happily shares her nutty birther conspiracy theories along with a variety of racist and anti-Semitic views to any and everyone who gives her air time. She is also a plastic surgery disaster.

This is almost too comically amateurish to be believed. This video of Michelle Malkin dressed up like a 13-year-old school girl was created and distributed by Malkin herself. Malkin has infamously linked Obama to the "Chicago machine," charging widespread corruption and graft in the White House. She has also, unbelievably (given that both of her parents are Philippine immigrants), defended the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I recommend watching this with the sound off :) This is S. E. Cupp, one of the newer Republican blow-up dolls. She has an Ivy League education, is a former ballet dancer, and has chosen to peddle propaganda for a living. She recently authored a book in which she argues that Christianity is under attack in America and is in danger of disappearing from public life. Oh, and she is an atheist. Confused yet? More importantly, is she wearing thigh-high boots in this interview?

All kidding aside, this post isn't intended as a bitchy swipe against hot Republican women ("don't hate me because I'm beautiful"), but rather to draw attention to the deeply ambivalent position women occupy in the conservative movement. The most prominent conservative women in the movement are not just attractive women capitalizing on their looks to get a message across. They are there for objectification and actively and overtly objectify themselves. Their appearance and their "smarts" IS the message, in other words. They are the "ideal woman" in the conservative subculture. The image below comparing "ours" (hot Republican women) with "theirs" (ugly Democratic women) says it all. It is almost too atavistic to be believed, and speaks to the sexism and misogyny that permeates the conservative movement.

Tea Party Speak Made Easy

2010-08-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

If you are not an American, or are an American who hails from Blue America (i.e., not a 'real American'), you may have puzzled over the whole Tea Party thing sprouting up all across this great nation. You may have heard one of Glenn Beck's famous rants or listened to Rand Paul, Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle (look her up, she's a treat!), understood all the words, but failed to comprehend the meaning of the words. You may have then become frustrated and put your fist through the wall, despairing of ever "getting" the Tea Party movement.

While journalists, documentary film-makers, and scholars are presently conducting the kind of careful ethnographic research necessary to make this movement intelligible to outsiders, I have in the meantime compiled a quick and dirty guide to 'tea party speak'--the language that your right-wing colleagues, relatives or acquaintances have adopted and that, in all likelihood, has left you baffled.

Here is a sampling of "tea party speak" that I have culled from the internets using a super scientific research methodology (random google searches), followed by an English translation:*

*Warning: the following translations may be disputed by said Tea Party types >:-)

Tea Party Speak (TPS): "If you know even a little about forms of govt you'll quickly recognize that this [Obama's health care reform] is socialism. And socialism is a slide ever closer to communism - the most oppressive and godless form of govt the earth has ever seen on par with few others.

Translation: Europe sucks. America rules. We have to avoid the hell that is Europe.

TPS: We seem to have forgotten what a precious gift our freedom is and that we need to preserve it even if we have to forego some comfort [affordable health care].

Translation: I would rather be ripped off by a health insurance company or forego a necessary organ transplant than live in a European country with a black president.

TPS: I'll never agree that government ought be in the business of (re)distributing healthcare. And that's why I would like to see the private sector and charities step up and responsibly help the people in need. I say responsibly because many people have chronic and costly diseases [...] of their own choosing... Hardworking, sacrificial [sic] people should not be forced to carry the burden of shiftless, n'er do wells. It is one thing to fork over tax money to fix the roads, it is quite another to fork over tax money to pay for someone's drug addiction recovery or diabetes because they are eating themselves to death.

Translation: I shouldn't have to pay for anyone else's health care but my own. Poor people should ask charities for help. Poor fat people shouldn't get any help at all--they get what they deserve. My taxes should pay for roads, not to help poor, lazy fat/drug-addicted blacks or Mexicans. Screw them.

TPS: Those who suck on the teet [sic] of government cannot complain when the milk goes sour. Now, if the government creates laws and taxes that kill the economy, then hands out help to those it has crippled we have to begin to wonder.

Translation: Liberals are parasites who are wrecking our great nation. They must be eliminated.

TPS: I don't like the fact that federal government is basically going to give subsidies for tax-funded abortions in the HealthCare Bill.

Translation: Obama wants to kill babies.

TPS: Profit is a good thing. In fact, it is a very good thing. When you take profit out of the health care equation, companies will cease to be competitive. Without competition, companies will cease to improve. America has the best health care in the world precisely because of profits.

Translation: Greed is good. Private businesses should have a monopoly over health care and get as much money out of people as legally possible. That is "good health care." Europe sucks.

TPS: As a history and economics teacher, I can tell you that never in the history of the world has there ever been price controls that have been successful.

Translation: Because I am a teaching professional, I can talk freely out of my ass and you have to believe everything I say.

TPS: Doctors DO hate [Obama's health care] bill. Doctors already work 55 hour weeks... they aren't going to volunteer to work more for no money. (With taxes, they already do that four months of a year!) ... Without the income to help pay off medical school expenses, there will be fewer students desiring to become doctors. You will be waiting for months to get your studies done or read by a radiologist. My husband is a radiologist and he doesn't know ONE doctor who is for this bill. Since this IS their business, I would think their comments about this should be valued. It's like the astronomist who sees the asteroid coming, and all the lay people say, "Oh, we'll be fine. This is a GOOD thing." What does the astronomist know, afterall?

Translation: Random made-up statistics make me sound credible. The fact that my husband is a medical professional makes me sound credible. Doctors in America are aggrieved souls working under slave conditions for menial wages. If doctors don't continue to earn more than a quarter of a million a year, they will refuse to work, and we won't have any more doctors.

TPS: I [would] rather be screwed by the insurance company then the gov't take over another sector of business. Has no one been to the post office or DMV or better yet a VA hospital - all very depressing.

Translation: Greedy American businesses rule. Europe sucks ass.

TPS: I simply believe in the principles that I speak about. I believe it to be true because I feel it in my gut.

Translation: I don't need to provide any evidence for my claims.

TPS: I will admit that I am a true believer in America. I think it is an honorable country that has made mistakes. I love my country and just want to restore it to its founding principles. It seems like we are trying to be like Europe. I have nothing against Europe but I just want is to return to our roots.

Translation: Europe is for losers.

TPS: The power needs to stay in the hands of the people to prevent abuse. The more industries the gov't snaps up and controls, the greater our loss of freedom will be. Isn't what that we're dying for every day - freedom? At least when you pay someone in the private sector for goods and services, you know you are paying a person like yourself who has to pay a mortgage and put
food on the table. Not so with gov't who's employees are better insulated from the consequences of economic downturns.

Translation: Having a black president makes me feel deeply insecure.

Explaining the Conservative Mind: Are You Born With It?

2010-08-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

What determines our political orientation? The question transcends mere party identification. It speaks to our value system and moral compass. It helps us distinguish right from wrong, good from malevolent public policy; it determines the role we believe government has in society, the relationship between ourselves and the state, and to whom we owe our deepest allegiance.

It has a special resonance for me, as someone who was raised conservative but became progressive. The ideological difference between my family and myself is truly remarkable and the distance I have traveled since childhood more remarkable still. The question I am left with is why I and a few other family members made this transition, whereas the rest of my family did not.

In matters of politics and public policy, many ideologies compete for dominance in a democratic system, but there are two broadly-defined political personalities that orient one's thinking on almost every policy issue: conservative (or traditionalist) and liberal (or progressive).

What distinguishes these orientations? Broadly speaking, conservatives value tradition and authority, ingroup loyalty and respect, sanctity and purity; liberals value collective care, equity and fairness. These orientations are supported by distinct belief systems and even moral universes.

UC Berkeley Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science George Lakoff argues in Don't Think of an Elephant that liberal and conservative mindsets are gendered frames. In this formulation, the conservative frame is that of a tough but fair disciplinarian father--punishing those who fail and rewarding those who succeed. By contrast, the liberal frame is that of a nurturing and caring mother who shields all her children from harm. The frames explain why, for instance, conservatives might give more resources to the stronger than the weaker members of society--acting otherwise would skew the moral incentives in society, encouraging sloth and degenerate living. For liberals, on the other hand, the weakest members of society are those who most need a helping hand, so greater resources are directed to the poor and needy so that they have a chance to improve their lot. In this way, society is also made more equitable. Lakoff is quick to note that most people use both frames in their lives, depending on the circumstances. But conservatives emphasize the strict father frame in matters of politics and public policy, whereas liberals draw on the nurturing mother frame.

But what leads some people to gravitate more to the disciplinarian conservative frame than the nurturing liberal frame?

University of Virginia professor of psychology, Jonathan Haidt summarizes the current state of psychological research on the conservative mind:

conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

In this view, the moral system favored by conservatives appeals greatly to people who are fearful of change and prone to authoritarian thinking styles.

So how deep do these personality traits go? A team of scientists from UCLA and NYU published the results of an experiment in Nature Neuroscience showing that self-identified conservative and liberal students displayed different cognitive behavior patterns in computer simulations. Thus, liberal students proved far more sensitive to cues for switching response patterns, whereas conservative students tended to filter out the cues as distracting information. They conclude that the cognitive styles of self-reported conservatives were more "structured and persistent," whereas those of liberals showed "greater tolerance for conflict and ambiguity," suggesting they were "more open to new experiences." Similarly, a 2003 review of psychological research on self-identified conservatives across a number of countries concludes that individuals tend to adopt conservative ideologies "to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity; and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals." In short, people who gravitate toward conservative ideologies tend to be psychologically motivated by the need to manage uncertainty and fear.

But why does conservatism tend to run in families? Are some families more fearful than others? If so, is this innate or learned? And which came first--conservatism or the social cognitive need for conservatism?

A fascinating study published in the American Political Science Review in 2005 suggests that, to some extent, conservative and liberal orientations are heritable. The study reported the results of twin studies showing that monozygotic twins (those who share 100 percent of their genetic material) were far more likely to have the same attitudes on a range of political issues than dizygotic twins (those who share 50 percent of their genetic material), controlling for having been raised together or separately and a whole host of other factors.

Still, this does not explain my case. The authors of the 2005 study are clear that genetics only account for a piece of the puzzle, but then what explains the rest? Since both sides of my family are heavily right-wing, it would have to have been some seriously recessive liberal gene. Otherwise, the explanation lies elsewhere.

I find the reearch of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) helpful in this respect. Building on the authoritarian personality thesis, Canadian Psychologist Bob Altemeyer innovated RWA and refined an index to measure it in the 1980s (if you haven't done so, I recommend taking his RWA test). His argument was that conservative is strongly correlated with high scores of RWA, which consists of three broad traits: (1) submissiveness to established authority figures, (2) aggressiveness directed against social deviants, and (3) conformism with accepted traditions and social norms. He cautions that not all those with high RWA scores are conservative and not all conservatives have high RWA scores; moreover, many RWA types are not politically active at all. However, there is a strong correlation between the two.

What I find interesting about his argument is its social learning component. In his extensive testing of university students, he finds that entering university students tend to have higher RWA scores than leaving students, suggesting that exposure to people from diverse backgrounds, grappling with foreign ideas, and being encouraged to think critically tends to reduce conformism and increase social, religious and ideological tolerance toward others.

The upshot is that exposure to foreign people, ideas, attitudes, and philosophies tends to increase one's tolerance for ambiguity and conflict as well as openness to new experience...which in turn correlates with liberal ideologies. Which is exactly my story.

On the downside, Pew Research surveys consistently show that conservatives and religious right-wingers tend to be happier than the rest of us.

Son of a bitch.

Idea # 2 for Solving the Economic Crisis: Invest in the New Green Revolution

2010-08-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

There is no longer any question that we are at the end of the era of cheap oil. Once dismissed as a doomsday crackpot fantasy, the theory of "peak oil" is now the accepted view of the scientific community and national governments alike. For the uninitiated, global peak oil is the point at which the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which production begins to decline, possibly precipitously. The theory was first outlined by oil geologist M. King Hubbard in 1956 and became known as "Hubbard's curve." Hubbard based his model on the observed production of oil wells and fields, showing that local production, national production and even global production of oil (or any finite resource) traced a logistical curve of exponential growth, followed by a brief plateau, ushering in irreversible decline.

The is the sketch used by Hubbard to accurately predict peak oil production in the United States at between 1965 and 1970. Up until that point, U.S. was effectively the Saudi Arabia of the world, producing enough oil to meet all of our energy needs while exporting to other nations. People scoffed at Hubbard's prediction at the time, as U.S. production was growing exponentially by the year. But U.S. oil production did indeed peak in 1971 and has declined ever since, despite ever more sophisticated methods of extraction. Indeed, Azerbaijan, U.S., Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia (all at one time top oil-producing countries) have peaked or are peaking now.

This chart from ratical.org shows oil production projected over time; estimates vary, but most analysts agree that we have either just reached peak oil or, in the most optimistic scenario, will do so in 2020.

To be clear, peak oil is not the point at which the world's oil supply is depleted; there are significant quantities of tar sands, heavy crude and shale oil that can replace the light sweet crude. The problem is that extracting fuel from these alternative sources is difficult and energy-intensive; we come ever closer to expending the same amount of energy on production as we get in return--at which point oil production is no longer worth the trouble.

The reality of peak oil is hitting at the same time that major new economies (India, China) are growing at a remarkable clip, putting ever greater pressure on the oil fields that remain. In the mid-twentieth century, only North America, Western Europe, Japan and a few other wealthy countries had oil-based economies. Today, almost every country in the world relies on a ready supply of cheap oil. If we do not make dramatic policy changes soon, we can look forward to a generation or more of resource wars, as the EU, U.S., China and India engage in a Second Great Scramble over remaining oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea, Africa, the Middle East, and the Arctic Circle. Not only will this increase the absolute level of war and suffering in the world, but it does little more than postpone the inevitable transition to alternative fuels, while polluting the environment and contributing to greenhouse gases.

So how does this looming crisis constitute a growth opportunity for the U.S. economy? The argument here is that massive investment in alternative sources of energy promises an economic boom that could rival or eclipse the tech boom of the 1990s.

There is every reason to believe that the government can spearhead path-breaking innovation in the field. Many twentieth-century inventions were made possible through publicly-funded research. Some came through direct government funding, such as the internet (based on APRANET, a U.S. military communications project), the computer (funded by the Defense Department), chemotherapy, and nuclear fission/fusion. Others were financed indirectly through universities and research institutes, such as the World Wide Web, antibiotics, antiseptics, the Human Genome Project, and many cancer drugs.

Nor is there any doubt that the government can spur economic development, partly by investing in human capital. In the mid-twentieth century, the government built the U.S. highway system, the university system, free K-12 education, public libraries, national parks, hydroelectric dams, bridges, nuclear energy, and mass irrigation of the American Southwest. U.S. military spending during World War II pulled us definitively out of the Great Depression, and U.S. aid under the Marshall Plan helped West European countries recover from the war. The government-sponsored GI bill helped many returning WWII veterans enter the middle class by financing university education and providing loans for new homes.

Is there any question that America is thirsting for another Keynesian revolution? (Those of you who doubt we have enough money for such an enterprise can find it in the trillion-dollar defense/war budget and tax cuts for the wealthy.) Massive public investment in America's infrastructure and industrial base may be our best shot at resolving the current economic crisis and chronically high unemployment while mitigating the future energy crunch.

Venture capitalist Eric Janszen, who famously forecast the tech bubble and got out at the top of the market, predicted in February 2008 that a new bubble in alternative energy would emerge in response to the collapse of the housing bubble. In The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for the next Big Crash, he observes that growth in our finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE)-based economy is to a great extent based on speculative bubbles. He predicts that the next great bubble will be in renewable energy because it is "politically expedient" and "scalable," requiring huge investments in communications and transportation infrastructure.

This would not be such a bad thing. An alternative energy bubble would have excellent knock-on effects, such as helping us transition away from our dependence on oil and curbing greenhouse gases, changes that are sorely needed going forward.

But why not have a new green revolution without the downsides of a destabilizing bubble? According to Janszen, this is entirely possible. He proposes levying a floating tarriff on oil, raising the price of oil to 200 to 300 dollars a barrel. If the price is raised very gradually, economic dislocation will be minimized as alternative renewable energies become increasingly cost-effective. As he points out in an interview with Wired magazine, the economy did not suffer unduly when the price of oil shot up from 20 USD to 100 USD a barrel in 2008. To facilitate the transition to renewable energy, he suggests rebuilding the nation's power grid to make it more efficient, installing high-speed rail, and piping fiber-optic cable into every household to reduce the need for commuting. Meanwhile, public-private corporations can be established that could draw on government funding but at the same time be responsive to shareholders.

One way or another, the new green revolution is coming. Renewable energy sources now make up 19 percent of the world's energy use; over half of newly installed energy capacity in the U.S. and Europe in 2009 was in renewables. From wikipedia:

According to a 2010 global status report on renewable energy, the growth in the capacity of alternative energy is between 10 to 60 percent annually, depending on the source. Alternative energy is also the darling of Wall Street. For two years running, private investment in renewables outstripped private investment in fossil fuels, growing from 40 billion in 2004 to 150 in 2009. Asian countries, particularly China, have emerged as leaders in development and manufacturing in this sector, with China producing 30 percent of the world's wind turbines (an increase from 10 percent in 2007) and 30 percent of the world's solar PV energy. The U.S. and even Europe are starting to fall behind the curve on the new green revolution.

There is really no down side to a new green revolution in terms of creating jobs and manufacturing potential, spurring the economy, averting or mitigating an energy crunch, and reducing the effects of anthropogenic climate change. For its own good, the U.S. must establish a leadership position in the new energy future.

Idea # 1 for Solving the Economic Crisis: Kill the Military-Industrial Complex

2010-08-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

To politicians and pundits of a conservative bent, the only way to avoid the coming Apocalyptic Fiscal Meltdown is to slash entitlement spending, i.e., those two big piggy banks--Medicare and Social Security. Because no politician in their right mind would touch the most popular federal programs in American history without political cover, the plan is to convince the American public that maintaining these programs "as is" will turn us into a third world country, i.e., Greece. With the public more-or-less acquiescent, they aim to get Obama and the Democrats on board with these "reforms," giving them plausible deniability come election time.

The problem is that these arguments, repeated ad nauseum in the MSM, are entirely fraudulent. It is true that both programs will soon be running annual deficits due to demographic fluctuations in a pay-as-you-go system (and for Medicare, the exploding costs of health care). Over the next two decades, millions of baby-boomers will hit retirement age, which means that the ratio of contributors to beneficiaries will be significantly reduced, at which point we begin to liquidate the trust fund assets to cover the deficits. The trust fund for Medicare is solvent until 2029 and for Social Security until 2040. According to the 2010 trustees report, a few fixes in payroll taxes and benefits will resolve the subsequent funding gaps in both programs. The larger point is that the Social Security and Medicare--funded by dedicated payroll taxes and individual premiums and co-payments--are entitlement programs that we pay into. By contrast, defense--funded out of general tax revenue--is part of the discretionary budget, making it a prime candidate for the chopping block.

A half-century ago, in his farewell address to the nation, General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of an emerging military-industrial complex where business, military and congress worked hand-in-glove to enrich defense contractors, creating a standing army of unprecedented proportions and robbing the country of vital funding for hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. Today, Eisenhower's predictions have been borne out in spades, with defense contractors based in all fifty states where they blackmail politicians into maintaining the bloated and unnecessary military budget. Florida Congressman Alan Grayson (D) recently reenacted the Eisenhower speech, warning that our military spending was impoverishing the nation and robbing future generations.

How big is the U.S. defense budget? Bigger than those of the next fourteen states combined. The following chart from Harlotofhearts.org shows the disproportionate size of the U.S. military budget in 2009. U.S. military spending was almost equal to the defense spending of the rest of the world combined; the U.S. and our NATO Allies account for two-thirds of the world's total military spending.

How big is our military spending relative to other outlays? The following chart shows that defense was the largest item in the 2009 federal budget. An estimated 38 to 44 of federal taxes in 2010 will have gone to defense spending, according to the CBO.

It is worth noting that this actually underestimates the size of military spending relative to other budgetary outlays. Since Social Security and Medicare are basically self-funded entitlement programs, they are not included in the annual discretionary budget. Of the 2010 federal discretionary budget, military spending actually makes up over half:

Remarkably, military spending increased at a rate of about 9 percent annually from 2000 to 2009, according to the CBO. The proposed 2011 defense budget is between 1 and 1.2 trillion dollars.

Perhaps surprisingly (or not), most of this spending serves no obvious security purpose and may even make us less secure. We are often fed the line that our military is large because we a large country or that we are the global policeman, and so we must provide security for our Allies around the world and defend against our enemies. However, much of this spending goes to programs that cannot possibly enhance our or our Allies' security. Obama has managed to cancel some wasteful and unnecessary weapons programs, such as the F-22 fighter jet. However, many more remain intact. According to the Arms Control Association, the proposed 2011 defense budget includes a 10 percent increase in funding for our nuclear weapons program (we spend 27 billion USD a year expanding our capacity to build new nukes and maintaining old ones). Another 10 billion is for ballistic missile defense (despite the fact that missile defense does not appear to work); 5.4 billion to build Cold War era Virginia-class submarines (designed to fight Soviet subs); 2.8 billion for V-22 Osprey helicopters (plagued with operational failures); 1.5 for space-based missile defense (really?); and 11.4 billion for F-35 joint strike fighters (produced before designs were complete).

The requested base budget for the Pentagon in 2011 is 549 billion USD, not including the 159 billion to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will continue to be funded through supplemental budget requests. It is estimated that each additional soldier sent to Afghanistan is costing taxpayers one million USD a year. To date, the two wars together have cost a little over one trillion USD and counting. Besides funding wars and weapons systems with questionable purposes, pork and waste is endemic in the Pentagon; a 2003 report by the Defense Department Inspector General indicated that the Pentagon could not account for a gob-smacking one trillion dollars. I rest my case.

It might be argued that, despite the massive pork and waste in defense spending, these programs provide valuable jobs that would be lost in the event of drastic cuts to defense. To which I would say: that is a pretty damn expensive jobs-program. Moreover, if the government wanted to be in the business of job creation, then why not pay people to build hospitals, schools and highways (America's dams, bridges, and highways are in imminent need of repair according to the American Society of Civil Engineers)? What about employing engineers and scientists to develop new (renewable, clean) sources of energy and rebuild the nation's power grid? Wouldn't that be a better use of human capital than developing new and inventive ways of killing people?

So why aren't we trimming fat from the Pentagon pig? Cutting military spending is something that unites members of congress on both sides of the aisle (from progressive Alan Grayson to conservative Tom Coburn), think tanks from the Heritage Foundation and CATO to Brookings and the Center for American Progress; and defense secretaries from Donald Rumsfeld to Bob Gates. One of the reasons there haven't been draconian cuts is that defense contractors have Congress over a barrel. Thus, a contractor will typically farm out parts of its weapons program to states and districts of influential congresspeople. If a representative threatens to cut the program, the contractor threatens to publicize the number of jobs that will be lost in that representative's district should the program be cut. Due to the revolving door, lobbyists for the industry are also well-represented in the ranks of the Pentagon's top brass; at the same time, retired generals are well-represented among defense lobbyists. Taken together, the system keep the funding spigot open.

Despite overwhelming odds against meaningful reform, U.S. citizens need to push their leaders to do the right thing. In fact, we can't afford not to. No less a figure than our first president, George Washington, affirmed that "over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty

Unless you are a Wealthy Cyborg, You Shouldn't be Voting Republican

2010-08-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is a little tongue-in-cheek, but only a little. As the fall mid-term elections approach, I have been pondering whether there are any good reasons for a person to vote straight-ticket Republican. I confess that I have a personal interest in this question because many of my family members are hardcore Republicans, even though most are of modest means.

Rather than offering reasons as to why so many working and lower middle class people vote Republican (against the predictions of traditional rational choice voting models), I evaluate some of the more common reasons that individuals themselves give for voting Republican:

(1) Republicans favor tax cuts, encouraging personal consumption and business investment; this stimulates the economy, yielding more tax revenue and thereby reducing the deficit.

This is the "rising tide lifts all boats" supply-side theory of economics, which is today widely discredited. In 2006, the Economic Policy Institute released a report concluding that the ginormous Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 failed to generate the promised economic growth. With no big economic gains and lower tax revenue, the result is higher deficits--which is precisely what occurred during the Reagan and George W. Bush presidencies. Here is a graph from Mike Kimel's blog showing that Democratic administrations boasted higher economic growth rates than Republican administrations.

Not only are Republican policies apparently bad for growth, but it is also worth noting that the poor do far better under Democratic administrations than Republican administrations, while the rich do roughly the same. A recent paper by Princeton Professor Larry Bartels uses data analysis to show that the income inequality rises under Republican administrations and falls under Democratic administrations, as shown in the figure below. This result is mainly attributable to differences in economic growth (30 percent higher under Democratic presidents on average) and unemployment (30 percent lower under Democratic presidents on average).

(2) Republicans have more fiscal discipline and we need to get Obama's federal spending under control before it destroys our currency/economy/American way of life.

Can we please stop pretending that the GOP is the party of fiscal probity? After all, it was not so long ago that Cheney asserted that "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter." And the Bush administration certainly acted as though it didn't matter--spending trillions of dollars in borrowed money for wars in the Middle East, a prescription drug benefit, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Despite the cacophony of concern-trolling over out-of-control spending under Obama, the bulk of projected deficit spending from now until 2019 is accounted for by Bush era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the servicing of that debt.

In fact, a review of deficit spending over the past 40 years explodes the notion that Republicans are the party of fiscal discipline. The periods of greatest growth in deficit spending correspond to the Reagan and Bush Jr. presidencies. The administrations of Carter and Clinton showed relative restraint. The deficit spiked in the first year of Obama's presidency, but it is worth noting that the 2009 budget (including the massive bank bailouts) was already in place before Obama was sworn in.

(3) Republicans understand that you can't show weakness internationally by negotiating with our enemies.

This is not at all true. Although George W. Bush famously took relations with our European allies to a new low, and refused to negotiate over WMDs with Iran and North Korea (leading them to accelerate their respective nuclear programs), the Bush administration did negotiate a deal with terror-sponsoring Libya, leading Gadhafi to give up the country's WMDs in return for lifted sanctions.

In fact, every president in recent history (Republican and Democratic) has negotiated deals with hostile or enemy states. Nixon famously opened up China. Although he presided over a huge nuclear arms build-up, Reagan reached out to the Soviets to help pave the way for the first arms reduction agreements. He also negotiated with our then-mortal enemy, Iran, and was notably reluctant to engage in war under any circumstances. More recently, Republican stalwarts George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, have attempted to broker a deal with the Russians to completely eliminate nuclear weapons on both sides.

(4) Republicans keep our country safe from terrorists.

This is another myth carefully cultivated by the right. Voters have traditionally ranked the Democratic Party better on the economy, health care and education, so the Republican Party has crafted an image as the party that keeps us safe. The evidence usually cited for this claim is that the U.S. was not attacked while Bush was in office (except for that 9/11 thing--but that was Clinton's fault). But even if we exempt the Bush administration from blame for 9/11, there was still an uptick in terrorist attacks against our Allies and U.S. interests abroad under the Bush administration. The National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 concluded that the threat of terror against the Homeland actually increased in recent years, primarily because the war in Iraq had allowed al Qaida to expand its operations there, it now had a safe haven in Pakistan, and U.S. threats to bomb Iran inspired Hezbollah to train its sites on the Homeland. Thus, far from making us safer, the Bush administration actually made us less safe.

(5) I am a religious conservative and the Republican Party reflects my Judeo-Christian values.

Sigh. True, this is what they say. But judging by their actions, the Republicans are not exactly paragons of traditional Christian values. The GOP is known for being a sanctuary for closeted homosexuals (many of whom oppose gay rights), and Republican leaders have reportedly solicited gay sex in airport bathrooms (former Senator Larry Craig), paid to be diapered by prostitutes (Senator David Vitter), forced his wife to engage in group sex (former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton), solicited sex from congressional male interns (former Representative Mark Foley), engaged in sex tourism (Rush Limbaugh), committed statutory rape (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the late Senator Strom Thurmon), molested children (former Christian Coalition chairman of Oregon Louis Beres), committed adultery (too many to count), and had sex with a mule (far-right Republican activist Neal Horsley). See a short-list of accused Republican sex offenders here. Of course the Democrats are no saints themselves, but (1) they never claimed to be, and (2) they don't seem to have quite as many pervy wankers in their ranks as the Republicans.

So when does it may sense to vote Republican? If you are among the top 1-5 (maybe 10) percent of income-earners, you may benefit from Republican tax cuts to the wealthy. If you are not, you may end up with a tax increase as the federal and state governments struggle to make up for the loss of revenue by raising sales and local taxes. Moreover, if you at all depend on Social Security or Medicare to help make ends meet in your august years, you are not likely to benefit from Republican plans to privatize or severely slash these programs.

But being wealthy is not enough. You should also ideally be a cyborg or some other super-human life-form that will be unaffected by Republican de-regulation of air, food, drug and water safety standards, not to mention consumer protections and product safety.

The Republican Party understands that they have a a very narrow natural constituency--mainly the super wealthy who are impervious to, or do not care about, the level of arsenic in the water supply, the level of carbon emissions in the air, the safety of children's toys, the risk of contracting E. Coli in tainted meat or vegetables, the stability of our banking system, and the safety of coal mining, nuclear power reactors, and offshore drilling operations. Cognizant of this , GOP activists have used fear, race-baiting, and cultural/religious warfare to broaden their constituency.

This is not to let the Democrats off the hook. The Democrats' performance since capturing the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms has been disappointing, to say the least. The weak sauce health care and financial reforms show that the Democrats are at least partly in hock to business interests, too weak or scared to challenge the establishment, or both. However, given the choice between a party that has partly sold out to corporate interests and a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, I choose the former every time.

The Rise of the Uber-Christian Right in American Politics

2010-07-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the theme of religion and U.S. politics, one of the most important trends in recent years has been the stealthy rise of the uber-Christian right in state and federal government offices. These days, Tea Partiers get all the press due to their goofy Obama=Hitler signs and the fact that many of them are armed to the teeth. Unlikely the Christian right, however, Tea Partiers are likely to remain on the margins of U.S. politics because they have not learned to hide their more odious opinions (see Rand Paul on the Civil Rights Act); for the most part, the Ayn Rand/One World Government/Don't Tread on Me crowd is far too weird and clownish to win higher office.

Not so with the New Christian right--a movement that dates back to televangelist Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition in the 1980s. Over more than two decades, the Christian right has honed its multi-vocal message. Activists, politicians and civil servants belonging to the movement have learned the fine art of speaking in code to their believers while sounding believably mainstream, multi-cultural and progressive to Americans outside the movement. Their most salient victory was electing George Bush Junior to the presidency.

In recent years, an even more radical offshoot of the radical right has made inroads into American politics. The Charismatic or neo-Charismatic or neo-Pentacostal movement is characterized by revivals and the use of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, miracle healings, and exorcising demons (I am not kidding). The New Apostolic Reformation movement includes a network of "prayer warriers" in all fifty states who conduct spiritual/territorial warfare to cleanse cities and towns of demons that they deem responsible for society's ills. Over the longer term, they aim to reclaim the "Seven Mountains of Culture" (business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion) and ultimately establish a theocratic government.

This would all be rather amusing if the movement hadn't already succeeded in making substantial inroads into state and local governments (including Sarah Palin in Alaska, both gubernatorial candidates in Hawaii, and police departments in Newark, Orlando, Baltimore and elsewhere). As for Palin, an astonishing video went viral around the time of the 2008 elections showing a Kenyan "Apostle" and NAR director for East Africa giving Sarah Palin a blessing to protect her from witchcraft and demons.

Creepy.

Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor and rising GOP star, is said to have performed exorcisms when he was in college. Other connected GOP luminaries include Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (MN) and Senators Sam Brownback (KS) and Jim DeMint (SC). The uber-right Christian movement has also infiltrated the military, and there are reports of American servicemen and -women proselytizing and handing out bibles in Afghanistan, in open violation of the military code. Under the Bush administration, the Justice Department was staffed with graduates from a right-wing Christian law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, and right-wing Christian-dominated school boards have rewritten history textbooks to include God as a major player in our nation's history. The NAR also has extensive ties with public officials in foreign countries, including the backers of the "kill the gays" bill in the Ugandan parliament that would make homosexuality a capital offense.

Secular and moderate Americans are encouraged to pay closer attention to the activities and goals of this insidious movement.

Religion and Gay Marriage Redux

2010-07-26T17:17:00.001-07:00

In an earlier post, I wrote about the recent documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition, which traces the Mormon Church's secretive, well-funded campaign to ban gay marriage in California (about 70 percent of the funds for the "yes" campaign came from Mormons, even though they make up only two percent of California's population). Most disturbing for me was the failure of Mormon leaders to reflect on the fact that Mormon polygamists in the nineteenth century had themselves been victimized by attempts to strip away their marriage rights. Mormons do not need a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" to appreciate what it would be like to be the target of unjust discrimination; they (or at least their great-grandparents) have first-hand knowledge of it. This, however, did not stop the leaders of a once-marginalized religious minority from pushing through initiatives to take away the rights of a marginalized sexual minority.

I ended my post by implying that organized religion fosters a kind of totalitarian mentality for their adherents whereby the only rights worth defending are those that support their religious worldview. It is worth noting, however, that opposition to gay marriage is not shared by all American churches. In 2005, the United Church of Christ (Obama's church) became the first major Christian denomination in the U.S. to officially support gay marriage. And while American Quakers are split on gay rights, Quaker communities in Australia, the U.K., New Zealand, and Canada are actively lobbying for gay marriage and same-sex unions. The Episcopal Church, too, officially sanctioned same-sex marriage in March of this year.

Many Christian clergy also support same-sex unions. A recent poll by Progressive Religion Research indicates that the vast majority of mainline Protestant clergy (Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian) support hate crimes legislation and same-sex civil unions or same-sex marriage. The position of churches and clergy matters immensely for public policy because of their impact on public opinion. For church-going people, the single best predictor of their position on gay rights is the position of their minister.

Even so, societal attitudes on gay marriage are changing rapidly, and recent ecclesiastical shifts suggest that many churches have altered their positions accordingly. There is also a generational shift in attitudes on gay rights--even among Christian conservatives. Although the vast majority of older white evangelical Christians oppose legal recognition of same-sex unions with only 9 percent favoring gay marriage, 58 percent of under-30 white evangelicals support legal recognition of same-sex unions with 26 percent favoring full marriage rights.

American churches that have changed their positions on gay marriage are right to do so, if only to remain relevant to their congregations.